The COVID Swamp

COVID
By Gina Easley

By Michele Coppola

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

I have COVID.

I have COVID.

I might die.

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

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

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

When will I be able to take a shower?

I have COVID.

Do my dogs think I am never coming home?

I am a statistic.

Am I going to die?

I have COVID.

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The plague cicada disappeared a few days later.

•••

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

“How’s your mom doing?” she asks.

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

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

“Heart failure and sepsis.”

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

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

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

“I’ll do that,” I say.

•••

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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Good Neighbors

community
Photo by Gina Easley

By Kate Sweeney

A couple of years ago, I was walking by myself through our neighborhood when I spied a couple—a young man and woman—with a little girl in a stroller, about the age of my own child.

“Oh! You have a kid?” I blurted out, following up quickly with what I hoped was a non-creepy-lady-accosting-a-couple-on-the-street smile. “How old is she?”

“She’s three,” said the woman and then quickly added, “but we’re about to move,” raising a hand as if to stop me right there. The gesture was not unlike that of a married person in a bar flashing her ring finger.

I wanted to ask her: How did she know I had a child? Had other people stopped them like this? Because her response felt rote, like she and her husband had spent their entire tenure in our neighborhood fending off would-be play-daters. And, more important to me: If this was the case, where were these other desperate neighborhood parents? Because I wanted to meet them.

This interaction seems innocuous enough: a mother looking for other families to hang with. A gesture that stems from a longing, as much for people as for place—a precise sort of Shangri-La that’s common enough in the American psyche—a neighborhood composed largely of kids and parents. In this place, people stroll up to one another’s porches to borrow a cup of flour, to lend a watchful eye and a playmate, or just to exchange a casual hello or a joke. The streets of this Eden are littered with bikes, scooters, and sidewalk chalk. Halloweens are epic. The version that I envisioned stopped short of manicured lawns and signs in kitchens reading, “Wine O’Clock.” We are urban liberals, after all—with aging hipsters’ razor-blade sense of what’s beyond the pale, cool-wise. But facts were facts: We lived in an intown neighborhood—a quiet place full of quiet streets and houses with closed doors behind which folks kept to themselves.

During my son’s prime toddler playdate years, I was never quite successful at finding that Shangi-La. And that fact held within it echoes of other times and places, a longing for home even as I was in it.

This isn’t a story about mere loneliness. It’s about place.

•••

A few years out of college, I was absorbed by the desire to live in a commune, or intentional community, or whatever you call it when neighbors are all cooking together in a big group kitchen but minus the bearded dude in orange robes who sleeps with all the women and the person in sunglasses standing off to the side holding a briefcase filled with everyone’s trust-fund money.

My imagination landed on a place called Zendik Farm in the mountains of North Carolina. This was the early 2000s, when the Zendik Farm people would still come into the Little Five Points neighborhood in Atlanta selling tee-shirts, pamphlets, and bumper stickers that read, in bold black sans-serif: “Stop bitching. Start a revolution.”

I did not know what this revolution was, but I imagined it had something to do with living off the land, with giving the finger to the establishment and learning to survive by your own wits along with a group of like-minded, can-do people.

One day someone left a Zendik Farm pamphlet in the coffeeshop where I worked. It was full of long, rambling sentences about the philosophy of their founder, a super-pure guy with a salt-and-pepper beard and long hair like ocean waves who had died just a couple of years earlier. Now, his surviving wife, of equally beatific calm and oceanic salt-and-pepper waves, had taken over, and all of this—the rambling philosophy, the worship of these old hippies—made it abundantly clear that I would never fit in there … but maybe, if I had to? I could try? I thought. Because geographically speaking, this was still the closest thing to Atlanta resembling my dream of getting the hell away and living life for real.

I was twenty-four, George W. Bush was president, and I was angry. I spent my days pedaling my bike between the coffeeshop where I worked and the cramped apartment I shared with my boyfriend, a fellow angry coffee-slinger. Our courtship had taken place fast, a romantic freefall in the midst of a string of bad roommates that had us moving in together almost immediately. That first year of our relationship is a red-eyed blur of free carbs and caffeine from work and talking together late into the night. I read his Punk Planet magazines and listened to his music, both of which electrified me. He was very much into a certain brand of moral purity: He taught me the term “DIY.”  During this time, I read one of my boyfriend’s favorite novels, The Monkey Wrench Gang, and dreamed of joining its characters in chopping down billboards and performing other righteous acts of environmental vandalism. I did my best to ignore the fact that there was a lot of page space dedicated to the amazing tits and ass of the Gang’s righteous female environmental vandal. I also borrowed a book from a coworker about animal tracking, written by a white man who said he learned this skill from a Noble Native American. My boyfriend and I daydreamed about learning these skills so that we could survive when the shit went down, but I never finished the tracking book, and, to tell the truth, neither of us so much as gardened or camped. He didn’t know how to cook rice. I had trouble hammering a single nail.

•••

The other day in the car, I was listening to a young indie rock band I’d never heard before. The chorus they sang erupted in the words: “The world has left us behind/oh, the world has left us behind,” and before I knew I had any reaction at all, I found myself spitting bitterly at the speaker, “I have no ‘us,’ I have no ‘us!’”

In a flash, I understood the singers to be singing about themselves as the millennials or Gen Z’ers whose very future has been stomped out by forebearers who’d inflicted environmental and economic ruin on this world. Left behind. And believe me, I more-than-sympathize, but at that moment, something mean in me struck out, something jealous of the club membership insinuated by the song’s righteous, mournful pluck. Sure, they’d been left behind, but they’d been left behind together.

I was born in a generational split. I did not share in the seatbelt-less 1970s childhoods of my sisters, both far older than me, nor am I a member of the hyper-scrutinized generation that came after. Sitting, as I do, in a late ’70s gap year of comparatively few American births, no marketing strives exactly to target me. All my life, it seems, this has put me at a distance. A distance from my older sisters and their shared childhoods. A distance from other kids, who, it seemed, were all far older or far younger than me in the lonely suburban neighborhood where I grew up. And at a distance, today, from coworkers who are just five or six years younger, but with figures of speech and ways of being that often seem utterly foreign.

Much of the time, I like this distance. Distance—from any natural tribe or club or gang—is where I spent my entire childhood, and so it has come to mean comfort. I spent my childhood sitting under tables and around corners, forgotten, listening in and learning. I’m an observer, and much of the time, that feels like enough. But not always.

•••

In the coffeeshop, the staff was an us. The people we served, as we viewed them, were mostly white yuppies. My boyfriend didn’t like them, a dislike he shared with the rest of our close-knit gang of coworkers. They—we, I guess—were fiercely dedicated to one another: workers-of-the-world united by the reality that the American Dream was a bunch of bullshit and that to own a house or work something more than either a proletarian gig or a selfless nonprofit job helping our fellow man signaled corruption.

Something in me was suspect, though. I harbored dreams above and beyond that of our little food service community, and this made me a pet. “Here comes Katy, cub reporter!” a coworker would declare as I rushed in from the public radio station where I had scored something like a part-time unpaid internship. I flinched at this condescension; it made me try harder. My first tattoo was a traditional sailor’s-style number covering my entire chest, and my coworkers, standing around the chair where I lay prone in a velvet-curtained studio, cheered as one to see the needle first hit flesh.

•••

After three turbulent years, my boyfriend and I broke up. Among other things, my ambition had shown through. Careerist, he called me when I chose my reporting job over a move with him to the Midwest, to work at his brother’s fair-trade coffee business. We made several more attempts after then, including the last: a winter flight north to his attic apartment, whose kitchen lacked both butter and salt. The summer before, during the heady days just before the market crash, he had considered buying a house; he was still kind of broke but qualified for an amazing loan. Now, late at night, the snow falling on the thin roof of the saltless, butter-less garret, our last fight: He called me “a little gold-digger-y” for the way I’d salivated over the idea of being with a man who owned a house.

To be fair, I probably had.

By then, I was living with grad school roommates in a crumbling old manor house chopped into apartments. This was on the North Carolina coast. The house was a gorgeous, decaying thing: pocket doors with stained glass windows, sky-high ceilings, cockroaches, and walls with literal mouse holes, like in cartoons. Ours was the apartment famous for parties, and during one marked by an unusual level of debauchery—unsavory couplings on the kitchen floor and a mystery guest or two—my most precious cache of jewelry, including the mother-of-pearl earrings made from a grandfather’s cufflinks, disappeared from the hall closet where I’d stashed them in a fit of distrust, as the windows of my ground-floor bedroom didn’t quite close.

If grad school life in the crumbling manor house apartment did not provide security, it did provide a level of community that I haven’t been able to match since. My bedroom was the smallest of three. Located just off the kitchen, it had once been the maids’ quarters: it connected to a second, smaller, windowless room behind it. This was my inner sanctum where I spent mornings and evenings writing. These were hours of wonderful, dreaming solitude, the kind of solitude that is wonderful because it’s not mandatory: Out there down the long hallway, there was always a space for me on the living room sofa where my roommates were watching bad reality television. Friends would walk the winding route back to my door to insist that I join them out on the porch for some wine and a game of corn hole. We cooked big breakfasts, and dinner parties were frequent. Dance parties blew off the steam and drama of grad school life, and—well, I told you where those led. It occurs to me now that the true greatness in those years lay mostly in the fact of living within walking distance of friends.

•••

Last night, a frequent dream returned: I am back in college. Not grad school, but undergrad. Out of some nebulous obligation, I have left my home, spouse, and child to go live with a nineteen-year-old in a dorm. In this version, classes were set to start the very next day, but I had no place to sleep. I drifted past the small cement block rooms inhabited by happily bunked students in sweatpants eating popcorn and studying, and, in the dramatic way of dreams, I wept as I walked, my sense of dispossession complete. Awakening was the same as always: a blessed relief as the ordinary landmarks of home spring up, the insecurities of my peripatetic youth drifting back into the ether.

•••

My household today is compact, tidy, and small: two adults and one child inhabiting nine hundred square feet. The last year and change have found us more circumscribed than ever, sealed off from the world by necessity during a time of pandemic. The benign sorts of border-intrusion that signal community—dinner parties and indoor play-dates—were mostly off-limits to everyone, a fact which, during the first weeks, acted on me as strange sedative, quieting any fears of missing out I may have previously harbored.

It was in this calm that I recognized the commonalities of the kind of community that I crave: It is an introvert’s dream, a just-add water brand you don’t have to work at. Put one way: a favorite childhood memory is lying with my ear to the yellow shag carpet in the upstairs hallway, listening to the grown-up party downstairs. I would waltz down in my nightgown; guests would smile at me, parents would say good-night, and then I could disappear again. Put still another: a few years ago, some ten or twelve years after my own dreams of selling all my belongings and moving to an actual intentional community had faded, I began investigating the golden age of American utopias: Alcott’s Fruitlands, New Harmony, Oneida. In part, I was trying to understand my own dream of disappearing into to a prefabricated community.

I don’t want to be responsible for making community happen. But I do, fiercely and with great longing, want for it to be. And to be part of it. And so, it turns out that the dear ex, who, in that moment of anger, called me “a little gold-digger-y” was right: A gold-digger doesn’t want to make an effort. She wants no lonely apartment, but a move-in-ready home, with all the small physical and emotional niceties this term implies. I’m so sorry, babe.

In the early months of the pandemic, I developed a different kind of sympathy, this one for my neighbors, the extraverted ones. I felt myself blessed, blessed, a thousand times blessed for the job and the home I still had—but also for the strange way in which this time was working in my favor. In my basement office, sunlight and birdsong pour in through one tiny window, and I was free of the mandatory small talk and sense of exposure that typify a day of open-floorplan office work.

And when I had to stretch my legs, there were options.

It’s an understatement to say I was no longer alone on my walks. Instead, one unlikely road near my house became the distanced Barcelona Ramblas of East Atlanta, populated each spring evening by joggers, young couples by the dozen, roommates tossing Frisbees as they strolled, and entire families—everyone awkwardly jostling to space themselves apart along the wide street that’s usually home to cars flying too fast past our houses.

In those weeks, I met three different parents with kids my child’s age. I loved everything about the chats I had with these people—their mutual genuine warmth and brevity, and how they ended with a mutual promise of playdates “after all this is over.” Sure, I would say, and in the quiet knowledge of options sometime down the road and the parting of ways that would occur within thirty seconds, I found perfection. We were all lonely now, but I was markedly less lonely than before in this level playing field: this one damaged world was all any of us had, not one of us bound for some other Shangri-La beyond our ordinary street on a glorious spring evening.

•••

And then, things changed, because they always do. The vague promises my neighbors and I made of future fellowship during those early days of the pandemic didn’t threaten my introvert’s bubble, and it turned out they never would. Looking back now, I cannot remember the specifics of what we promised, nor a single name. As spring became summer, the number of people I passed in the streets dwindled. In the baking heat of the parking lot outside the grocery store—the only place I ever went—we sweated through our masks. Once inside, I found it hard even to make eye contact with anyone, so repulsed was I by these other bodies which quickly became a mass of blurred, contagious humanity in my peripheral vision. And still, I felt lonely. Lonely and ineffectual as I kept our kid apart from the world, clicking away at “Donate” buttons on my phone during that summer of protest, and during the dark winter that followed, walking our old dog down empty streets while listening to news podcasts that kept me an informed, terrified citizen.

I’m not saying there weren’t moments. There was at least one.

A candlelight vigil honoring Congressman John Lewis sparked joy so sharp it was hard to distinguish from anger. After his death, hundreds of us walked beneath a highway overpass that sliced a Black neighborhood in half, our words reverberating back to us in waves of call and response: Good trouble. Good trouble. Good trouble!

It was a sudden full-body thunderclap of spirit that had everything to do with people and place. This explosive no to the dominant narrative of exclusion offered a double jolt of communality. We were home, and we were home.

•••

When I was younger, I imagined community to be a thing one secured and checked off a list, like a haircut that agrees with one’s chin or a writing career. (Joke’s on you, Young Me.) You find it and, bam, there you are around the campfire; you’ve not been rejected. These are your people and there is nothing further to seek. The other night I found myself around a real campfire, leading a birthday toast for my sweetheart. The fire had been late getting going and we complained as we waited: It was too cold, too dark to just stand around like this, but now we huzzahed as one, the periphery lurking, a barren wilderness at our backs, our little group of six or eight inching a bit closer now despite the continued risk of pandemic contagion.

It was one of those moments of ultimacy. But it was just a moment. There have been other fires, other toasts my whole life through with stretches of cold between. It will all find its way to me again. This thought occurred to me as I looked at the faces of our friends, all of us imperfectly fitted to one another but clinging close on this chilly fall night. Laughing at a joke, I sat down. My camp chair was a little too close to the flames and I knew that the next morning, I’d be dehydrated with itchy legs. For the moment, I bathed in the warmth anyway.

•••

KATE SWEENEY is a writer, podcast host and producer, and former public radio journalist living in Atlanta, Georgia. Her book American Afterlife, (UGA Press, 2014), earned a Georgia Author of the Year Award. Thomas Lynch called the book “a reliable witness and well-wrought litany to last things and final details.” Readers mostly tell her they were surprised it wasn’t a total bummer. Among other places, her writing has appeared in Oxford American, Utne Reader Online, Atlanta Magazine, New South, and Creative Loafing. More here: katesweeney.net 

 

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Animal Me

animal
Photo by Gina Easley

By Beth Kephart

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

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

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

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

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

I form sentences I never speak.

I write letters I never tuck into his box.

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

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

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

•••

Safe from me.

•••

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

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

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

•••

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

My twisted kite tail of a body.

My plump pumpkin-shaped face.

My monster self.

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

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

•••

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

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

•••

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

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

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

Mwah mwah mwah, I said.

Mwah mwah mwah. Now I was screaming.

I was aware of my husband’s sudden horror.

I was aware of my father’s stepping forward.

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

The animal in me went after him.

I was not who I thought I’d ever be.

•••

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

And undangerous.

•••

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

I went after him, feral.

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

I felt my father hook one arm.

I felt my husband hook another.

I heard my husband saying, What the hell?

Hit the man, he’ll hit you back.

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

•••

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

•••

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

•••

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

•••

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

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

•••

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

 

 

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Head Case

Photo by Gina Easley

By Reyna Eisenstark

A few years ago, my ex-husband C. (already my ex-husband of a few years) fell down in his living room and could not get up. He was eventually able to crawl to a phone and call 911, and he assured the cop who showed up that he wasn’t drunk. It’s hard to know what exactly the cop thought of him, a fifty-year-old man crawling around on his hands and knees in a once-beautiful house that had been gutted to its studs and that also included cages of parrots that may or may not have been squawking in panic.

C. had been having difficulty with his balance for a few weeks. After the fall, an MRI revealed the cause: hydrocephaly, or fluid that had been accumulating and creating an intense pressure in his brain. At some point, years ago, during our marriage, he had fallen, possibly from a ladder (neither of us could really remember any kind of significant fall), unknowingly damaged his head, and the fluid had been slowly building until his brain could no longer take it. This is not a precise medical explanation, but it’s the one I’m going with.

For many years before this incident took place, I had been fascinated by a famous head case—that of twenty-five-year-old railroad supervisor Phineas Gage. In 1848, Gage was packing blasting powder into a rock when it accidentally triggered an explosion that drove a metal rod straight through his head. Gage survived this accident, which destroyed a portion of his frontal lobe, but afterward he was apparently “no longer Gage.” This once amiable man became angry and abusive; his personality had been permanently altered. Or so every basic psychology and neuroscience text would have you believe. The case of Phineas Gage is usually held up as the first time doctors were able to correlate the frontal lobe with personality, but many of these early studies are now considered questionable. There is evidence that Gage was still Gage, that he eventually recovered after the accident. Yet like many stories of this kind, the more interesting myth has persisted. I (and many others) very likely preferred it.

•••

Once I learned about C.’s diagnosis, I thought back to our marriage, to a time when, though I couldn’t really pinpoint it then, his personality had begun to change. He’d always had a bad temper. But at some point it got worse, so that when he was angry, the anger was more vicious, cruel. He was no longer C. I did notice it, but it was a slow, steady buildup, just like the fluid in his brain, and there was so much else going on, things that would have likely ended our marriage anyway. But I never suspected that his personality was being damaged from his own brain.

There is a metaphor C. often used throughout our marriage that has only seemed relevant to me now. It’s this: before football players wore helmets, they were more careful about not crashing into people’s heads. Once helmets became mandatory, the players attacked harder and got, paradoxically, more injured. C. would point to this in instances where “fixing” something actually made the problem worse. This story always resonated with me as, I suppose, various stories about head injuries did. For some reason.

•••

After the MRI, C.’s balance and other functions slowly got worse, until about a month later when doctors inserted a shunt into his brain to drain the fluid, and he was basically back to normal. Except not exactly normal. Normal the way he was before the injury so many years ago. He told me that he’d had no idea how much rage he’d been carrying around with him all the time until it was suddenly . . . gone. He was also able to read books again, to focus on things, to stop feeling irritated at everyone. The intense pressure in his brain had subsided.

After our separation, but before the accident, C. had other medical issues to deal with, but this did not keep him from doing dangerous work around his house and rescuing a large number of parrots, which he’d wanted to do for years. The parrots were always squawking and were allowed to take up as much space as they liked and, if you were not careful, would fly directly at your head as you entered the house. So much of C.’s life was about not protecting his head and I do mean this in every way possible.

•••

But this is not C.’s story; it’s mine, and the myth persisted. It was easy to tell myself that a brain injury was at the root of all of his terrible behavior and poor decisions. The question as to why I simply accepted all of this is one I refused to answer. Who doesn’t like an excuse?

One time, in my early twenties, I showed up at a therapy appointment five minutes late. My therapist at the time, who I didn’t like all that much, made a big deal about my being late, about how it wasted both our time, etc., and I just apologized and hoped we would move on. But then she looked at her appointment book and realized I’d only been five minutes late. She thought my appointment had been thirty minutes earlier and that I was thirty-five minutes late. Okay, fine, I thought, but she wanted to know why I hadn’t pointed that out, why I’d let her go on and on like that when I’d really only been five minutes late. I must have seemed crazy to you, she said. Why didn’t you say something? And this is probably all I got out of my short time with her as a therapist: why didn’t I indeed.

•••

Probably the more apt metaphor for this entire situation, better than Phineas Gage, better than football helmets, is that of the frog who jumps out of a boiling pot of water versus the frog who sits in a cool pot of water and does not notice that the water is getting hotter until it is too late. Except that this too is an imperfect metaphor. A frog will very likely jump out of a slowly boiling pot of water once the water gets too hot. But this is one of those metaphors that is useful anyway because, even though it’s not really factual, we know exactly what it means when we use it. Psychology professors like to repeat the story of Phineas Gage because they like what it suggests, even if the facts are wrong. I’m pretty sure the facts about football helmets are absolutely true though. That was the thing about C. Sometimes, his metaphors were right on.

•••

One of the things that scientists really did take away from the case of Phineas Gage is that the brain and mind are one thing, and that alone is pretty impressive. What I can finally take away from the case of my own ex-husband is that the damage to his brain/mind made things much worse for all of us, but that the outcome (me leaving our marriage) would have, should have, been the same. Though I am the kind of person who tends to obsess over random moments in the past that unintentionally changed my life, I haven’t done so with this one. It turns out I am done worrying about his head. I am looking after mine.

•••

REYNA EISENSTARK is a writer and editor living in upstate New York. You can read more of her writing here. Or all her Full Grown People essays here.

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Old People

Photo by Gina Easley

By Susan Moldaw

I unbuckle my mother’s seatbelt, open her car door, sling her purse onto my shoulder, and watch while she turns sideways, slowly inching to the seat’s edge where she braces herself with the car frame as anchor. She’s arthritic, eighty-eight years old, and a widow. I hold my breath as she moves one leg out of the car, then the other, wobbly and teetering as she finally stands. She clutches my arm as she hoists one leg up from the curb to the sidewalk, then the second leg. And it isn’t a simple two-step; it’s like scaling a mountain for my mother, with an ever-present fear of falling—a not irrational fear for anyone over sixty. I count my own years.

“She’s a fall waiting to happen,” I fret to my sister a few days later, sprawled on my bedroom easy chair. My sister lives out of town; we talk several times weekly. “She needs someone who will walk with her all the time.” I’m preaching to the choir. We both know convincing our mother to hire a companion will take an act of God. What she will allow is housekeeping and cooking help.

A woman goes grocery shopping for my mother at Draegers, cooks meals of red snapper or baked salmon with golden beets. At times she zips a hard-to-reach zipper or fastens a button at the wrist. When I visit, she tries to support my mother as she rises from a kitchen chair. My mother stamps her foot and slowly stands on her own. Afterward, we walk to the family room and sit on a couch with a floral print.

“She’s only trying to help,” I say.

“If I stop doing things for myself, pretty soon I won’t be able to do anything for myself.” My mother is a connoisseur of robes. She brushes a few stray crumbs off her long, pink terrycloth that has a convenient front zipper. Several crumbs remain that I refrain from flicking away—this time. I glance out the window and see the two iron outdoor lounge chairs where my father and I used to sit before he died nearly eight years ago. They seem bare in January, without their summer cushions.

I look back at my mother. “That makes sense,” I say.

On another lengthy call, I say to my sister, “I can manage her, but it isn’t fair to same-age friends who help. She’ll topple them.” Emboldened by righteous anger—her stubbornness might endanger her friends—I sit my mother down in her kitchen, cheery with its brightly colored, hand-painted tiles and African violets in ceramic pots. I steel myself for her to stonewall, as she usually does.

“There’s a lovely employment agency in San Francisco.” I can’t use the agency’s actual name—“Sage Eldercare Solutions”—so I say “Town and Country,” an agency Sage sometimes engages. My mother brightens at the name.  Many people she knows use Town and Country to hire household help. She has used them herself. My mother is reassured by familiar references.

“They have what’s known as ‘care managers,’” I continue. Her eyes narrow. Her breath grows rapid. She looks around the room, as if to spot the nearest exit. “Maybe Town and Country will find someone who can go to an occasional movie or out to dinner.” Weekends are hard since my father died, and she gets lonely, though she’s been a phenomenal widow, calling friends, making plans, and going out. “Nobody wants a widow at their dinner parties,” she likes to say, “though they’ll make room for the widower.”

My mother glances at the headlines of today’s New York Times, scattered on the kitchen table. She takes tissue from her blouse sleeve and blows her nose. She puts the Kleenex back in her sleeve, straightens the paper, and looks up. “All right,” she says. “I’ll talk with someone.” With no hint of excitement, I say I’ll contact the agency.

•••

Town and Country sends a young woman for an interview who comes to my mother’s home. She’s neatly dressed, with a pleasing smile. She sits on the couch, crossing her legs at the ankle.

“Tell me about yourself,” I say.

She nods and says she has a passion for the arts, is trained as a nurse, and most importantly, she loves people. She directs her comments to my mother and speaks in a quiet voice. My mother leans forward. She loves the arts, and she’s energized by people. Now we’re getting somewhere, I think.

References of potential hires are promised, the agency fees acceptable. But the hapless woman titles herself a “Geriatric Care Manager” in an email to my mother, and the deal is shot. My mother refuses further communications.

“Geriatric,” my mother fumes. “Old people.”

That patience so often extolled in daughters evaporates. I want to bark, You’re old! Just hire her, Mom! but I don’t. Calling my mother old is akin to calling her ugly or useless. I know she doesn’t like old people. Neither had her father. He was ninety when he died. I rein in my anger and muster a weak, “Let’s keep the contact,” and “Perhaps we can revisit this.”

Tad Friend, writing about ageism in The New Yorker, refers to a chapter in a collection on the subject, written by psychologists. They assert that many shun the old to protect themselves from thoughts of death. “Ageism is so hard to root out,” Friend continues, “because it allows us to ward off a paralyzing fact with a pleasing fiction. It lets us fool ourselves, for a time, into believing we’ll never die.”

If my mother’s dislike of older people hides her fear of death, she’s not alone. I avoid my own advancing age. Sixty-five, seventy—why, those numbers sound positively youthful. I’d rather not think too hard about how many years I may have left.

•••

My mother and I go to the San Francisco Fall Art & Antique Show. She decides to take her walker, a collapsible contraption that she’s festooned with dusty dried flowers in shades of rose and blue with one burst of yellow, affixed to the front of the walker with a wide pink ribbon wound round. Using a walker isn’t entirely unprecedented—she uses it around her house—but when she’d take it out before she’d excused it with complaints of temporary foot maladies, or she’d brought it on short trips as a necessary travel aid. This time, she makes no apologies.

Once we arrive, I retrieve the walker from the trunk and snap it open. My mother and I accomplish her departure from the car in our usual manner, and she establishes herself within the walker’s confines, beaming. My mother blooms in society, and dresses to good effect. She wears a dull gold tunic jacket, black silk pants, and black tennis shoes—a concession to the comfort of her feet and only noticeable if you manage to divert your gaze from her diamond antique brooch.

The evening unfolds in a cavernous hall of San Francisco’s Fort Mason, a former military base now home to non-profits, including the Blue Bear School of Music, the Magic Theater, and the San Francisco Children’s Art Center—an art program I took my sons to when they were preschool age and I was not old. Picasso drawings, fine English furniture, gold ladybug pins dotted with sapphires and rubies for eyes, amidst other objets line the walkways, tempting strollers on all sides. My mother greets passersby, old friends from her many years of activity in San Francisco society. A few glance at the walker, but she seems unaware. We roam freely; as the night progresses, the crowds thicken and we get hemmed in.

“Let’s get out of here,” I say, worried she’ll be knocked over. I don’t know how we’ll maneuver.

With a thrust of the walker, she plunges into the morass, scattering women in five-inch heels and men in dark suits with alarmed expressions. Why do I underestimate her? My father knew she was strong; he used Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policy dictate to describe her: that she spoke softly and carried a big stick. He tried to protect her anyway. “That’s why I married him,” she says. “I knew he’d take care of me.” Who will she let take care of her now—her purse tucked into the basket of her walker for anyone to snatch, her gait unsteady, her bones old?

My mother smiles as the crowds part and we safely emerge at the front door. Someone asks if I need help, but it’s all I can do to keep from laughing— what mettle! what spunk!—managing a “No, thank you.” I steer her into the car and store the walker in the trunk. When I join my mother, she has the show catalogue open. “Our favorite jeweler didn’t come this year.” She turns a page.

“Mom.” I throw my catalogue into the back seat.

She folds a page corner in her catalogue and looks up.

“You were great back there. That walker brings clout.” I check my lipstick in the car mirror and rummage in my purse for the tube. My husband sometimes asks why I wear it. Because I look dead without it, I think, applying fresh color.

My mother turns another page in her catalogue. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll need it,” she says. For the rest of your life, I think, a bit unkindly, though I only smile. Another truth I won’t utter. If I’m protecting my mother from her eventual decline, it’s no stretch to say I’m also protecting myself from my own.

•••

Nearly thirty years ago our family threw a party for my mother’s sixtieth birthday. I still have the guest list. The Bartels. Dead. Scott Carey. Dead. Connie Eisenstat. Dead.

My father.

The list goes on.

We both read obituaries compulsively. In the last few years, several friends my age have died. A neurologist I know says that she won’t get resuscitated if she has a heart attack. “After sixty, you never come out of it the same.” Sixty! I’m shocked. Am I already at the point of no return?

My mother makes younger friends. She likes them better because they’re that much farther away from death. Just recently, she called my friends and me, “young women.” “I’m not young!” I told her. (Neither are my friends.) Medicare, social security—all just a few birthdays away.

•••

I’m reading The Oxford Book of Aging, an anthology of essays, stories, and poems on growing old. A poem by Ruth Harriet Jacobs titled “Don’t Call Me a Young Woman” includes these lines: “I am an old woman, a long liver./I’m proud of it. I revel in it…” Jacobs, in the context of the poem, owns her age, though perhaps she struggles with ageism. Have I mentioned my age? I’m sixty-three. Like my mother, age is uncomfortable to declare.

“Age is just a number in your head,” my mother is fond of saying. Yes—and no. According to Tad Friend, aging is “…the leading precondition for most of the decline-hastening diseases, such as cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s.” Age, plus health, may be the winning ticket, so for my mother and perhaps others age really is just a number.

In a book called Countertransference and Older Clients, countertransference meaning, simply, how feelings the professional has about the client may impact care, there was a chart of disabilities that reminded me of aging. I never could get it out of my head. Here are the maladies that got me the most: “Being unable to recall who you were or answer simple questions about your past; Being dependent for bathing, toileting, and being moved from place to place; Never being able to do your favorite activity again; Watching your body waste away inch by—”

I have a sudden urge to throw salt over my shoulder, knock on wood. Writing more feels like tempting fate. “Don’t call me a young woman,” writes Jacobs. “You reveal your own fears of aging.” Perhaps the reason I don’t want my mother to call me young is that it reminds me that I’m not.

•••

There are blessings an observant Jew recites every morning, and though I’m not an observant Jew by Orthodox standards, I say a version daily while I’m still in bed. According to the Mishkan T’filah, Reform Judaism’s prayer book, these morning blessings remind us of the miracle of waking to bodily life: “Praised are you, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the Universe, who opens the eyes of the blind…who stretches the earth over the waters…who strengthens steps…”

My mother may walk with strong intention but walking hurts.

Bunions and corns and bursas and hammertoes condemn her feet with each step. Heeding my mother’s plight, I exercise my toes every day like tiny soldiers in formation, stretching them, raising them, making the big toes touch because they don’t anymore. Side-by-side they curve to the outside of my feet, the beginning of a bunion I was horrified to notice on my left foot. I rush ahead twenty-five years to a nightmare vision of myself: hobbling, bent over, hanging on to a walker—nothing like my mother’s queenly stance.

•••

One of my mother’s friends—a woman six years her junior— fell not long ago in Hawaii. My mother remarks over dinner at her home one evening, “Hawaii is hard for old people.” We sit in the family room on the floral couch, with trays balanced on our laps, the TV news on. “Yes, it is,” I say eagerly. “Hawaii’s been hard for you.” Finally—an acknowledgement of her age and frailties. I take a sip of tomato soup. On a recent family vacation to Hawaii, she’d been ferried in a golf cart to meals as her primary outings. My mother’s soup spoon clinks against the side of her cup. She looks at me in surprise. She hadn’t included herself.

I hold my soup cup and look into the swirl of red, then glance at her. She doesn’t have a trace of gray in her salon-dyed hair. Neither do I. My appointment for a cut and color is two weeks away. Just that morning I’d considered moving it up because I hate the sliver of gray, widening daily where my hair parts, but I’d used a color wand instead, called “Brush It Away.” I keep one in my purse and travel bag for “emergencies.”

The emergency of looking old.

Leaving her home later that evening, driving on suburban side streets as the sky darkens and my aging eyes struggle to adjust, I think about her mortality, and mine. Odds are, she’ll go first.

I hope she goes first.

I don’t want to think about her death! Or my own. Who wants to think about no longer being in the world? I merge onto the freeway. The lights of the oncoming cars disorient me. I keep my eyes on the road.

•••

In my work as a chaplain I’ve sat with death. The old and some young taking last breaths, sometimes alone, sometimes with family members gathered round. There are many ways one goes, or says good-bye— with love, without love, regrets, or without regrets, sadness, relief, anger. Most people fear a painful death. My fear is dying alone, but that’s not just it. I fear dying before my time, by fire, water, war, or other happenstances of fate, matter-of–factly listed in the Unataneh Tokef, the prayer recited at Rosh Hashanah— the Jewish New Year. I hear the prayer every year at services, and shiver.

I don’t have the courage to ask my mother what she fears. I hope I’ll have the guts when her time comes. Will I have the blessing of sitting with her at the end? Who will sit with me?

•••

I drop by the San Francisco Jewish Community Center one afternoon for Shabbat blessings. Children from the preschool sit on the atrium floor on carpet squares. A singer strums Sabbath songs on a guitar. He sings “Shabbat Shalom—Hey!” and at the “hey!” adults clap, kids belt “hey!” and some kids pop from their spots into the air, landing in a squat, repeating their blast on each successive “hey!”

Sitting at a round table covered with butcher paper, crayons scattered on top, I write “Peace to All” and “Welcome the Stranger” in bright green. I take a large hunk of freshly baked, fragrant challah from a basket offered by a staffer and a Dixie cup filled with red wine. Munching on the challah, I watch the kids laughing and jumping with all the energy of four- and five-year-olds, while images of the life course spin through my imagination: the kids, starting out, me, thriving in late middle, and my mother, bringing up the rear, her body slowing down but her spirit alive as any kid’s—all of us moving into an unknown future.

•••

In fall, my mother and I go to synagogue for Rosh Hashanah. We sit towards the front, my mother walking unsteadily with her walker on the aisle’s downward slope. In front of us is a family who lost their son in the previous year. My mother and I attended the memorial together. I look in my bag for Kleenex but I know she’ll have a supply—she always does. She hands me a wadded-up tissue and we both wipe our eyes as the cantor begins to sing. We listen as sunlight streams, illuminating the blues, greens, reds, and yellows of the stained glass windows. I glance at my mother’s profile, the view of her in synagogue I’ll always remember—the straight line of her nose, the curve of her cheek with its tiny red veins and rosy cast, the same slight brown spots that I so resolutely try to vanquish on my own cheeks on visits to the dermatologist. The image reminds me of my favorite photo of her, also in profile. She’s a teenager, just a few years before she met my father. Her hair is held back by a clip, she’s wearing a print dress with a little girl’s round collar, and she’s gazing starry-eyed into the distance, as if imagining the life she’d someday have.

Sometime during the service, a young woman goes to the bima—the raised part of the sanctuary—and begins to sing. She’s the daughter of a dear friend my age who died just months before. I tell my mother who she is. My Kleenex is soggy, she hands me another, then slowly and gently takes my hand. We sit holding hands as the singer’s voice envelopes us. The dead take their seats with the living and my soul expands, comforted by memory, my mother’s presence, and the connective tissue of love.

•••

SUSAN MOLDAW’s work has appeared in bioStories, Broad Street, Fourth Genre, Literary Mama, Narrative, Ruminate, and others. She’s a chaplain and gerontologist and is currently completing a program in spiritual direction. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

 

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The Memory House

A tiny handmade house on clumps of dirt against a blue, cloudy sky. Represents "The Memory House," a childhood home
Photo by Gina Easley

By Melissent Zumwalt

Earlier this week, my husband and I arrived at my childhood home to help my mother move. She has lived on this spot for thirty-four years (since I was two years old). The last twenty-five of those years here, she spent against her will, a captive, hating this place, begging my dad to move. He passed away 363 days ago.

Since our coming, I often find Mom staring vacantly into the air, slumped over on the couch, listless. After decades of seeking an escape from this house, on the eve of her ultimate freedom, she is morose, maudlin, exhibiting something akin to Stockholm syndrome.

It now feels like maybe this whole move was my idea, that I thrust this upon her too soon after Dad’s passing. But the fact of the matter is, however we ended up here—it’s happening. The new owners take possession in five days, and somehow we have to get Mom out of here, physically and emotionally.

•••

The house itself is nothing special. A 1978 ranch model situated on an acre of land in the rural Willamette Valley of Oregon. It’s located in an unincorporated area not claimed by any town:  farm country.

My parents were not farmers, but most of the families in this area are, or were back then. The soil of the Willamette Valley is the most fertile in the nation, its own form of “black gold.” This rich earth alleviates the need for a green thumb to succeed as a gardener. There was the time Mom dug a hole in a corner of the front yard and simply threw our Halloween Jack-o-Lantern into it for disposal. We forgot about it until the next fall when a robust pumpkin plant emerged from the spot, gracing us with a bounty of fresh pumpkins.

Acreage of berries, hops and hay proliferated in the region, the air often permeated by the stench of manure, a rich scent of cow excrement I found revolting as a child. (How dramatic we were as kids on the school bus, making choking sounds and pantomiming gagging as we rode by particularly ripe fields). Later, it became a smell as nostalgic to me as wood smoke or pine.

The stillness of the region is all-encompassing, to the point of suffocation. A childhood friend slept over one night and found the force of the silence so unnerving she could not rest. The distance between houses and scant traffic leads to a night sky that is total in its blackness. Until I left home, I didn’t appreciate how few people had the opportunity to see the evening stars.

“Going into town” from here required a commitment. It would sound like we were loading up a wagon train, “Hey, we’re going into town. Do you need anything?” Trips like this were premeditated and would not be repeated for another week. With the time it took to travel out and back, there was never any concept of “running to the store” for a forgotten item or an impulse purchase. The same was true for getting to school or going to friends’ houses. Everything had to be planned, coordinated.

I was never interested in any of it, the rural lifestyle—and truth be told, my parents really weren’t either.

The house was chosen based on its physical isolation. There was no neighborhood of which to speak, no community, no one to cast judgment on us with disapproving eyes. My mom would tell me, only half-jokingly, that we ended up out here because we were “run out of town.”

When I was a baby, we lived in “city” limits (a bursting metropolis of less than 5,000 people). In those early years of our family, perhaps Dad’s hoarding affliction could still have been misconstrued as severe messiness. The garage filled up and spilled over with things—broken bicycles, greasy spools of rope, dilapidated cars, empty paint cans, rusty ladders—occupying the yard, the driveway, like a garbage dump.

Mom often recounted a story of one afternoon when she and I were home alone together. Holding me on her hip, she answered a knock at the door, and to her surprise, found a policeman standing there. He told her there were town ordinances. She was going to need to clean up her yard or he would have to fine her. With the pride she took in her appearance and her impeccable housekeeping skills, she choked up with embarrassment. She did not mention the mess was my dad’s. She spent the afternoon with a neighbor woman feverishly cleaning up the small yard and garage. When my dad came home, he was enraged. He hollered at her, red-faced, for touching his things, accusing her of trying to get rid of him. My dad was over six feet tall and barrel-chested. When angered, he was a charging bull. Mom looked for a way to make it work. Within a week, she found the house for sale in the country and they moved every last item away from the disparaging gaze of city life.

As an adult, I later recognized the extreme isolation I felt as a child, an isolation carried with me throughout my life, was a deliberate construct.

I didn’t anticipate moving Mom out this week would hold much emotion for me. After leaving home at seventeen, my return visits were infrequent at best. I preferred my parents, or more specifically, my mother, come to see me wherever I happened to be living—often in the most vibrant, densest places I could find. In my urban apartments, the sounds of ambulance sirens and the constant whirring of traffic soothed me to sleep like a lullaby. I gravitated to places pulsating with indicators of life: streetlights, headlights, neon lights. The non-stop presence of humanity was inescapable even inside my apartments, where the smell of my neighbors’ cooking infused the air and it was possible to hear them singing, coughing, laughing through the thin, shared walls. I never had to be alone.

•••

The house on Killins Loop served as the physical manifestation of our family’s neuroses.

Mom had her spaces, the front of the house and inside, where her OCD reigned. What, to most people, would be termed “spring cleaning”, constituted her normal weekly routine—fully emptying cupboards and scrubbing down shelves, vacuuming under couch cushions and flipping them over to preserve the longevity of the couch, washing walls, scouring the oven, moving the refrigerator to mop behind it. The pervasive aroma of Pine-Sol signaled her movement from one room to the next. Her cleaning was not cheerful. It was beleaguered, martyred. She’d clean through the house like an army on the move, muttering along the way, “None of you would care if I dropped dead except you wouldn’t have anyone to clean up after you.”

She enforced strict rules with us (never sit on the bed, never eat outside the kitchen); issued protocols around putting things away (precisely how to fold the blanket on the couch when done using it, specifically how to tuck the chairs back in under the table); told us exactly where things should go (shoes off upon entering the front door, how and where to line them up), taught how to turn appliances on and off to keep them functionable for maximum lifespan. I grew up under an uncompromising regimen, like being raised at basic training by a drill sergeant.

And Mom conceded Dad his spaces, mostly outside, the back acre and the barn, where his hoarding dominated. His stuff piled up to the rafters of the barn and cascaded out, covering the yard and becoming entangled with the rampant, wild vegetation, incorporating crazy things like boat motors (we had no boat) and discarded school lockers and unwieldy strips of sheet metal twenty feet long and objects that had become unrecognizable over time. There was no system to any of it. Wherever he put something down last, that’s where it stayed, and he heaped new things on top of old as he brought them in.

Dad’s compulsion tried to overpower hers. His junk would begin to infiltrate the inside of the house through the tacked-on sun porch he’d built, accumulating around his desk, on the table, starting out innocuously as stacks of receipts, losing lotto tickets, used nails. But then it expanded into mounds of inoperable fans, dismantled clocks, warped VHS tapes, a flat tire. Mom fought it back like a wildfire, holding the line, watching for drift—for things finding their way to the kitchen counter or the bedroom. She would get firm with him, demand it all migrate back to the barn, and start moving things out herself. Which led to the inevitable eruption of gruesome shouting matches. The cycle repeated itself, year upon year.

•••

As I pass through the hall towards the bedrooms, a loaded moving box weighing down my forearms, the hole in the closet door catches my eye.

I recall with exacting clarity the night it happened.

My older brother, Chris, fifteen at the time, returned home from being out with friends. He disappeared frequently back then, sneaking out through his bedroom window, going missing for days, showing up unexpectedly at odd hours, already drinking heavily and abusing hard drugs. That evening he slunk in through the front door, trying to make his way unnoticed, past where Mom and I sat in the family room watching T.V. But Mom confronted him in the hall, both of them primed for an altercation.

“Look at me,” she demanded, cupping his chin with her palm to turn his face her direction. “You’re high again.”

“No, I’m not,” he retorted, anger seeping from him already.

“Chris, I can tell by looking at your eyes. I know. Don’t lie to me!”

“I told you! I’m not high!” he yelled.

“And I told you not to come home like this!”

And then he burst and started punching the closet door with his bare fist, repeatedly, screaming with each hit, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

My beautiful brother turned into a demonic thing right before my eight-year-old eyes.

No one ever fixed the hole. There isn’t time or reason to now. The buyers take ownership in four days, it will be their problem then.

•••

Mom wanders aimlessly through the house, back hunched, arms dangling at her sides. She loosely grasps a half-formed cardboard box by its flap in her right hand. The box slaps her leg with each shuffle step, dragging along on the floor beside her.

“I don’t know what to do with this,” she mumbles, gesturing to the box. “Do you need it somewhere?”

One step leads down into the house’s sunken, formal living room, situated directly off the front entrance. We approach the built-in bookshelves along the back wall. Mom sits on the brick stoop in front of the fireplace, adjacent to the bookcases. I sit on the floor in front of them and take books off the shelves, one at a time, holding each up for her assessment. Her collection is chockfull of mysteries and biographies, her favorites.

Pulling out the next book, “Black Dahlia?”

“Donate,” she says.

In my youth, the popular novels she’d kept from the 1960s and early 70s intrigued me the most, providing me with a window into a bygone era. Peyton Place. Valley of the Dolls. Fear of Flying. Coffee, Tea or Me. I used to sneak her books off the shelf while she was away at work, read and replace them before she found any missing. Part of the taboo was the content of these books, considered racy during their time. But more important was the fact I didn’t want her to know I had gone into the living room to get them.

We were not supposed to enter the living room.

The living room was an anomaly, the nicest spot in the house. Mom and Dad replaced the room’s green shag with a plush, white carpeting. She’d feared we would sully this pristine new floor with our soiled feet—and she came from an old-fashioned upbringing that believed a formal living room was for entertaining only.

More than just the thick, luxurious carpet and all Mom’s books, the living room was where she kept a globe, a painting of her mother and a formal portrait of Mom, Chris, and me as a baby. There was a full-length couch with matching love seat and a proper coffee table. As a kid, the room seemed so spacious, so beautiful. I wished we were allowed to use it more often.

The problem with saving our best areas for entertaining was that we never had guests. Mom’s side of the family all remained in West Virginia, and although Dad’s family lived locally, none of them spoke with each other, ever. Mom and Dad had no friends, or none outside of work, or at least none who would travel the great expanse to visit us at our home.

•••

The inaugural owners occupied the house for two years, then Mom and Dad bought it in 1980. When my parents acquired the house, it cost $80K. They had $30K to put down from the sale of their place in town. With Dad’s military service, they were able to secure a loan through the VA for the remainder of the purchase price. Today, thirty-four years later, Mom owes $150K on the house. The calculation is incomprehensible.

Decades back, Dad went into business, opening a security firm with an irreputable colleague. Over the years, the firm struggled and Dad’s partner convinced him to put our house up as collateral for another loan. Dad took Mom to the bank to sign the papers without telling her the purpose of the visit, capturing her signature through the element of surprise.

As his partner steadily embezzled money and failed to pay taxes, Dad never questioned the accounting, never saw the books, until the whole operation was on the verge of collapse. Dad’s signature held him accountable and we were assured to lose the house. I was eleven and they didn’t discuss things like this with me directly. But I overheard their arguments.

Mom, yelling, “I can’t believe you did this to us! We are going to lose the house!”

Dad, also yelling, “We’re not going to lose the goddamn house!”

That was the language they used. “Lose the house.” Lost—like a set of car keys, or losing a sock. Abrupt. One day the keys are in hand, and the next, lost. As a kid, I tried to imagine what it would look like, when we “lost” the house. Would it be like the time our mini-van got repossessed? When Dad drove it to work and came out to find it missing? One moment it was ours, and the next, gone forever.

Would it happen quick, like a fire, enabling us to take only what we could grab in that moment? A favorite dress and whatever book I happened to be reading? Or would we know they were coming, like a scheduled appointment?

I worried that when the time came, I wouldn’t be allowed to stay with my parents any more. That they would be seen as officially unfit. I tried to prepare myself.

One Saturday afternoon, Mom and I wandered through the mall. Even as a kid, I understood shopping was Mom’s addiction, her way to deal with Dad and Chris and life. The mall allowed us a neutral setting where we could experience happiness, at least for a moment. It felt safer for me to broach sensitive topics there.

Mom stopped to peruse a blouse, folded neatly on a display table. I watched her face for the moment of transition, the split second between when her attention was freed from the merchandise but before we marched onward to the next item. When the instant arrived, using clear inflection, low volume, I broke out my rehearsed inquiry, “Mom, if they take our house away, will they take me away from you and Dad?”

“What?” her voice terse, my words breaking her shopping-induced reverie. She did not make eye contact, but her annoyance with me was evident for thinking this, for saying these words out loud, in public, where other people might hear them. “Of course not,” she hissed. “Look at all those kids who end up living with their parents in cars.”

I tried to envision it. The four of us cramming into some used car for the night, like something out of an afterschool special. For what it was worth, I found consolation in her response. My bedroom might be taken from me, but my family would not be.

Armed with this new information, I waited for the day we would “lose the house.”

•••

With forty-eight hours remaining until moving day, I walk into the kitchen for a cup of coffee and some yogurt. Mom stands at the kitchen sink, dishrag in hand, crying. I approach her from the side, invoking my most soothing tone, “Are you feeling sad about the move?” It seems an obvious question, but she’s been pining to leave for decades.

“Yes, this is my house. I have a house, and I’m moving to that … that stupid condo. I’ve lived here for thirty-four years,” she replies.

“I know, it’s a big change,” I say,” What’ve been some of your best memories here?” More than just changing the conversation to something positive, I am legitimately curious what she is going to miss.

“Well, there’s a lot of good memories,” she sniffs, “Like, when we took you and Chris to Disneyland.”

For me, the irony is immediate. Her fondest memories of the house are when we were away from it.

“Yeah, that was a fun trip,” I concede. “And we did make it to Disneyland two times.”

“We did?”

I guess she blocked out the second excursion. I don’t blame her. The first time, when I was seven and Chris fourteen, we drove in Dad’s old pick-up truck all the way down I-5 from Oregon to Southern California. Mom and Dad up front in the cab, Chris and I riding in the truck bed, under the canopy, sitting on foam mats. We visited the Magic Kingdom, enjoying the Pirates of the Caribbean and It’s a Small World, eating cheeseburgers in restaurants, our one true family vacation.

But the night before the second trip, just two years later, Chris ran away from home again after a verbal brawl with Dad. My parents debated whether to cancel the trip. Since they had taken leave from work and made all the arrangements—a rarity for them—they decided the three of us would depart as scheduled.

Upon our return, we found the family room window shattered, the house in disarray. Apparently, Chris did not have his house key. He and his friends broke in while we were away, searching for things they could sell for drug money. His friends stole several of Dad’s guns and Chris pilfered whatever cash Mom tried to keep hidden for emergencies, ransacking her personal drawers. When I try to summon memories from that second outing to Disneyland, all I see is broken glass littering the family room carpet.

Standing there with Mom in the kitchen, reminiscing about the few positive moments she conjured up, I mentally search for heart-warming reflections of my own contained within these four walls.

My real joy in the house came from the studio. In Mom’s younger years, she pursued dance as a professional career. Once she had us kids, she wanted to continue her dance career as a teacher. Mom had a conversation with Dad and asked him if his job was secure, if it could support the family while she launched her dance studio. He replied yes, in full confidence. Then he reconstructed the garage at Killins Loop into Becky’s Dance and Exercise Studio. He bricked over the garage door into a solid façade, sprung the floor and lined the walls with barres and mirrors.

Mom opened for students and six months later Dad was fired from his job for stealing. He could not stop himself from bringing things home, amassing more, piling up his hoard, regardless of where or how he obtained these things.

Needing a reliable paycheck, Mom eventually shuttered her business, but the physical studio remained, an homage to her unfulfilled dreams. Over the years it inevitably became a glorified storage room, but I always kept enough of the floor cleared to dance.

I hated Dad’s mess and his instability. I hated Mom’s regimented rules. I hated my brother’s intoxicated anger. I hated being so alone all the time. Too far to walk or bike to anything as a kid. I took it all out in that studio. In the endless monotony of summer, with nowhere to go and no way to get there, sometimes I exercised up to four hours at a time. Finding my solace through movement and music and endorphins. Waiting for the day when I could finally leave it all behind.

•••

Night falls on our last evening with the house, my childhood home.

I stand alone in the doorway of the darkened laundry room and look at the emptied dining room through to the kitchen and the family room. Thinking back on all our memories, wondering if, after thirty-four years, our family’s unhappiness has taken on a life of its own that will haunt this space once we leave.

Earlier today Mom and I took a break from chores and went for a short walk down our country road. As we meandered, the omnipresent, low-slung cloud cover parted, revealing Mt. Hood’s noble peak. Realizing I never found out how we managed to keep the house, I used this opportunity to ask.

“Oh, we were going to lose it,” she tells me with certainty. “We had to make a minimum payment of ten thousand dollars right away or it was gone. There was no way we had that. I was preparing for us to leave. But then, at the last minute, Aunt Ruth sent me a check for it.”

The knowledge settles with me. “So, she’s the reason we could stay.”

“And then, we were just broke,” Mom continues. “After paying the IRS on the back taxes each month, the double house payments, we had nothing left, and I was working two and three jobs. Trying to catch up.”

This part of our story, I remember well.

Staring now into the darkness of the house, my viewpoint shifts. I understand, viscerally, with the perspective of adulthood, how hard my mom fought to keep this place, for us.

What she did was remarkable.

Mom and her sister did not finish high school. Their lives were plagued by turbulence and upheaval, never having enough stability to establish a rhythm to their schooling or to develop close friendships with other children.

Mom recalls instances in her youth of waking up in basement apartments, the floor flooded to her ankles, or life in sweltering attic units where her father could not stand erect. Because of her own father’s addictions and abuse, she wanted things for me that had never been afforded to her. Compared to the poverty she grew up in, our home on Killins Loop was palatial, and I, its beneficiary.

This house provided me with the foundation to finish high school, to be the first in the family to graduate college. As much as I had hated it, this house provided me with a stable platform to spring forth into the world and find my way.

•••

The realtor told us we could just leave our house keys on the kitchen counter and be out by the afternoon. But I burned with curiosity—who were these people that would occupy the space that had occupied me for so long? We arranged to hand over the keys to the new owners in person.

There is no logical place for us to wait for them. It is not really our house any more. This moment exists in a vortex, no longer part of our old life, the life that contained Killins Loop, and the new lives not yet created.

On this early September afternoon, simply remaining outside is most comfortable. The three of us—my mom, my husband and me—take a seat on the front concrete step.

The house never looked as good as it does today. The sun shines warm and inviting, not as overly intense as in the summer months. The sweet odor of freshly mowed lawn floats on the breeze and the branches of the apple tree hang heavy with Gravensteins. Mom swept the front porch, the sidewalk, and her window washings make the front of the house sparkle.

“What time is it?” Mom asks.

“5:05,” I reply.

“They’re late,” she says.

Another five minutes creep by before we notice a turquoise mini-van approach. This must be them. No other cars have driven by since we’ve been outside. The three of us stand with expectancy.

As the van pulls into the gravel driveway, I try to catch a glimpse, a precursor, of who is inside. After endless seconds, a clean-cut man in khaki pants and a woman wearing a sun dress, both in their early thirties, emerge. I spot a small face press up against the back window. The woman slides open the passenger side door and a jumble of little limbs and torsos, attached to four hearty children, tumble out.

We walk towards each other. Mom appears small, timid. She extends her hand to them, “I’m Becky,” she says.

The woman smiles with compassion and takes Mom’s hand in both of hers. “I’m Susan,” she says. “Is this your house?” She seems genuinely interested to meet Mom, as if she is grateful to her for this new home.

“Yes,” Mom replies, tears forming in the corners of her eyes.

Susan turns to the man beside her. “This is my husband, Dan, and we just love your house. We are so thankful. This will be our first house. Oh, and these—” she gestures to the four kids who appear to range in age from three to eleven, who brim with uncontainable enthusiasm, and who have already begun chasing each other around the front yard—“are Elizabeth, Stephanie, Jennifer and Jacob. He’s our youngest.”

We smile in acknowledgment and finish our introductions. We learn Susan and Dan are both schoolteachers. Their delight over having room for their children to play is demonstrable. They already talk about planting a garden.

“Can we walk through the house together?” Susan asks. Although the invitation is directed mostly to my mom, her offer provides me a needed moment of closure.

As the five of us enter the house, the kids run to catch up. They barrel through the front door and from the cramped interior hallway, drop down into the sunken living room. All four of them skipping in circles, unfettered, through the empty room, nimble feet on white carpet. I wonder how this family will use the living room. The children are so natural in the space, so joyful. As the eldest girl clasps the young boy’s hand, I pray for them. That they will gather in here, play games together, eat popcorn on couches, laugh with each other here, love each other here.

•••

MELISSENT ZUMWALT is an artist, advocate and administrator who lives in Portland, Oregon. Her written work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Whisk(e)y Tit Journal, Full Grown People, Oregon Humanities’ Beyond the Margins, Sisyphus, Pithead Chapel and elsewhere. She learned the art of storytelling from her mother, a woman who has an uncanny ability to recount the most ridiculous and tragic moments of life with beauty and humor. Read more at melissentzumwalt.com.

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The Case for “Cunt”

Photo by Gina Easley

By Brooke Champagne

                                                     I tell you this

Is what I love about America—the words it puts

In my mouth…

—Heather McHugh, “I Knew I’d Sing”

 

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He’s so fucking!”

“He’s so what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Then why do you,” I said, flatly.

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

 

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Turning Up in a Dream Last Night

Photo by Lenore Edman/flickr

By Abigail Thomas

was a young man I went out with a lifetime ago. Such different days. I had finally left an unhappy marriage and was living with my three kids in my parents’ place in the city, half a block from Washington Square. It was the late sixties, and I was running all kinds of hot. My poor parents were built-in babysitters. I lied about where I was going, what I was doing. I think they were afraid to ask questions.

“Went out with” is perhaps too formal a phrase to describe our meetings, which often took place on the upper bunk of a tired old double decker bed in a crowded apartment somewhere in the East Village. We had met at a big noisy party and exchanged a few words before until somebody else barged in, and I lost track of him. Later, as people began to leave, it was discovered that everyone’s bag had been stolen. We were all upset, bewildered, asking a flurry of questions—Who? Why? How? Nobody knew. And then my bag was returned, dropped off at the front desk of Brentano’s where I worked in the office, keeping a running count of how many copies of which books were sold each day, based on notes from the guys at the register. Everything written on scraps of paper. In those days Brentano’s was on the corner of University Place and 8th Street. Azuma was right next door. Oh, Azuma! Well, missing from my bag was the little bit of money and added to it was somebody else’s bottle of Visine. There was also a short note signed by the young man I’d met at the party, giving me his telephone number which I immediately called.

I forget his name­—he changed it every week to stay incognito. He was one of the leaders of a revolutionary group that seemed to consist of two young black men and a lot of adoring white girls, but I might have made it up about the girls. He was kind and gentle and attentive where my former husband had been curt and cold and abusive, and I was crazy about him. I don’t remember what we talked about, and I don’t even really remember the sex, just that we had a lot of it. At some point he disappeared for a while, ostensibly to go to Canada to learn how to make dynamite. It seemed strange; why Canada? I didn’t give a second thought to the dynamite, which never materialized. I was oblivious to what could go badly wrong.

I have been trying to remember his face, why we lost track of each other. His presence has lingered all day. We were so vulnerable. That’s what I remember best. We were both so vulnerable. And so willing. We actually believed in a better world. I remember I had a tiny red address book, and every time he changed his name, I entered the new one, carefully crossing out the one he’d had before. I wish I still had it. I wish could hold in my hand what I can’t put into words.

Oh god, now I am remembering the young man who worked in the stockroom of Brentano’s. I liked him very much. He had been dishonorably discharged from the army, after the helicopter he was in was given word that no prisoners were being taken, and the North Vietnamese soldiers they were carrying were to be thrown off while still in the air. This decent young man went nuts.

We slept together once. I didn’t know I had the clap until he broke it to me gently, because he had it now, and he had slept with no one but his girlfriend for years. I didn’t know where I had gotten it—by then I was sleeping with any man who could fog a mirror, but it wasn’t a toilet seat, which is where my friend told his girlfriend he had gotten it. He wrote down the address of a clinic that had just opened and told me I needed to go. I recall a long walk west, and a room full of sheepish-looking people waiting their turns.

But now dozens of memories are falling like confetti into my consciousness, and my friend Paul has arrived, and we get to waxing nostalgic about the city we loved, in the days when you could live on a shoestring. That city is long gone, a kinder, more tolerant town, or so I am thinking now. Also vanished are most of our old haunts—even The Riviera closed down, for god’s sake. That was the last straw. And although my memory fails me (where exactly was the Ninth Circle?) I’m experiencing a physical rush that my body remembers better than I do, and it’s 1969 again.

If I close my eyes, I’m back in Washington Square, sitting barefoot on the rim of the fountain with all the other ragtag and bobtails. I’ll probably sleep with somebody I meet here today without even knowing his name. We will wind up in the East Village, or Harlem, or somewhere on West 4th Street. Trust defined my youth back then, trust and hunger for what I didn’t know, and sex felt like a nutrient we released for the planet. The times that were a’changing have changed, but for a little while I’m going to ignore what went off the rails and let myself remember what innocence and hope felt like.

•••

ABIGAIL THOMAS has four children, twelve grandchildren, one great grandchild, eight books, two dogs, and a high school education. She is eighty years old and prefers this to any other age for its simplicity.

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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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Katharine: A Love Story

Photo by Gina Easley

By Susan Rebecca White

From the moment we met, Katharine dazzled me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

•••

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

•••

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

 

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