I’m working on the new anthology (pictured above, featuring a glorious photo by Gina Easley.) This time, I’m switching things up a bit.
The theme of Soul Mate 101 is love and sex, all done up in the FGP way. About half the essays are brand-spanking new work; the other half are some gems from the site. I’m already so thrilled about it that I can’t imagine the state I’ll be worked up into by the time the book actually is published—I’m shooting for mid-September.
Who are writers in this latest one?
Why, none other than Sara Bir, William Bradley, Gayle Brandeis, Glendaliz Camacho, Carolyn Edgar, Sarah Einstein, Reyna Eisenstark, Dionne Ford, McKel Jensen, Jean Kim, Antonia Malchik, Zsofi McMullin, Catherine Newman, Deesha Philyaw, Browning Porter, Susan Kushner Resnick, Natasha Saje, Tracy Sutton Schorn, Louise Sloan, Megan Stielstra, and Elissa Wald.
I’ll be introducing them in the notifications letter in the coming months. (Some of them have books coming out or out already. Some good, good stuff.)
I hope you’ll preorder now. I’m the only one who has read this whole collection so far, but all of these true tales of love in the time of adulthood have me swooning. I think you’re going to love the book—and, hey, I haven’t steered you wrong before, have I?
For most of my life you’ve been the size of walnuts. Nuts and other produce are standard measurements for small bodily organs and glands. The prostate gland is also the size of a walnut, but by the time a man is forty sometimes it’s as big as an apricot. The pituitary gland is the size of a pea. Whereas we measure hail by sports balls. When hail gets to be the size of golf balls that’s when it starts to get serious. Someone’s going to take a picture of that hail.
When I was born, stored inside the two of you, ovaries, was half the genetic material for a million people. That’s about the population of San Jose, California. I’ve never been to San Jose, but I’m imagining it populated solely by those people, the potential humans whose blueprints you harbored. Tall men and short women. Dark-haired, with poor eyesight. If I were thinking of starting a business in that alternate San Jose, it would be an optical shop. There wouldn’t be a lot of audience participation at concerts, as my people don’t like to draw attention to themselves, but the shows would be well attended. The population would have to pay special attention to sunscreen. It would be a snarky San Jose.
But amid all those brown-eyed wallflowers, maybe there would be a few blonde-haired, blue-eyed standouts. They would be the product of long-forgotten recessive genes that give them the ability and inclination to be cheerleaders or to complete layups in a graceful fashion.
Those million people, though? They’re only a fraction of the story. When I was a fetus, you held seven million eggs follicles. That’s the population of New York City, minus the Bronx. But to be brutally honest, most of those potential people didn’t have a lot of, well, potential. So you performed a culling, keeping only the most promising million egg follicles. And of those million, throughout my lifetime, maybe 500 will get even a shot at the big show.
I think of my San Jose with affection, all those ghost people, the artists, the bricklayers, the teachers, the petty thieves, the bureaucrats, the scientists. The odds were against them, were against all of us. But we made it. How can we ever look at another human being without a sense of wonder? Every person who takes a breath has scaled the Kilimanjaro of biology, has won the Powerball and is standing there with that big check and the shit-eating grin, or should be. We should be embracing each other as comrades, as survivors. Just showing up on Earth at all means we’re winners.
I know we can’t always get along. We need to argue about important things like the environment and the economy. We also need to argue about things that don’t matter, like the Oxford Comma and whether leggings are pants, because written into our blueprints are brains that want to make sense of things, that want to nail down the rules. Also written into our blueprints is the desire to have the last word.
But still, every so often I meet someone and I’m struck by the unlikelihood that I exist and that she exists and that we’re in the same place, having a conversation, and we understand the words that the other says. And I feel a connection to her. When I read about a crime, I sometimes think about both the perpetrator and the victim and feel an almost unbearable sadness that there are perpetrators and victims, after all the work that was done behind the scenes, within the warm, dark factory of the human body, to bring them into the world. I think about my ghost San Jose, and all the other ghost San Joses, and about how we’re the ones who made it into the outside world. We should be a little gentler with each other. We should be gentler with ourselves.
But back to you, ovaries. Of those million egg follicles you kept in safe keeping for me, two of them became living, breathing people. There’s no mystery like that of a newborn baby. I never saw my job as molding my children, but more as letting their mysteries unfold. Deep in the genetic makeup of my son were instructions to curl his toes under his feet when he sits, like one of his uncles does. How far back does that go? Maybe five hundred thousand years ago there was a Homo heidelbergensis sitting on a rock in what would eventually be Germany, sharpening a stone point for a spear, with his toes curled under his feet.
Etched somewhere in the DNA of those two well-timed eggs were determination, a love of music, sharp wits, and a great capacity for kindness. Also (between the two of them, not naming names) stubbornness, perfectionism, a habit of telling jokes at the wrong time, and difficulty with time management. You did your part and I’ve tried to do my part. I tried to help them find their paths, but to also do a lot of staying out of their way so that they could become who they actually were and not who I imagined they might be. I didn’t do much, but I think I didn’t mess up your hard work. They’re adult and almost adult, and so far, so good.
I’m grateful that these are the two I got, although I guess that I’d feel the same if I’d ended up with two of the ghost children in San Jose instead. I know I’m anthropomorphizing you way too much, ovaries, but you did a good job and I appreciate it.
Of course, you’re only half the story. Testes are nothing to sneeze at either. They stay busy, cranking out genetic material on an as-needed basis, at an incomprehensible rate, like 1,500 sperm cells a second. It’s survival of the fittest when it comes to sperm, and the culling is even more cut-throat than that of the egg follicles. In heat after heat in the race for life, almost all of them lose. Forget about my San Jose or even my New York City without The Bronx. We’re talking twice the population of the earth every month. You, ovaries, are the students who prepared ahead of time. You read the syllabus and did the assignments the first week of class, and then just waited for the due dates. Testes are the students who goofed off all semester and then crammed the night of the test and still pulled off a pretty good grade. But don’t resent the testes. It takes all kinds.
So, with all this talk of eggs and children I want to point out that I’m much more than a mother. I’m a writer, I understand at least ninety percent of the rules of football, and I’m a highly competent parallel parker. Reproduction is only one of many facets of me. But you, ovaries, are unabashed in your single-mindedness. Everything you do is to advance the cause of extending my genetic legacy. I’m going to tell you something, but I think you know it already, if you’re really honest with yourself: no more eggs will become people. For a while now, you’ve been acting as if nothing has changed, but really you’ve just been going through the motions, like a bookkeeper in an abandoned office. There’s no new business, nobody’s asking for the report, nobody’s reading your emails, but you’ve still been keeping the books month after month.
At some point, though, your job will be done. Remember when you were the size of a walnut? Ligaments strained under the weight of the future generations within you. But eventually you’ll be the size of an almond. I wonder what size nut you are now. A pistachio? Or maybe a cashew?
There’s not too much plot to our story, and that’s a good thing. You haven’t been stricken with any diseases or major dysfunctions, although there’s still time, I guess. Most likely one of my organs will eventually do me in, but sentimentally, I hope it’s not you. You’re my connection to the future and my link to the past. Just about every other part of my body could, theoretically, be swapped out for someone else’s, or replaced by a machine. They just have their jobs to do. My heart pumps blood, my kidneys clean that blood and my lungs supply that blood with oxygen, but they don’t do their job differently from anyone else’s heart, kidneys, or lungs. But you took pieces of me, of my mother, of my grandmother, of my great-grandfather, and offered them as possibilities to the future. You know the secrets of who I am and who I could have been. I’d like you to be with me until the end, like two old friends, side by side in rocking chairs, sitting quietly. They know each other so well that they don’t have to say a word.
•••
JODY MACE is a freelance writer living in North Carolina. Her essays have appeared in O Magazine, Brain, Child, The Washington Post, and many other publications, as well as several anthologies. Her website is jodymace.com. She publishes the website Charlotte on the Cheap in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is a regular contributor to Full Grown People.
1. When I was a child, my family lived in the south of France, in the town of Aix-en-Provence. My father had been transferred there for his job. He worked for Shell Oil and had not yet learned to hate it. Later, when my brother and I were old enough to think seriously about what kinds of jobs we might have, he warned us away from working for anyone; he felt he had wasted much of his life in servitude to bland corporate life. He urged both of us to be our own bosses!, to not get stuck in what he considered the unimaginative hell of middle management.
The advice was mostly lost on me, but that came later anyway. This period in the south of France was before my father’s disillusionment. He was still a young exec in the early seventies and Aix was not an expensive city then. My parents found a second-floor apartment for rent that, while not large, was palatial in its high ceilings, tiled floors, elaborate moldings, and the most extravagant wallpaper in the living room. In photographs, though discolored with time, it is still stunning: a deep green background with bronze vines in vertical lines.
None of this was of much interest to me at the time, though. Instead, for my brother and me, the appeal of the place lay in the gigantic terrace. It still amazes me to think that this was where I learned to ride a bike. It was sized like a mini-mall parking lot. Except it was beautiful and sunny, with geraniums growing out of old planters and a wrought-iron barrier to keep us from tumbling into the street below.
Across from our building was a gated property. Though the house was not visible from the terrace, the garden was, and it had a pool. I heard it said that Alain Delon lived there. The name meant nothing to me then, except I realized it must belong to someone important or famous, because of the thrill I discerned half-suppressed in its saying. It was clear that to have a pool like this, you had to be important or famous or at least rich.
The pool was shaped like an old-fashioned mirror, straight on the sides, and curving in and out at each end. I don’t remember ever seeing anyone swimming in it. It was just there, turquoise and sparkling, inviting but inaccessible.
Amazingly, my father put up a huge blow-up pool on our terrace, big enough for my brother and me to swim in. Now that I’m an adult, I can’t imagine doing such a crazy thing. The terrace was not built to hold the weight of that many thousands of gallons and might have collapsed. Or, if the pool had burst suddenly, I can only imagine the awesome spectacle of all that water gushing out and flooding our apartment and the one below. But neither of these things happened, and my brother and I splashed and shrieked and swam all summer long. It was nothing like the beautiful and stately pool across the street but it was still heaven to us.
Plugging the building’s address into Google maps, I am a little stunned to have a satellite view of the terrace, and, across the street, Alain Delon’s former garden with its cypress trees and Mediterranean pines, and its pool gorgeously intact. It is surprising somehow to see my childhood memories so unambiguously confirmed. We moved away from Aix when I was five so there is much about our life there that I don’t remember clearly. The terrace and the pool and the wallpaper, among a handful of other things, remained vivid to me but it seemed the vividness of a dream.
The convergence of dream and reality in this one memory sends a chill down my spine. Time has passed and so many things have changed, but this thing has remained the same.
2. Fast forward fifteen years. After my French schooling, I went to college in the U.S. My college boyfriend, though majoring in history, was a musician, almost famous at a couple of east coast colleges, including Dartmouth where his band played a couple of times a year and where Michael Eisner’s son went to school. The young Eisner had ambitions to start a record label or a management company—I can’t exactly remember now—and he wanted my boyfriend to be his first client. The summer after we graduated, he arranged for my boyfriend to play a showcase gig at The Viper Room. The club was legendary to me, because only a few months earlier River Phoenix had OD’ed on the sidewalk outside, which broke my heart for his family and friends, and for all that wasted talent and beauty.
I was living in San Francisco right after college, though I felt utterly adrift, struggling to find a job and a place to live. My mother had arranged for me to stay for a few weeks with a friend from her own college days. Instead of being grateful for this generosity, I resented having another parental figure and labored to hide my sullenness. By the time my boyfriend called to tell me that he was being flown out to L.A. by Eisner’s son and did I want to spend a few days with him in a hotel there, I felt desperate to escape the claustrophobia of my own fumblings and failure to get a toehold on adulthood. Yes, I wanted to go! I was too broke to fly and didn’t know how to drive so I bought myself a bus ticket to L.A.
This was by far the longest bus ride I had ever taken. It left at five a.m. from San Francisco and took almost twelve hours, through the Central Valley. No one actually wanted to be on the bus, but it was a fifth the price of a plane ticket, and we all had places to go. We stopped in Modesto, Merced, Fresno, Visalia, Delano, Bakersfield—towns with names that were intriguing and mysterious to me. I was new to California, and the Central Valley presented such a strange contrast to the foggy, winsome beauty of San Francisco. I was gobsmacked by this demonstration of how gigantic California was. In France, a trip that long would mean you had crossed into another country, but here mile after mile after mile under the beating, hard sun and still there was more road between the bus and L.A. With each stop the bus filled more until every seat was taken. Many of the passengers were older, and some were infirm. One or two looked like they might have just been released from prison. One woman spoke loudly to herself the entire bus ride.
When we stopped at the Greyhound depot in downtown L.A., I was relieved and euphoric to see A. waiting for me with a borrowed car. My lust for him woke me up from the grogginess of the journey. We hadn’t seen each other since I’d decided to move to San Francisco, and he had decided to pursue his luck in New York. While not exactly broken up, the distance between us had seemed to contain a resounding finality. And now we were here. Together. In L.A.
It was late afternoon but still very warm. As we drove, I noted that I liked L.A.’s wide streets. I didn’t mind that the traffic moved slowly since I had no particular agenda. I was happy sitting next to A., and I was interested in everything moving past my window—billboards, palm trees, convertible cars with their tops down. I felt calmed by the gentle weight of A.’s hand on my leg. I didn’t know what was going to happen to us in the long run, but here we were together now.
In another half hour, A. and I were in Michael Eisner’s pool. I imagined the dust of the trip washed off by this pure and cool water and was pleased at this image. In the back of my mind I was a little horrified at how rag-tag I must have seemed to the Eisners, sweaty and rumpled and dazed from so many hours of sitting in one place. But this was only in the back of my mind because in the front of my mind was A. We stood in the shallow end of the pool, facing each other, skimming the surface with our fingertips. I didn’t trust myself to touch him, but I could feel the water conducting the electricity between us. How perfect it would have been to fuck in this perfect pool. But the whole Eisner family was inside, and in another half-hour we were going to sit down to dinner, and however bold I wanted to imagine myself, I wasn’t bold enough to do that.
I don’t remember much about the dinner, except it was lovely and generous of them to host me and A. Michael talked to his son, giving him advice about dealing with the music bigwigs who were coming that night. I had no idea how to interact with anyone in this particular situation so I was quiet. All I could think about was going back into the pool with A. and having the whole place to ourselves. It no longer seemed incongruous for us to be there. I didn’t consider us out of place. If anything, everyone else seemed out of place, superfluous. Such a beautiful pool only needed two people, in love with each other.
3. A few years later, I moved to L.A. Despite our best efforts, A. and I broke up, and I made new friends to distract myself. One of them, Jason, was a production assistant on Ted Danson’s short-lived TV show Ink. Jason had become friendly with Danson and his wife Mary Steenburgen, and they’d entrusted him with their house and pets while they went out of town for a few weeks. Jason found a way to insert “Ted and Mary” into his every other sentence, which I liked because I would have done the same thing.
One evening Jason invited me to swim at Ted and Mary’s with a couple of other people. When we got there Jason led us through the back gate to the pool area. He went inside the house to get towels, saying, “You guys stay here.” We hadn’t particularly been planning to go inside, but at his admonition, we teased him by coming up to the French doors. We found he’d locked them behind him. We were faintly outraged at his having done this and teased him—“Jason, we’re coming in!” we shrieked softly, rattling the doorknobs for effect.
I glanced at the interior, which looked cozy in an English-countryhouse-via-Beverly-Hills kind of way. This was a popular decorating style for a certain Hollywood crowd, I guessed, but when I thought of England I didn’t think swimming pool. It was thinking of the south of France, and of Aix, and the mirror of water across the street, that put me in the mind of pools.
Soon enough we were bored of pestering Jason and instead we jumped into the luminous water. At night, pools are mysterious and alluring. With the lights turned on they have an eerie, glowing beauty. The deep shadowy places where the light doesn’t reach makes them a little bit frightening too. Movement at the water’s surface is magnified. Light breaks apart and comes together again. Planar geometry makes its own strange kind of sense in the refraction of moving light. Bodies glow in a way they never otherwise do.
The setting was so beautiful, it seemed to call for some flirtation and it seemed wasteful to pass up this opportunity. I began to banter with a boy in our group.
A few years later, I would marry him, but I didn’t know it yet and just then such a thought would have seemed ludicrous. At that moment we were simply making jokes and observing each other from this new vantage point. We were buoyed by the water and by the sense of having stepped out of our ordinary lives. A few steps away there was a cozy interior but the doors were locked and we were out here in the eerie luminescence.
4. In Santa Monica, right off the Pacific Coast Highway is the pool that Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst built for their beach getaway. Now it exists as the Annenberg Beach House, and it’s open to the public in summer. On Sundays I often go with my guy and our kids around five o’clock. The air is still warm then and the pool is heated to a decadent eighty degrees. What a crazy luxury to swim in the late afternoon in clear water that is almost bathtub-warm, with the scent of the Pacific around us and the entire sky overhead. The pool is spectacularly beautiful, its perimeter tiled in a Greek key pattern and its bottom encircled with mosaics of ocean life. Speckled green and blue and yellow fish swim among the octopi and the billowing seaweed.
The main house, designed by Julia Morgan, was torn down in 1956 but I can imagine, floating in the dreamy water, that it is still there and that Hollywood intrigues are just out of earshot. I think of Marion Davies who is so often reduced in popular imagination to her caricature as Charles Foster Kane’s untalented, complaining mistress in Citizen Kane. Watching the real Davies act, in The Patsy for instance, she deploys her charm and her comedic chops with a dazzling ease. She gives side-eye like a boss, she pouts adorably, and she transforms herself in quick-witted imitations of her contemporaries.
It is easier, though, I suppose, to see Davies as the “mistress.” An untalented hack, in other words, for whom a smitten Hearst bankrolled pictures. It is easier somehow to reduce her to that narrow role, than to take in a whole person and her complex relationships to others. Hearst was older than she was. He was by far the richer of the two. We believe we understand what this means. “Oh, it’s like that. Of course it is.”
As I rise and break the surface of the water, I think of the trajectory of my own life, of my early childhood in the South of France, of the life I’ve made in Southern California, of how, if I were rich or famous of the object of any curiosity, it might be read in this way or that, to make more sense, or at least to make easier sense. My choices so far have been rather conventional, but even so each one was made for its own particular reasons, generated by circumstances and emotions that take root in the mix between the personal, the cultural, and the societal. My life is not scrutinized, but I loathe that famous women’s choices so often are, and then reduced to categories of convenience.
Plunging underwater again, the sound of my own blood throbbing in my ears, my mind wanders. I think of Alain Delon, who said recently about his love affair with the beloved Franco-German actress Romy Schneider, that while he still grieved her death at only forty-three, it had at least preserved her beauty: “It’s difficult to admit, but I wouldn’t have wanted to see her at 70. It’s better she went this way.” I turned forty-three this year, and while far from possessing Schneider’s beauty, the thought that in any universe it would be “better” to die at forty-three rather than to age—as we all must if we are to live, as Alain Delon himself has—strikes me as obnoxious in the extreme. Can there be a starker example of reducing a multi-faceted person to a mere surface? If Delon loved her, how could he not take in that she was more than just her physical beauty? That Schneider had depth beneath her surface loveliness, that she was more complicated, more flawed and more profound, should not be so very difficult to understand.
5. If I ever figure out how to have a pool of my own, it will be like a David Hockney painting. Sparkling and rippling in the sun, a nude figure emerging from its cool clearness.
When my children are teenagers and have their friends over, I will leave them to their youthful splashing. They will be surprised, and a little annoyed perhaps, at how much skinny-dipping there is when my friends are over, though. They will hardly be able to believe how comfortable we are in our middle-aged bodies. At least that is how I picture it all when I daydream my pool into existence.
I think of growing older with M. How impossible this was to envision when I was a young adult—a lifetime spent by another’s side. How easily I picture it now—now that we have almost two decades together under the bridge.
I think of our children growing up and the pools into which they will dip their own toes. The choices they will make, the paths their lives will take, and the nostalgias they will carry with them. I think of us swimming together in Marion Davies’s old pool. I think of the long summers of their childhood and try to picture where they will choose to make their lives. I imagine the possibility of some far-off day holding grandchildren as I wade with them into welcoming waters somewhere—perhaps even in my own backyard. I am wistful contemplating the adventures my children will undertake, and the unguessed ones still ahead for me, for M., for all of us.
•••
LAURENCE DUMORTIER writes essays and fiction. She is finishing her PhD in English, with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. You can find her online at twitter.com/ElleDeeTweets
The sight of demure violets and shaggy dandelions against the deep green of recently mowed grass has always delighted you. Normally you don’t like the combination of yellow and purple or yellow and green, because you hate team sports and those eye-searing pairings are often team colors, spotted on high school basketball jerseys or the itchy polyester cling of cheerleading uniforms. But in the context of spring, you love it, those three colors coming together for a few short weeks, radiant under the still-shocking intensity of midday sunlight. It calls to mind a suburban idyll, those violets and dandelions asserting themselves against an herbicide-drenched carpet of lawn.
But it is night now and you are looking at your phone, even though you’ve vowed to spend less time looking at your phone, and one of the feeds of text on it alerts you that a cookbook writer you admire just made violet syrup. It excites you, the very sound of it. Violet syrup. You imagine the violet syrup in a dainty pressed-glass jar, illuminated like an isolated shard of sacred stained glass in the path of an afternoon sunbeam, high on the shelf of a shabby-chic hutch. It calls to mind tea parties and Anne of Green Gables, harkening back to an age before phones that offer tiny visual enticements of violet syrup in the first place.
In your house there are all sorts of things to do, things that get pushed aside because of your job, which is to arrange little black symbols in lines against glowing white screen. It is called editing. The things you edit are lists about food, and you correct the mistakes in these lists because you’ve had enough jobs cooking food to spot misinformation quickly. You know what food does, even though your editing job consumes enough of your time that you now resort to serving boxes of bunny-shaped macaroni and cheese for dinner more often than you are comfortable with.
You do this editing from home, because that’s where the screen is, and your daughter often sees you scowling intently at it, and the magnetic power it holds over you infuriates her. You try very hard to limit her own exposure to glowing screens, both large and small, and yet there you are all day, tapping away at buttons as she implores you to draw with her or listen to her rambling preschooler stories. You want to give yourself fully to those stories, but the lingering demands of unresolved symbol-arranging pulls you away. Her job is to go to daycare, where she can play with other kids her age and build up her social skills so you can be at peace with your screen and your keys.
Sometimes you need a break from editing, so you switch to a different screen for a bit and click on little boxes and stars under photos of babies and dogs. You didn’t click on the star under the violet syrup on your phone. Is this worth a star? What does one do with violet syrup?
You try to shove the violet syrup to the back of your brain, but the violets do not give up on you. They appear all over, suddenly, in low-lying mobs: in the green strip of medians, along the path in the woods where you walk the dog. They grow in clusters, making pinpricks of color at the base of stop signs and between the cracks in the sidewalk. They soothe and disrupt you, because they are just another thing that you won’t get to. If you don’t pick the violets and make them into syrup, you’ll forget about how the purple and the green of violets make you feel.
You go with your daughter to a park without your phone so you can be somewhere and not really think about stars and boxes, and she runs off and then returns, bearing a fistful of white violets collected indelicately in her small hands. “For you, Mama,” she says. White violets?Was that one of Elizabeth Taylor’s perfumes?
The white violets do it. After a whole week confronting their quiet menace, you surrender. It’s Friday and you have deadlines. You are alone at home, busy editing inside and it’s glorious outside and you evict yourself from your dining room-cum-office. You close up the screen and grab a mixing bowl and go to your front yard, which, despite its minimal lawn, is infested with violets. You squat down, and you pick.
And you pick. One violet, two violets, three violets. You need a murder of violets build up in the bowl. You think of saffron, collected from the stamens of tiny crocuses, and consider how ill-suited you would be for the life of a saffron harvester, since after five minutes you are ready to quit this violet-picking business. You cannot give up. You do not give up.
The violet syrup recipe on your phone says to gather three handfuls of violets. You succeed, and you take a close-up picture of the bowl of violets with your phone, and you think about sharing this picture so other people—friends, kind-of friends, vaporous friends—can click on a box or star to agree with you about how great your life is, this life of carefree front-yard foraging. But you look at the real violets and then the violets on your phone, and you notice that they look nothing alike. Your phone violets are blue-ish and stiff and cool, and your real violets are a vibrant violet-purple, and the shiny metal bowl is warm from sitting on your lap. You delete the photo.
You retreat inside, to the kitchen, to separate the tender petals from their green bases that hold them together (a part of their anatomy called, adorably, the pip). So many small flowers, so many pips to maneuver around. Hundreds. Steeping the pips with the petals would make the resulting syrup bitter and to skip it would be to negate the already frivolous work you’ve invested so far. This is exactly the sort of thing you’d love to recruit your daughter for, but pulling petals away from pips requires more finesse than her unruly five-year-old fingers can muster. And so you do it by yourself, outsourcing the supervision of your daughter so you can blow off work and pluck itty-bitty flowers apart for making an essentially useless condiment.
It occurs to you that you should probably taste a violet before you go through with this. For all of the wildflower’s loveliness, its fragrance and flavor is that of the most bland lettuce ever, and you don’t imagine exposure to heat doing it any favors, but by now you’ve decided that making violet syrup will fill some hole in your life that needs to be filled. Even if you are just filling it with lettuce-flavored simple syrup.
Building up a critical mass of violet petals feels Sisyphean, absurd, impossible. Many times in your life, you have repeated insignificant tasks. You pumped the handle of the hopper and squirted a blob of Bavarian cream inside the donut. You stripped away the stranger’s slept-on sheets and unfurled a fresh sheet for a new stranger to sleep on. You took the rectangle of plastic from the customer, slid it through the reader, and made small talk as they paid for their pig-shaped corncob holders or glittery pink silicone spatula.
Do you receive our catalog?
Would you like a bag for this?
Enjoy your day!
You took the rectangle of plastic from someone else and slid it through the reader, and then another rectangle from another person, and then another.
A good place to eat around here? What do you like?
That meat grinder’s aluminum, so I don’t recommend putting it in the dishwasher.
Caribbean is my favorite Le Creuset color, too.
Your favorite Le Creuset color is actually Flame. The violets are tedious, still. Twenty minutes in, you have a pint of pip-free petals, not nearly the quart you need for the syrup. Screw it. You instead opt to make violet sugar, which requires only one handful of petals and one cup of granulated sugar.
It’s the big dirty secret of foraging that, with enough refined sugar, all things are possible. Only a few centuries ago, it was an expensive luxury. Crews of African slaves labored around the clock on Caribbean plantations to placate white people’s hunger for the laser-like precision of white sugar sweetness. On those islands that inspired a Le Creuset marketing expert to name a soothing shade of turquoise blue after their waters, there was a constant need for boatloads of new slaves, because they died before they got around to having children. Some fell into the boiling vats of cane juice, and some bled to death after getting their limbs caught in the rollers that pressed the cane, but most were simply worked to the point where they collapsed and never got up again.
Sugar is commonplace now, unavoidable. It infiltrates the snacks your daughter eats at daycare, the Nutri-Grain Bars and Fruit Roll-Ups. Now, the ability to afford eschewing sugar is a sign of membership in the upper class. Your white sugar, though, will not be white. After this, it will be violet.
A few blitzes in the food processor and that’s it. It tastes like regular sugar and looks like wet purple sand. To give it a boost, you add a grating of Meyer lemon zest, but it’s still not punchy enough.
You look at the windowsill over your kitchen sink and spy a vanilla bean pod. Of course you always air-dry the hulls of scraped-out beans after the majority of their flavor has been sucked into custards and compotes. They cost about a hundred dollars a pound and are actually the cured seed pods of a specific orchid, one that’s pollinated by hand a hemisphere away. The producers of these seed pods sometimes use a needle to prick a unique brand on them, just as a cattle rancher would, so the beans can be traced back should a vanilla seed pod rustler come to plunder the crop. Sometimes, before eviscerating them with a paring knife, you examine vanilla beans and you spy the tattoos, looking like leathery runes from another age, and you imagine having to prick thousands of still-green seed pods on orchid vines.
You realize you now have a small stockpile of dried vanilla bean hulls, and you grind them to several tablespoons of fine brown dust in your spice grinder, and you add a fat pinch of this dust to your violet sugar, and it does the trick. They’re kindred spirits, these two esoteric floral essences.
You retrieve your child from daycare, and you both return home to a big bowl of intact violet blossoms, ones that were not massacred into sugar, and you give this bowl to your daughter and send her to the yard and say, “Do you want to play with these?” She sprinkles the violets on the sidewalk and scatters decapitated dandelions and mangled clumps of grass among them, announcing, “I made a store!” and you approve.
The violet sugar is in a jar on the counter. It is subdued in color and soothing to look at, nothing at all like the cartoonish hues of purchased decorating sugar that you sprinkle on cutout cookies, and you just leave it there, even though you have no immediate plans to bake anything. Maybe you will divide it among smaller jars and give it to a few of your friends, the ones who appreciate things like the glancing presence of violets. The violet sugar means you are not entirely a useless and shallow person. You think about it and think about it and then sit and tap on keys and sort those feelings out, and then there it is, Violets, Boxes, and Stars, a few teasing lines on the screen of a phone, and you tap on them, and see this.
•••
SARA BIR is a regular contributor to Full Grown People. She lives in Ohio.
We’d talked about going to the German restaurant in Gibson City for years. Well, my friends had talked about it and I’d played along, neither enthusiastically nor unenthusiastically. When I thought of German food, what came to mind was the German restaurant we went to in high school as part of the German class field trip. I didn’t love it. Sausage and schnitzel don’t rate high on my list, I guess. But then Elise reminded me about strudel. Who doesn’t love a good strudel?
So the six of us—Chris and Christy, Elise and Jeremy, and Steve and I—all drove the forty-five minutes through the cornfields of Illinois one Saturday night to give it a try. I’d been hearing wonderful things about Bayern Stube for more than ten years now, and Steve loves sausage. Oh, does he love sausage. He’d studied the online menu for days and he knew just what he wanted: the huge platter of assorted sausages.
We’re seated at a huge table in the very back room, past the rooms decorated in the dark tones we’d come to associate with German-themed anything. This room is too brightly lit and feels more like a banquet room. It’s decorated—if you can call it that—with both parts of and entire dead animals. A deer head here, an entire turkey splayed out and flattened onto the wall over there. Antlers. Bearskins. “Do you get the sense that Grandpa went a little nuts decorating this room?” Jeremy asks. But only Elise and I can hear him because the table is so big and the chairs so wide and the room so loud that conversation is limited to those sitting closest to us. There’s a party of six at a round table behind us, a party of probably ten at the table next to us, and a party of five or so plus a toddler over there in the corner.
The waitresses are wearing dirndl dresses with the gathered white blouse and it’s hard not to notice how prominent their breasts are. It’s like the German version of Hooters. Our waitress takes our drink orders and disappears for a half hour. A half hour. We beg a waiter for water. It arrives only after our drinks. Steam is coming out of Steve’s ears and I’m beginning to feel the stress of his frustration. I try to make him laugh. We joke that we’d get up and leave except that this is the only restaurant in town.
We study the menu. I’m still not quite sure what a schnitzel is, but the one with apples and gruyere cheese on top sounds good. The Bismarck. We watch our waitress deliver a tray full of drinks to the table of six behind us. We salivate. “I’m feeling a little parched,” I say, smacking my lips together. I tell them all about our plans to go on vacation with the dogs up to Door County in June. We’ll be staying at a dog-friendly inn right on the lake and, as part of the “Hot Dog” package, we’ll get a gift card to a local dog-friendly restaurant whose selling points include a doggy menu. It kills me to imagine Wrigley and Essay sitting at a table with us, looking over the menu, deciding what they’re in the mood for. Yes, we’d like four of everything, please, says Wrigley to the waiter. “They’ll probably be served before we are,” someone says.
At last, our drinks arrive. Steve’s full liter of beer is in a huge glass stein and he drinks it very quickly. Mine is in a smaller glass stein and not nearly as impressive looking. Soon our waters arrive and we order. We’re in it for the long haul, it seems, so we’d better get comfortable. These chairs. They’re huge and hard and the baby over in the corner cries every now and then, a sound that grates on some of our nerves. In order to hear each other, we have to practically shout and still some of us are lost in our own conversations.
I come from a long line of loud people. My mother’s sneezes could wake the dead and her laughter could be heard up the street. In nearly every job that I’ve ever had, my loud laugh has been the subject of attention, both good and bad, but mostly good. When I move my office at school from one in a long hallway of colleagues to a much bigger but more remote one, my colleagues tell me how they miss hearing me laugh.
Our food arrives to much fanfare. We’re hungry. We need another round of drinks. One of the tables behind us clears out, making the toddler’s cries more prominent. Midway through our meal, a woman from the toddler table comes over to our table, and I wish I could describe better what happened but I couldn’t look at her and only Jeremy and Elise and Christy and I heard her ask me to please stop laughing because every time I laugh it scares the toddler and she starts crying. I can’t look at her. Jeremy doesn’t look at her. I probably set my lips tight together and nod. Later I learn that Christy gives her the stink eye. I don’t know what we say to her, if anything, to get her to leave, but she’s apologizing as she’s asking me to stop being so loud. Steve doesn’t hear her and we have to report to him and Chris what just happened. I’m mortified. I try to summon anger as my friends respond with outrage as they process what just happened.
“Why isn’t that baby home in bed?”
“It’s clear who runs the show in that household. Baby gets what Baby wants.”
“A kid who’s afraid of laughter. Christ.”
“You are not too loud. I love your laugh.”
“Who does that?”
Steve, realizing what’s happened, says in their general direction, “We’re too loud?”
I want the subject to change. I’m mortified and all I can think about is how I couldn’t even look at her when she was talking directly to me. But my friends continue defending me and I almost can’t bear it. Because I can see the woman’s point. Almost too easily, I slip from my own perspective into hers and I imagine that if I were at a restaurant with my toddler and there was a woman at a nearby table whose laugh was particularly loud, I, too, might ask her if she could perhaps be a bit quieter. Maybe I would have done it differently, more kindly perhaps, but I couldn’t inhabit my own position, feel my own anger and self-righteousness for more than a minute or two before shifting to empathy for her position.
We’re a culture concerned with empathy these days, the popular sentiment being that we don’t have enough of it. But having too much of it and accessing it too quickly can be as destructive as not having any.
Christy asks me what I would have said if I’d been able.
“Probably something along the lines of ‘Fuck you.’”
“You should’ve,” she says.
Our table goes quiet for a little bit as we all absorb what’s happened. I remind my friends of the time that another friend of ours, sitting next to me at patio table on a summer day, got up and moved to another chair after dramatically covering his ear with his hand in response to my laugh.
“Well,” says Jeremy. “This puts a damper on the evening.”
Steve is upset that he didn’t realize what was happening when it was happening because he would’ve defended me better, he says.
I often tell my rhetoric students that once I’m done with them, they’ll never be able to see the world the same way. I tell them that I’m out to ruin their lives. Experiences they’d never thought twice about would become fodder for analysis, and they’d recognize dominant ideology everywhere they turned. As my friends rushed to my defense, I wanted the subject to change because I kept thinking that if they’d been sitting at the table with the toddler, they’d be rushing to the mother’s defense just as vehemently. And they would’ve been very good at it. Their defense of me, I couldn’t help but think, was so obviously biased.
And then, a few days later, telling the story to another friend, I found myself saying that it’s not as though I would’ve wanted the opposite situation: to be called out like that and to have my friends agree with the woman. Yeah, Amy, you’re way too loud. We’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. Could you please just stop laughing?
That would’ve been a nightmare.
A few more days later and now I think I get it. It’s never just about what we think it’s about.
When I was a kid, my older sister abused me. She hit me and insulted me and told my friends how stupid and fat I was. She told me to shut up when I sneezed. Margie’s bedroom was next to mine, and the house was configured so that to get to her room, she had to go through mine—just a few steps, but enough to make me feel like I could never really shut the door or shut her out. My door was always open.
Bedtime. Margie walks through to her room. “You little shit. You’re dead.”
Middle of the night. Margie walks back through to the one bathroom in the house. “Little fucker. Fat shit.”
Back to her room. “Skank.”
Morning. “You’re dead, you little shit.”
And so it went, with our mother doing nothing to stop it. I always had the sense that Ma didn’t believe me when I told her about Margie hitting me, giving me bloody noses. But now I think that she couldn’t bear to see it and so she just didn’t. She looked away. She told me to stay away from her. She made it about me, what I was doing or not doing.
When my friends sought every possible way to defend me, to protect me from the shame they knew I’d probably eventually be feeling, they were doing what my mother never did, and I didn’t know how to accept it. I just wanted to change the subject.
I never got my strudel. They had cherry or apple/raisin. Steve and I were going to share dessert, but he doesn’t like cherry and I didn’t want raisins in my apple strudel. Instead we passed around a piece of black forest cake and when the family with the toddler left, Steve said to them, in his most sarcastic voice, “Have a nice night.”
•••
AMY E. ROBILLARD is an associate professor of writing and rhetoric at Illinois State University, where her favorite course to teach—the one on the personal essay—garners the most enthusiastic responses from students. She and her husband are the guardians of two very special mutts, one named Wrigley and one named Essay. Her work has also appeared on The Rumpus.
JOB OFFER: ACADEMIC PROGRAM IN PARIS has immediate opening for housing coordinator. Bilingual/bicultural skills, experience with Word, Excel & Filemaker. Prefer candidate with middle-aged (or defunct) uterus.
The ad didn’t read that way. But it might as well have.
Jobs for English speakers in Paris abound—if you want to teach business English or wash dishes. The salaries for both are the same, as are the possibilities for advancement. I came to France thanks to a year-long teaching position. Graduate school in my native Montana hadn’t worked out as I’d hoped. We teaching assistants huddled in our offices, hoping to avoid French professors who battled in the halls, and I’d started to hate French. In coming to Paris, I’d hoped to salvage my love of the language, but instead found a different kind of love. I met my husband and decided to stay. For several years, I went from job to job, private lesson to private lesson, metro line one to metro line eight to metro line fourteen, spending more time in tunnels—sometimes an hour between jobs—than I did above ground, and started to dream of having a job with only one daily commute instead of six. I loved my students. But for a tenured position in the French school system, you must be European. So when my contract wasn’t renewed, I decided to write a novel.
I think of myself as on sabbatical. True, this period of enrichment and growth was to have lasted just a year. It is now going on three. “Unemployed” would be the precise term for my condition, but I prefer to be vague.
I apply for jobs. Just this week there was the job at a Jewish NGO, a housing coordinator position, and an editorship for a leukemia magazine. I look at the want ads dutifully and write cover letters so that I can tell myself that although the competition is fierce, I am trying. I send resumes out in the same way children send letters to Santa Claus. Of course, the children eventually wise up. I never seem to.
La directrice of the academic program calls to arrange an interview for the housing coordinator position. I put on my blue suit (only worn three times) and grab my briefcase, bought last year in hopes of making me look professional. My life is so empty that the briefcase is still stuffed with the wadded tissue paper from the store. When I arrive at the office, la directrice smiles and asks if I’d like a cup of tea—she’s just brewed a pot. As we chat, I take in her friendly manner, long, cherry Kool-Aid-colored hair, and pea-green boots and think that she is not your typical director. She asks me to sit down. The office furniture is black. There are no plants. Although we’re both American, she conducts the whole interview in French. It’s strange. She says the salary isn’t great, but employees have three months of paid vacation. They’ll pay for my cell phone. If I want to work only four days a week, that’s fine. The perfect job.
The interview goes well, although near the end, she asks how old I am then notes that I’ve “not passed the child-bearing years.” I stare at her for a moment before answering—she pretends not to notice. As la directrice walks me to the door, she says she feels we’ve clicked. She looks giddy and tells me that there’s another candidate who is forty-nine, which is good on the one hand because she’s already raised her children. On the other, she is not as dynamic as me. La directrice wants me. We’ve clicked, she says again, and invites me back for an interview with la directrice executive on Monday. As I leave, I glance at my watch. The interview lasted nearly two hours. I didn’t see the time pass. For the first time in years, I let myself feel hopeful about a job.
Paris, the city of languorous lunches and long walks along the Seine, has not pounded the need to be prompt out of me. I’d rather be an hour early than five minutes late. So I arrive ten minutes before the 9:00 am interview. I know the building code and hit the numbers on the brass pad. Not wanting to be too early, I wait five minutes in the closet-sized vestibule, then ring the interphone. Once. Twice. Three times. No response. Sigh. It was all too good to be true; they’ve forgotten about me. I consider leaving, then consider my bank account. I stay.
I’ve never gone to an interview in which the interviewer was late. It makes me feel uneasy. I wait five minutes, then five more, then five more. When la directice executive arrives at 9:10, she scowls at me like I am an idiot for being on time. Impeccably groomed and the size of a Kewpie doll, she wears a Hermès scarf. Loosely translated, this word means, “I have four hundred dollars to waste and desperately need people to know that.” She unlocks the door; I follow her up the narrow staircase.
In French, she lectures me on the importance of a gracious welcome. The students—from Harvard, Yale, Stanford—pay almost $30,000 per year, so there’s a lot at stake. Ladirectrice executive mentions the other candidate, “She’s forty-nine. She’s raised her children.”
“How old are you?” she asks.
“Thirty-five.”
“Are you married?”
“Yes.”
“When do you plan on having children?”
Huh?
When I don’t answer, la directrice executive points out that I am “still in the child-bearing years.”
I say my husband and I haven’t discussed it; she looks at me suspiciously.
“But you’re thirty-five,” she informs me, as if I’ve forgotten. “The whole reason people marry is to have children.”
The last person to say this to me was a priest. The day before Edouard and I got married, Father William said he’d refuse to marry us if we didn’t sign the form stating we’d raise our theoretical kids as Catholics.
“Can you promise that you won’t have children?” la directrice executive asks. “Just for the first year.”
I am dumbstruck. The silence makes her nervous. She fiddles with her scarf.
“Not that I’m forbidding you to have any,” she assures me. “I’m a mother. A working mother. I would never deprive any woman of that pleasure. It’s just that now is a bad time for us.” She squints in the direction of my stomach, then she yells, “Tell me when you’re planning on it. When? When?”
It’s so hot in the office that I can’t breathe. La directrice joins us. “Everything all right?” Dazed, I nod. They smile brightly and I know the interview is over. I tell them that the other candidate seems better suited to the job, then thank them and leave as fast as I can.
When I talk about the interview with Parisian friends, they’re surprised I haven’t been asked about having kids—with France’s generous maternity leave, companies have much at stake.
“The next time it happens, pretend to tear up,” one advises. “Tell the interviewer, ‘You’ve brought up a painful topic because I’m sterile.’”
In Courrier Cadre magazine article “Discrimination: Solutions that Work,” Cecile Pincet writes: “Between the ages of 28 and 35, women are often asked ‘Are you planning to have a baby?’ in job interviews. You must respond no. Sometimes, you have to know when to lie.” In the jobs edition of the magazine Femme Actuelle, Amelie Cordonnier and Marion Kressmann note that asking about pregnancy is illegal. “He oversteps his rights, but to remind him of this would be risky. You can respond in all honesty with a minimum of information: ‘Yes, but not in the immediate future.’ You can also turn it around: ‘Is that a problem for you?’ It’s a good way to not fall into a trap and to keep the upper hand.”
La directrice calls to offer me the job. Finally, someone wants me. I sent out dozens of letters and someone responded. We clicked. I thought that I would be happy. She says that her boss loved me and asks how I feel about the interview. I don’t mention la directrice executive’s thoughts on why people marry, or the fact that she asked me not to have kids. Instead, I complain that she was late, and that when she read my hyphenated last name aloud, she said, “Do we have to say it all?” La directrice admits that la directice executive can be… difficult. She, too, has had ups and downs with her boss. Plus, they are both a bit tense after learning their academic coordinator is pregnant. I tell her I felt manipulated when they kept bringing up the candidate past her child-bearing years. In other words, I ruin everything. I’d kept my mouth shut during two interviews, why couldn’t I have kept it shut during one phone call?
La directrice calls to rescind the job offer. She feels that I am volatile and judgmental. Maybe I am volatile and judgmental. I contemplate what bothered me, beyond the invasive questions, beyond the fact that la directrice executive looked at me like I was a liar when I said I wasn’t thinking about having children.
The reason I sabotaged myself is difficult to voice: la directrice executive asked questions I don’t even ask myself. Questions even my mother and mother-in-law don’t ask, though they’re probably dying to. Questions I avoid. Even my husband avoids them. Two years ago, when I asked if he wanted children, he replied it was up to me. And that was the end of the conversation. La directrice executive demanded answers I couldn’t give. When am I going to have a child? When? I don’t know. I keep waiting to feel the desire, some little spark, but it’s been thirty-five years and I still don’t feel it. I don’t think I’ll ever feel it. This is hard to face. So hard to face, I chose to avoid it, until the job interview. Now it’s all I can think about.
I remember an image from the eighties, a woman with foofy hair and too much make-up screeching, “My biological clock is ticking.” I never felt a single tick. If I have a clock, someone forgot to wind it. Until the interview. Now I feel a strange, hard ticking, like a bomb set to go off, making me more and more nervous. “When? When? Just tell me when!”
Growing up, I expected to have kids just like everyone else. I love my husband and know that he would be an amazing father. Why don’t I feel a desire to bring life into this world? Why can’t I at least talk about it? All around me, it feels like people are moving on, moving forward. Friends and family are having babies, having miscarriages, getting fed up with IVF treatments, getting divorced, getting remarried, buying houses, going to recitals, finding better jobs, earning more money, making new friends, having affairs, selling houses, going on diets, reading good books, having deep conversations, making important and not important decisions while I sit frozen.
Two weeks later, I pick up the bilingual job ads and pore over each page like a child making a wish list—project manager for the Invest in France Agency, editor at Datasia, account manager at Azego. I even look at the hotel and restaurant section—Wili’s Wine Bar needs someone, as does the Indiana Cafe.
After my strange job interview, I don’t mind being unemployed. At least in my living room, no one asks personal questions. It’s a relief not to be in that stuffy office with edgy women. (I imagine la directrice executive greeting me in the morning with a birth-control pill and a glass of water.) It’s a relief to go back to not thinking about having kids. Glancing down the page, I spot the program coordinator position at an MBA school. I applied for that job five months ago. Third time this year it’s appeared. Apparently the person they chose didn’t work out. Again. I turn on my computer, click on the cover letter, spruce it up and change the date, then send it to the North Pole.
•••
JANET SKESLIEN CHARLES is the author of Moonlight in Odessa (Bloomsbury), which was translated into twelve languages and reflects her time as a Soros Fellow in Odessa, Ukraine. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in Slice and Pharos. Originally from Montana, she traveled to France in 1998. She interviews writers at jskesliencharles.com and is on Twitter as @moonlightodessa.
A friend who I hadn’t seen in about a decade visited last weekend. Pat has been a Change Artist in her professional life, taking on and then shedding many careers, and now in her current job she gives workshops on Change Management, a subject she has mastered and I have flunked.
This week when I learned that two walnut trees, fixtures in my back yard, must be cut down because they’re touching wires, I almost cried. Over breakfast, she quoted Toffler from Future Shock: “The illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read or write. The illiterate of the 21st Century will be those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” I nodded along—this assessment sounded like good advice for more than just professional development. But part of me resisted—I’m recalcitrant, someone who instinctually resists guidance and the newest packaged wisdom about what’s good for me. What did it mean to learn, unlearn, and relearn? I seem to be the sort of person who needs to learn again what I already know, not something new as in for the first time, as much as learning something again. Does that qualify as relearning?
I imagine you shaking your head as my friend Pat did and saying, that’s a sad thing. And you might be right, but our discussion made me think about a recent experience in which I needed to learn what I thought I knew.
•••
I had thought at this stage in my life when I’ve made such progress overcoming my unruly impulses that I would never have this experience again. At the very least, I’d make new mistakes, live through fresh disasters, but I wouldn’t repeat the old disasters like a pack donkey who takes one trail and one trail only even though it’s rocky as hell. The disaster I am referring to is none other than a train wreck of a haircut.
Early in life, they were engineered by my mother, and then later, they were self-inflicted and these are the worst kind—don’t you think?—the kind you can’t blame on anyone else but yourself. You can’t point the finger at your mother; you can only point the finger at yourself and wonder what came over you, what secret currents were fermenting in your little brain that erupted when you took your seat in some hairdresser’s chair and instructed them to do something radical to your hair. Perhaps you would dismiss changes in hair as style and not substance, but I would disagree. Hair matters; when a woman wants a change in her life, she often starts with her hair.
And so it was that I found myself in Sunshine’s chair in front of the big mirror that doesn’t reflect back to you who you’d like to be, but who you are. And yes, the woman who cuts my hair is named Sunshine. It isn’t her birth name. She gave herself that name when she came of age and was charting a very different course for her life than the one she had barely survived. She’s been cutting my hair for fifteen years. We’ve been adventurous, we’ve tried out some cuts and colors that weren’t as becoming as we had hoped; sometimes I’ve left feeling a tad deflated but mostly I’ve been struck that Sunshine saw just what I had been wanting to go forward. Until this last time, I’ve never gotten into my car and slumped over the steering wheel wondering if I could go on, wondering whether I had the will to turn the ignition on and ease my car back into the flow of traffic.
How was I going to return to work and face my coworkers and students who are gifted panelists on the runway of life’s mistakes? How, later in the evening, if I survived the afternoon, would I face my neighbors? I saw my day, post haircut, stretched out before me in one long extravaganza of shame.
Until that noon in Sunshine’s chair, I had medium length hair—a long, loose updated shag that tended towards the messy and wild. As a dedicated swimmer, I tend not to comb my hair after my swim and instead tousle it on the run. I don’t want to be one of those women who swim for thirty minutes and then spend sixty minutes fixing their hair and make-up before they emerge from the locker room. As Raymond Carver advised—get in and get out fast. Like him, I don’t like to linger or fuss. In the days running up to my appointment, my hair felt increasingly heavy. By the time the day arrived, the feeling of gravity was killing me.
When I plopped into the barbershop chair, its cracked leather cushion sighed. I found myself grabbing bunches of my hair and saying to Sunshine in a slightly accusatory manner, Look at this unruly mess! And indeed, when I pulled my hair this way and that, scrunching it up and away from my scalp, I did make a wild spectacle of myself. It is one thing to look stylishly disheveled and another to look like a banshee. I was trending towards the banshee. I had entered Studio 107 planning to ask for my usual, a trim. I wasn’t thinking, let’s do a radical, mind-blowing cut. I was going to make a modest proposal. What was unleashed when I settled into the chair? Little did I realize something larger was motivating my agitation and that I was pursuing my own winding path.
Here’s the thing about the relationship between hairdresser and hair possessor: the power between them is unequal. And the chair, even if you are sitting in it, belongs to the hairdresser. It is hers; she just allows you to sit in it temporarily. I know all this and usually I proceed with caution, if not trepidation. Yesterday, if I had paused and collected myself, I would have realized that my comments coupled with my gestures gave Sunshine a clear opening to interpret what she thought were my real desires. And that’s what she did. She believed my antics were saying I don’t just want my usual trim; I want you to hack the hair from my head like a mother fucker. And Sunshine, being the bold person that she is, did just that. It was quick and dirty and I hardly knew what happened. Did I mention that most of Sunshine’s skin, except for her face, is covered with a tattoo of many colors? Her hair is never the same color or style from appointment to appointment. It doesn’t resemble hair you see on the street or in the work place. It is elaborately constructed of a design that can’t be repeated. Therefore, I do not look to Sunshine for a restrained approach to hair.
Still the question remains—why didn’t I stop her? Having unleashed the fury in her, why didn’t I reach up and grab her arm, the one with the sensational scissors, or open my mouth and say, Wait! Why did I sit passively and mutely in the chair, chunks of my hair drifting down over my face and arms and floating onto the parquet floor? Did I want Sunshine to think I still had risky behavior running in my veins? Did I secretly want Sunshine to do what I lacked the nerve to do myself? Sometimes we forget and must be reminded of this fact: hairdressers are powerful. They are among the most powerful women in the world and other women live in fear of them and place their happiness in their hands. Yesterday I cared more about what Sunshine thought of me than I cared about my hair. A challenge had been laid down, and I’d better see it through.
When the hacking was over, we both looked in the mirror at my head. It was something to behold. Even Sunshine seemed taken aback by her handiwork. My hair, what there was of it, was now remarkably close to my very angular head, and it seemed at cross purposes, some sections twisting up, some twisting down. It made a statement that I was a woman who wasn’t afraid to have my face come before others directly with little formulation, like a short poem without any adornment. At the time I didn’t know whether I wanted to make that statement or not. It seemed not. Weakly she pronounced it a success: “I like it,” she said. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
Back in the car, after I managed to lift my head off the steering wheel, I thought about wigs. I wanted one. But then it didn’t seem like me to cover up my mistakes. Following up a mistake with another mistake was not a good practice. Better to live with the results—isn’t that what I had learned from past mistakes?
I got through the afternoon’s work related events without comment and that was a bad sign. I obviously had something radical done to my hair and if it had turned out well, people would have mentioned it, wouldn’t they? I had two meetings with female graduate students and I did not attend to what they were saying because I was so preoccupied by their not saying anything about my hair. I was sure they were thinking, who does she think she is? Jean Seberg in Breathless or Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby? Though both these students were too young to know that Jean Seberg in Breathless was iconic of a certain kind of female waif popular during my era—the role Michelle Williams is now playing. When I was in high school I wore my hair as short as Mia Farrow. These were the days of a female counter-revolution in style when Twiggy and Mia and Jean were all the rage and symbolized a breezy and sexy independence with their boy cuts. Like them, back then, I was a stem of a girl with long legs and long neck, and the short hair worked. Now it would appear that I needed reminding Jean Seberg is dead and we study Breathless in film classes. Even Mia Farrow and Twiggy are no longer waif-like and neither keep their hair short, and if they did, we’d think they were foolishly reclaiming their long gone youth. We’d only be reminded of what they once were and aren’t now. But here I am with my cropped hair.
I slunk out of the Wanderer’s Tea House where I had met my students and felt myself lucky that I didn’t run into anyone I knew on my way to the car. But that evening on an unusually warm spring-like day, I knew that my neighbors would emerge from their winter lairs with their dogs and flock to the street. After dinner on the walk with the dogs, it was as I had feared—many neighbors were out and about. On the curve before our house, we ran into John Beck and the first words out of his mouth were, “I like what you’ve done to your hair.”
I almost blurted out—“You mean my removal of it?” Trying but failing to make light of my chagrin, I told him the sad saga of how I had made a mistake.
“Nonsense,” he said, “It makes you look perky.” Which he considered a good thing, something uttered to cheer me up. Unfortunately I could only think of the bitter irony that now after my mother had died and could no longer see me, I had finally realized her ideal vision of me. She had always wished for me to be bouncy and perky like a ball that you can throw against the wall and it comes back to you.
Before I could move on, another neighbor, Lyle, came by with his dog and again immediately launched into comments about my hair, as if there was no other subject. He really liked the change or alternatively he had quickly ascertained that I was feeling low about it and decided it was his job to buoy up my spirits.
Either way, it was interesting that two unaccompanied men sailed forth into the breach of my hair disaster with spirit and bravado. My own husband joined their ranks to form a trio of positive appraisal. I didn’t trust them one little bit. I thought the earlier female silence was much more likely to be an honest assessment. Still it gave me pause—they seemed unlikely cheerleaders. Or perhaps their cheerfulness reflects the relative lack of importance they place in hair. After all, my husband spends not one iota of his time thinking about his hair. And John Beck doesn’t have any. Only women can be counted on to understand the complications of hair, I thought.
A few days have passed since what I call the epic cut, and I’m coming to realize that the trio of men may have seen something I couldn’t. Maybe my new hair suits me or suits something I wanted but was struggling to articulate. Maybe this is what I wanted and it’s taken a few days to catch up with my hair as has so often been the case in the past. I’ve found to my surprise that I don’t shriek when I catch sight of myself in the mirror. I’m getting to like my new old self—she seems less armored, less covered, and reminds me that being alive is not a well-behaved kind of affair. When I run my fingers along the back of my neck I’m not entirely surprised to find that my hair is growing back just as Sunshine said it would.
•••
MARCIA ALDRICH is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton and part of the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers Series. Companion to an Untold Story won the AWP Award in Creative nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in The Best American Essays. She has just completed a collection of essays, The Art of Being Born. Her website is marciaaldrich.com.
The crocodile slipped out of the underbrush that strangled the opposite shore and eased into the water. He shoved off with webbed paws incongruously small for steering a barge loaded with muscle and teeth, like tricycle tires on a hearse. He moved slowly, as if he had all the time in the world to wreak havoc upon humanity. No hurry, must scrutinize the menu before making his selection.
The freshwater lagoon teemed with local families diving headfirst into crystalline water. They hurtled themselves into the boulder-encrusted pond from a frayed rope swinging from a rickety tree. Standing on a small dock downstream, I’d hesitated to join the splashing crowd. With the croc’s grand entrance through the curtain of mangroves, the terrified mob scrambled from the water. We didn’t speak their language, and the Mexicans didn’t speak ours, but we got the message: get the hell out of the water, pronto! In a country where the national motto seemed to be, I’m reconciled to death, the translation rang loud and clear: Not like this.
“Felipe,” scolded the poolside café’s bartender, shaking his head at the cold-blooded critter who had crashed the party.
Although Felipe apparently pub-crawled here often enough to earn himself a pet name, the bartender had kept mum while the croc remained out of sight. The café had the market for refreshment cornered, perched at the edge of a shady headwater deep in the Mexican jungle. Bad for business, this errant croc who bellied up to his bar with growing frequency, so the bartender wasn’t going to give away the marauder in the back booth as long as the Uzi stayed under the table.
If ever God needed to knock back a stiff one, Tovara Spring is where He’d rap his knuckles for a double shot of Cuervo. Here we could chug an ice cold bottle of Tecate with a lime wedge, then leap into aquamarine water to cool off in the muggy heat. Which my husband, friends, and I were about to do when Felipe took his cue and cruised into the spotlight. Despite his lack of Shakespeare monologues or juggling tricks, he had the audience eating out of the palm of his hand. There was nothing to stop him if he decided to eat our hands. If Felipe chomped one of us in mid-swig, he’d get the lime, beer, and salty sweat all in one gulp.
We had nowhere to run if Felipe left the water, since the only way in or out of this place was by boat. He idled in neutral about ten feet from where we jammed together on the dock at the lagoon’s base. At the pond’s head, about a hundred feet upstream, a cliff towered. The dock jutted from a narrow strip of paved shoreline along one side, mostly hogged by the café. A handy set of stairs descended into the water so that Felipe could easily emerge from his bath to sip his piña colada with cartilage garnish. On the opposite shore: a solid mass of impenetrable brambles, probably littered with the remains of other tourists.
Too close for comfort, we backed up on the dock. Our friend Mark and our guide Nicho argued about Felipe’s vital statistics. Eight feet long, snout to tail, Mark estimated. Twelve feet, Nicho countered. We agreed on ten, but of a massive girth, solid as skyscraper girders—well-fed. Nicho’s quick calculation: 450 pounds. We settled on 500. Fifty years old, everyone agreed, judging by Felipe’s size—a crafty survivor who knew a thing or two about the food chain.
The bartender wrung his apron, likely hoping Felipe would realize that he’d forgotten his SPF 30 and return to the shade. But Felipe didn’t move an inch of his cement-hard muscle (not bad for a middle-aged bald guy, he’d obviously been disciplined about his Pilates). His scales looked as dense as the concrete pier we stood on. Unimpressed with his admirers, he sunbathed like an aloof Hollywood starlet. An imperceptible current rotated him gently in the limpid water. Squat legs, thick and short as old-growth tree stumps, were motionless. Those feet were made for bitch-slapping as sure as any evolutionary tool, but Felipe didn’t look like he’d bother breaking a fingernail.
Sizable fish tra la la’d under him, and turtles cruised past his snout. If the mood struck, the jaws that made up a remarkable portion of his overall length would widen and then snap shut, with the strongest bite of any animal on earth, and he’d ingest a crunchy tortuga like a taco. Just a snack, more out of boredom than hunger—a television commercial break to interrupt a documentary yawner in which the seasoned killer does absolutely nada. I suspect he hummed an Alice Cooper tune under his breath.
The lagoon beckoned, now peaceful and empty. Truly paradise—except for the crocodile—this idyllic spot that we’d toiled to get to.
I turned around to the downstream side of the dock, my back to Felipe. I stuck my big toe into the water. Here in this pond, disaster wasn’t lurking around a corner, ready to catch me unawares, but stretched out in the water, big as a pontoon bridge.
We had journeyed half a day from Puerto Vallarta to get to this mouth of water, appearing by magic at the base of a verdant cliff. The still and cool freshwater turned to murky saltwater farther downriver—if you could call the maze of channels hacked through the swamp a river—before meandering to the Pacific Ocean. We had hoped to sight crocs as we journeyed up the swamp from where it emptied into the sea, but we never intended to swim with one. Our guide had assured us that crocodiles never crossed from salt to fresh water. So when we putt-putted from brine into the sudden miracle of clear water at the head of San Cristobal Estuary, we stripped down to our bathing suits, eager to take a refreshing dunk in the carnivore-free pond.
A hundred miles from any cash machine or English-speaking waiter, we were the only white folks there—three middle-aged, married couples, all pushing the upper limits of height-weight proportionate and more interested in testing tequila brands than in testing our mettle. We had traveled all morning on rough roads pockmarked every blink by a white roadside cross commemorating a gory death. Buses passed compact cars on blind mountain curves, and the left hand blinker on the car ahead could signify a polite “okay to pass, the road’s clear,” or, “I’m turning left, so don’t pass.” Take your pick, brake or gun it, ’sup to you. You’d find out in a minute what the driver ahead was trying to tell you.
We navigated the tricky Mexican highway system of turning left from the right hand lane. We followed instructions like, “Park at the El Conchal landing. Get out of the car and wait. Eventually someone will come get you.” Fortunately this turned out to mean boat guides, not drug runners or kidnappers.
We spent two more hours puttering up the estuary in a flat panga with no life preservers. Our rented skiff squeezed through the tunnels of trees; in places we ducked to avoid low-hanging limbs that would knock us into brackish tributaries. Covered in bugspray and sunscreen in high humidity, we hunted crocodiles with our digicams and binocs, but they remained elusive. We spotted tortugas, owls, and herons, and the disintegrating remains of a Hollywood movie set, all well and good, but not what we came to see. An hour after we forked over 200 pesos (twenty dollars) apiece and journeyed up the dank estuary without seeing any reptiles, our guide Nicho admitted that it was the wrong season. At this time of year, late in the spring, the parent crocs hid with their newborns deep in the tangled mass of shrubbery and roots. We glimpsed one or two juvenile crocs, a foot or so long, errant adolescents out on the prowl, revving their engines. At sight of us, they startled like teens caught smoking and thrashed away through the undergrowth with an unexpected swiftness from clumsy-looking bodies. So by the time Felipe took the watery stage, I understood his capacity for speed. Looks were deceiving. He was a Sherman tank with a Maserati motor. His fire hydrant legs could move like redlining pistons.
Calm as driftwood, Felipe was an impressive beast, especially given the lack of barbed wire fences, nets, guns, and Peligrosa! signs. A depressing ecological reason must account for Felipe’s emigrating to a new ’hood, where he was as welcome as an oil tanker in the Galapagos, but at the moment, who cared about global environmental crises?
I’d risen before dawn while on vacation and traveled all morning for a dip in this swimming hole. I was an inch shorter than when we’d set off that morning, my spine compacted by our tin van’s thunking through never-ending potholes. I’d worn my swimming suit under my clothes to save myself the hassle of changing. No teeny-bikini, this total coverage bathing costume. I suffered the swamp in a girdle of cling wrap. Felipé would need some serious dental floss to pick this hellacious spandex stuff out of his incisors. The turquoise water glinted. I moved to the empty head of the pond. Felipe did the dead man’s float, the distance between us about the length of a few stretch limos in a funeral procession. I sat on a boulder and dangled my legs into the water. Nirvana, if I ignored the fact that I was flashing my knees at a butcher with a fondness for knuckle sandwiches.
The crocodile has remained unchanged for 200 million years. I’d remained unchanged for forty. Time to shake things up.
I’d spent four decades in my well-defined female role: shopper, navigator, time watcher, reservation- and list-maker. I was a clucking hen, not a wildlife tamer. I blundered into rare exploits by mistake, ignorance, or indifference. I tagged along on other people’s adventures so that I could carry the First Aid kit. Like today. I’d almost stayed back at the hotel with my book, in close reach of the fridge and bottle opener, but I went along to ensure that everyone wore their seatbelts and sunblock. I wasn’t out to wrestle a tooth-crammed predator that would outlive a nuclear holocaust (I hadn’t read any such crocodile prognoses anywhere, but, looking at him, I was certain that cockroach genetics had nothing on his). This sucker’s DNA was all about survival. Obviously unlike mine, since I, sporting cellulite instead of armor, was flaunting my gams at a pilgrim with a penchant for drumsticks.
My idea of daring was eating just-expired yogurt. I’d faced my brand of peril earlier in the shallow end of the hotel swimming pool; I slipped off a child’s inner tube, a too-small frame for my large culo, and cracked my head on the underwater stairs. Did I want to meet my maker in such an inglorious manner, floating ass up in one foot of heated water? Or did I want to go down as the woman who swam with crocodiles, the inspiration for Waltzes with Felipe, an overbudget Costner epic? Just me and Baryshnicroc starring in a memorable pas de deux.
Always too fearful and uncoordinated, I’d never done a cartwheel, never climbed a tree, never did the splits, except once when I slipped on my brother’s Hot Wheels. The primary definition of my life so far was what I had not done: bear children despite repeated attempts. Always an over planner, stocking up on maps and emergency supplies, things had not gone as planned. After seven miscarriages in ten years, I was aimless, drifting like Felipe in the trickling current, uncertain about my next step. My husband and I could not agree about embracing childlessness, further medical intervention, or adoption, so we often ended up discussing divorce. Adopting a child felt as scary as swimming with a crocodile, a leap of faith if ever there was one. My husband was ready to take the plunge, but my reluctance persisted. I wanted to feel whole and complete first, without a child, before I moved forward on adoption—not as if I was missing a puzzle piece, a woman without substance or value until she replicated herself. What I had become was paralyzed. Faced with twelve brands of pickles in the grocery store, I left empty-handed. My future was not nearly as clear as Felipe’s shadow, stretching dark and ominous below him on the pond bottom.
But this decision was miraculously easy. I was sweaty. I was grumpy. I was sore and tired. I was an idiot American with a charge card. I endured hardship for a dunk in this water and damn it—after being denied time and time again the thing that I most wanted—a dunk is what I’d get. I didn’t want to leave this pond adding one more thing I had not done to the already lengthy list. If it was my time, then I couldn’t imagine a better place to go. My demise would be quick. I’d be beheaded like a Cabbage Patch doll snatched by the school bully. (A friend assured me later that in reality the croc would drag me to the rocky depths and toy with me until I drowned in slow agony.) Regardless, we were so far from any hospital that I couldn’t be saved to live out my days with no arms and legs, just a head and torso sipping meals through a straw. No fuss or muss for my family, no choosing cremation or burial, no debating my final resting place, just a wake with margaritas and alligator boots all ’round.
Here, I wasn’t afraid of the unknown, an ambush against my body by my own body that surprised me every time. This was my one and only chance to swim with a crocodile. In the States, a SWAT team headed by Bruce Willis would close the place down before you could say New York Sewer. If I lived through doggie-paddling with a homicidal lizard, I would have this knowledge to carry me through the rest of my life: for once, I didn’t overthink. I finally did something really, really stupid. At long last, I took a risk.
Mostly, though, it was hot, and the water was fine.
So, with a smidgen of a second thought, I eased my body into the water a decapitated head’s throw away from a ferocious reptile. I tooled around my end of the killer-infested pond (I assure you that one large crocodile equates to infested), about as far from Felipe as a baseball catcher from a dirty player on third. I enjoyed myself but tried not to splash and attract Felipe’s attention. This wasn’t about committing suicide. I was simply tired of being afraid. Of course, I was also hyper-aware that I frolicked with a wide-jawed trespasser who could make toothpicks of pelvic bones.
I floated, as near to a prehistoric killing machine as I’d once gotten to Roger Daltrey backstage before my nerves failed me. The water so clear, I saw the tips of my toes five feet below me, and farther. So clear, I would see an underwater torpedo, dark shadow of death, streak through the depths a millisecond before I become dinner. Me, a frothing bubble bath of crimson, red tendrils snaking to the surface as the predator worried me into extinction. The huddled mass of frightened bathers onshore would witness Chef Croc shredding my sinews and tendons like fajita fixin’s. My eyeball might float to the surface before the croc snagged it for dessert, a tasty macaroon. Or my ear a vanilla wafer, my diamond stud twinkling in his teeth like a rap star’s.
Felipe did… absolutely nothing. We each remained at our end of the pond, avoiding eye contact like brooding tennis opponents mid-match. The locals on shore looked from Felipe to me and back again.
Felipe appeared oblivious, off in a daydream, yet I sensed his awareness of every dragonfly that flitted past his snout. When he chose to strike, it would be with the speed of a Daytona finish line. He was the size and shape of a drag racer, poised at the start, wheels spinning, ready to peel out and burn rubber. But he didn’t. He hung out, considering the shapes of clouds.
My husband, the daredevil who’d never left his teens and kept emergency rooms in business, watched me from shore, arms crossed over his shirt. Damp stains spread under his arms and sweat dripped down his forehead. Without children, we often had nothing in common, other than his tendency to set things aflame and my ability to douse them with one of my several fire extinguishers. I had followed him on countless of his spontaneous escapades, more to pick up the pieces in case of catastrophe than to enjoy the moment, nagging him the whole time about safety equipment, safety courses, safety belts, safety goggles. But this tale would be mine alone, my gamble, my glory, if not my funeral.
The crowd grew bored with tossing Felipe tortillas that he left for the fish. One by one, the families returned to the water. A father tossed his two kids in; the toddler couldn’t swim and wore inflatable arm bands above his spindly elbows. A pregnant madre slipped in, cradling her infant. For the first time in my life, I’d been the fearless leader, venturing into the face of menace and proving it safe for the rest of grateful humanity. Me, Bruce Willis, with breasts and hair. Job done and credits rolling, I heaved myself out of the water, cool and slick as an arctic seal and just about as graceful.
Truthfully, I’m sure the locals would have returned to the water without my bumbling example. I couldn’t pretend to sum up their culture after a week there, but I witnessed a willingness for risk that’s absent in the States (except by teenaged boys). The bull-riders at the local rodeo had no ambulance or nearby hospital, the beaches no lifeguards or warnings about riptides, and the taxis no seatbelts, with grannies in rockers riding in the back of open-bed pickups. They exhibited an acceptance of fate that I rarely glimpsed in the U.S. I’m sure they would embrace a pension plan and a teaching hospital in a First World minute but had no choice other than to shrug at whatever nature and providence handed them. Nobody said boo to the bartender for keeping his trap shut when he should have divulged the fact that Felipe had U-Hauled it into a family neighborhood.
In the States, we insist on insurance, assurance, or recompense for what nature or mankind dishes out. We want doctors to fix our ills and demand that lawyers avenge what’s broken. We weigh statistics before we make decisions. I knew the precise odds for each of my pregnancies and thought each of my doctors would eventually cure my problem. I tried to shrug and “let nature take its course” but could not, carrying on an argument about where nature’s path led me. Adoption carried a different sort of risk, with a good chance that alcohol and drugs had been abused during the pregnancy and that the child had been abused since birth. But if I didn’t take that plunge, I would surely lose out on one of the richest experiences of my life.
We climbed back into our panga and began the long journey home. My husband put his arm around me. Felipe still hadn’t moved a pinkie.
But we did. We signed up for foster care and adoption certification training shortly after we returned home. Someday I’ll be able to tell my son, “Mommy once swam with a crocodile.”
Then, “Don’t ever let me catch you doing something so stupid.”
•••
JENNIFER D. MUNRO is a freelance editor whose blog, StraightNoChaserMom.com, is a Top Three Finalist in the 2015 National Society of Newspaper Columnists blog competition. She was also a Top Ten Finalist in the Erma Bombeck Global Humor competition. Her numerous publishing credits include Salon; Brain, Child; Listen to Your Mother; Literary Mama; Best American Erotica; and The Bigger the Better the Tighter the Sweater: 21 Funny Women on Beauty and Body Image. Her humorous stories about sex and the sexes are collected in The Erotica Writer’s Husband. Website: JenniferDMunro.com.
We’re driving to my cousin’s wedding in Atlantic City. We’re on a tight schedule. We spin past the bare-branched sycamores. The ground is dotted with patches of snow. The wind lashes against our rickety Honda.
Ben says he’s too hot in his coat. Peter says he’s too cold. “Just wait. We’ll be there soon.” We’re getting closer. I begin to smell the waves of the bay.
Then Peter throws up.
We pull over, strip him down. He cries, his bare legs shaking in the cold. We toss his dirty clothes in a plastic grocery bag, find some clean clothes, mop up the vomit with baby wipes.
“Okay,” I say to my husband. “We’ll get there right when the ceremony starts. You’ll drop me off. I’ll change into my dress. I won’t miss it.”
We keep driving. Now the ocean is clearer, on the edge of the parkway. I inhale it. I, who hate to travel, inhale the ocean and its expanse, its freedom.
Finally, we arrive at the hotel. Bright lights, gold fountains, Roman god pseudo-sculpture. I was naïve; I expected a simple hotel. It’s like we’ve entered an amusement park.
Dizzy circles through the parking garage. My stomach in my throat. My mother texts me: “It’s okay. She won’t notice if you miss the ceremony.”
A parking spot, finally. I toss all our “fancy” clothes in a garbage bag to change into along the way.
We enter Caesar’s Atlantic City. Immediately the smell of cigarette smoke and misery. The blinking lights of the slot machines. The room begins to spin.
I say to my husband, “Here, watch the children.” I take out my dress and tights, my good bra. I hand him the garbage bag with the children’s clothes, and run inside the ladies room.
I change inside a stall, my bare feet on the cold bathroom floor. I tie up my messy hair, smear on some lipstick.
My husband has changed Peter into his button-down shirt and necktie. He hands me the garbage bag and Peter, then wanders off with Ben to change.
This. This is when I begin to fall apart.
Peter wants nothing more than to climb on all the slot machines. Peter will not stay in my arms. He twists away with all his two-year-old might. I try to carry him, the garbage bag of clothes, and my winter coat. And I cannot. I cannot do it.
My cellphone is low on charge. I have no idea which direction my husband has gone. I am completely lost, alone, with a screaming toddler who is half-covered in vomit.
I can’t hold onto all of it anymore. I can’t stop the panic from boiling over, from my belly, to my throat, to my eyes.
And then I’m not in my life anymore. It is 1983, and I am alone with my mother in the airport. The stench of cigarette smoke in our hair. Is it from the airport, or from the cigarettes my father has been smoking?
My father is gone. He left just as the snow began to fall in life-size, enormous chunks. Just as the baby started to blossom in my mother. Winter and spring colliding.
We are utterly alone in that airport. We do not know where he is, only that we are following him. The airport tilts as the planes rise up into the sky.
•••
The airport was the room between the worlds. But not a room. A cavern. A chamber. An expanse of white that stretched beyond where I could see. There were no exits, no escapes, no way home.
The only way to out was to get on a plane.
We watched the planes through the window—a giant wall of glass. The planes were larger than life. They were dinosaurs: standing still, then suddenly running, lifting their clobbering tails up into the air.
The airport smelled of gasoline, cigarettes, and diaper cream.
It was 1984, and my sister was a newborn, snuggled against my mother. But her presence was slight, muted. She was young enough to sleep quietly in my mother’s arms. She closed her eyes and ignored it all.
My mother and I walked up and down the corridors. We were marbles being rolled up and down and around the tunnels, gates, entrances. We were being rolled by the great hand of my father. He reached for us across the continent. He didn’t want us with him, but he beckoned us nonetheless.
He made us want to find him. He made us look for him in each man’s face we saw streaming past.
Had he shaved his mustache yet? Was it just growing in?
I looked for my father, though I knew he wasn’t there.
I wanted to leave. I didn’t want to go with my mother. I wanted to run away.
I stood at the top of the escalator, and my mother stood below. “Take me home,” I said.
My mother had no words. And now I see my sister for sure, my mother holding her, running up the escalator as it’s moving. There is no way to stop it from moving. My sister, the suitcase, the tickets—everything in her arms but me. It is clear that she can’t carry me as well, that I must will myself up the escalator.
And I do. I follow her. I get on the plane. I begin the endless journey of looking for my father.
•••
I have been trying to piece it together, the origins of my anxiety—why my mind so easily jumps to the worst-case scenario.
I have had to untrain myself from assuming that any time my children get sick that they are going to die. I have to shut out the thought that any time I don’t hear from my husband for a few hours that he’s in grave danger. It is their lives—the ones whom I hold most dearly—that are at stake.
I have some theories. The loss of my father is one. But I didn’t completely lose him. He didn’t die. He just left. As a child, it was a loss that felt like death, but I still saw him often enough over the years. I could still find him, wrap him up in a bear hug.
I think the feeling of doom runs deeper, back to my ancestors, back through my DNA.
The dead babies, the boat, the planes, the entrances, the exits. Portals into the world, and out.
•••
My grandmother slid the box out from under her bed. It was a beautiful brown box, old, faded around the edges, but nicely preserved. Maybe she was going to show me one of her hats, or try to give me another of her soft patent-leather shoes. (We had the same tiny feet, size 5).
She opened it up to reveal a small dress. Light pink, with a lacy, embroidered neckline. It was flattened and neatly laid, like something you would see on display at a museum. Small enough to lie flat in the box—a dress for a very young girl. You could almost see her lying quietly there.
I thought it was perhaps one of my mother’s childhood dresses, or one of my grandmother’s from when she was a girl.
“This is the dress of the girl who died,” my grandmother said. She drew out the word “died.” She had this way of being completely serious, but with an airy, dramatic flair.
Then she told the story. I only heard it that one time and was too scared to ask about again.
Her parents and their daughter were immigrating to America from Kiev, Russia. The boat was dirty, disgusting, people piled on top of one another, nowhere to sleep, living in squalor. There was very little food. Everyone ate rice, she said.
The little girl never made it to America.
My grandmother didn’t know how she died. And I was too shocked to ask.
“They named me Nachama, which means comfort, because I was her replacement,” she said.
But no one ever called her that. Her name was Emma.
She was Emma, my grandmother. But now I knew she was born after trauma, after the deepest loss imaginable. It would haunt her, and me, for the rest of our lives.
•••
We moved thirteen times by the time I was thirteen years old. We were chasing my father up and down the west coast. But there was also a restlessness on my mother’s part that propelled us from house to house—a search for the key to happiness.
I never felt that I had a home. Home was intangible, something reserved for daydreams.
And real dreams, too. I have always dreamt about the houses. I dream that I can go back to a home of mine, one that we left, and is still there, preserved as it was.
I dream of the apartment with the walk-in closet that I turned into a room for myself. I’d make stacks of toy money and play bank, or I’d take in all the books in our house and play library. I remember playing with my charm necklace, hiding the parts behind the coats. I think I tried to sleep in there, curl up into a little ball behind my mother’s boots. But I couldn’t relax. I couldn’t rest.
I dream of the apartment where I did have my own room. The twin windows that faced the mint tree. I’d crack the window open and inhale. My room with the full size bed in the center, the faded pink blanket, boom box on the bureau. When the earthquake began, first the windows rattled, then the radio switched itself off, then the lights. I walked out of my room as my mom and sister were coming out of the kitchen. We watched the chandelier sway, slowly, calmly, as though nothing momentous and devastating was happening.
And last night, I dreamt about the apartment I lived in longest. I knew it would enter my dreams soon enough—the apartment we left last summer. Both of my children were born there. I became a mother in those narrow rooms. Last night, in the dream, I stood in the living room, its soft brown carpet under my bare feet. The carpet felt wet, like soil that had been newly watered. A breeze was coming in. Ben’s stamp collection was lying open on the floor. The couch was gone, but the piano was there—the keyboard open, the keys whiter and brighter than I remember them.
I couldn’t say goodbye to that apartment. The last time we went, to get an ice cream sandwich my older son had left in the freezer (I kid you not), I didn’t want to go in. Because I hate endings. I hate last times. Especially when it comes to houses.
If I never have to move again, I will be eternally grateful. But I know we will move again someday. We rent our new home, and I have a deep desire to own a house someday.
If I own a house, it’s like I will never have to leave. I can grow old there. I can die there. I can sink into it. Get comfortable. A small square of earth that is entirely my own.
•••
Then there was the story my grandmother never told me: the story of the other baby, her baby, the first one. I don’t think they ever named him.
In those days, you didn’t talk about stillbirth. The doctor told them to grieve briefly, then try right away for another baby.
That’s one of the few details I know. That, and the cord wrapped around his neck.
In my mind, the cord is blue, the room is blue, the baby blue. Gray and blue swirling together, enveloping the room in a dense fog.
I wonder if they ever saw him.
Did they hold him? Could they bear it?
Their second son, Raphael, the angel, was born a year later, as the doctor recommended.
But where did the grief go?
You never saw my grandmother in grief, only in fear. Her sister gone, this baby, too. Life so fragile, so temporary.
My grandmother used to read the obituaries every day. She’d sit in the rocking chair next to the aqua-blue telephone.
Did he die as he entered the world, as he journeyed out of her body? Or did he die inside her?
My son Ben was born that way, with the cord around his neck. The midwife told me to stop pushing for second; then she deftly hooked her finger under the cord, and slipped it off him. He came crashing out of me, alive and screaming.
I don’t know what happened with my grandmother’s baby, but sometimes I imagine that I could save him—unloop that cord, set him free, stamp out the panic that passed from my grandmother’s body, into my mother’s, into me.
•••
I started walking when I was eighteen. I was coming out of one of the toughest times of my life: the first time I’d experienced a period of panic attacks.
It started the summer I turned sixteen.
I used to spend the summer with my father in California. That summer was brutal. I missed my boyfriend (who would later become my husband), and I was starting to assert myself in new ways—typical of the teenage years. I began to criticize my father and my stepmom. Harshly. I wasn’t pulling any punches. It got nasty, fast. They couldn’t handle it. They couldn’t handle me. I couldn’t handle them. And I felt trapped.
After that summer, I developed an intense fear of flying (obvious connection there—flying meant visiting my father). And, devastated by my abandonment, my father cut off all communication with me for a year. In that year, my phobias increased. Things I’d never been afraid of before became tinged with the most incredible, raw terror I’d ever felt.
I was afraid of all modes of transportation, really. Cars, taxis, the school bus. There had been a shooting on the Long Island Railroad, and I was sure it would happen again, to me. I was deathly afraid of mass shootings. I’d get nervous in crowded places. The diner. The mall. Thank God school shootings weren’t rampant at the time—I’m sure I would have been too scared to go to school.
I gained a lot of weight. I’d always been a normal weight—curvy as I became pubescent, but always in a normal range. I gained at least twenty pounds then. I ate to cushion my frightened body. I ate to silence my racing heart.
Somehow—I’m not really sure how—I started to come out of the panic. I decided to see a therapist. She wasn’t great, but just the act of going was good for me. And I started walking, both to lose the weight, and also because I found it amazingly freeing. It seemed to wash the anxiety out of my body. And I liked being out of my house. I liked the fresh air. I liked the endorphins. I liked being able, at last, to think clearly. I liked slicing through the world at my own pace. I liked looking at the perfect houses, with the perfect families inside (or so I imagined).
All these years later, I still walk almost every day. Sometimes with a baby strapped to my chest, or a toddler in a stroller. And on weekends, entirely alone.
Since this past summer, I have added some running to my routine. I’m not sure why. I had been having dreams about running. It seemed absurd to me at first. But the dreams were like magic, like I was gliding through space.
•••
When we moved to the new house last summer, we noticed several white beings swooping across the trees out in the distance, over the pond.
Later, we realized: egrets.
And then the four of us—even the baby—would wait until night came (it came late then, in summer) and wait for them at the window. It was magic. Pure and simple. These great, graceful birds, with wings that were quiet, long breaths.
As the earth cooled, the egrets retreated. Where did they go? No one asked. We moved deeper into the everyday. School started. The days got shorter and darker.
But I have thought over the months, where did they go? You always hear that birds go south. But really—where? Or do some die? I guess that’s what I really want to know.
I am obsessed with beings—people—coming and going. The way they wander in and out of lives. And how they get there.
My grandmother would always ask: How did you get here? By foot? Car? Train? She was interested in modes of transportation—fixated on the travel routes of the ones she loved. She wanted to make sure you would arrive at your destination in one piece. “Call when you get there,” she’d say.
The formation of birds as they migrate—of course it takes our breath away. The unspoken communication, the way their bodies seem to magnetize to each other. Don’t we all just want to know where to go? And with whom to travel? What comfort there. What grace.
Ben wants to get a new camera with a zoom lens so that we can photograph the egrets this summer to preserve the magic. We know it’s temporary. We want to capture it.
Just a week ago, the pond was covered in snow, and under the snow—ice. Now it’s melted, and the ducks swim smoothly through it. On the way home from a walk today, Peter and I heard them quacking.
Yes, spring. Which leads to summer. And all the birds opening their wings, returning home.
•••
We missed the ceremony.
After we were all dressed, we rushed through the hotel, past restaurants and gift shops, up escalators, around corners—everything sharply glittering. We found signs for the reception (there were many) and took the final elevator up to the very top of the building.
The elevator opened onto the wedding. The reception was in full swing. I saw the bride first, my cousin, towering over me in heels, her burnt-red hair, endlessly flowing shimmer-white dress trailing behind her. She was rosy-cheeked, in a just-married daze, and thrilled that we made it.
No guilt. No worries. No fear. We made it.
An enormous picture window overlooked the ocean. It was twilight, and the grays and blues from outside drifted into the wedding hall, bathing everyone in a warm, ethereal light.
I began to breathe.
I scanned the room for my family. There they were, my mother and sister, sitting on a leather loveseat together, plates of hors d’oeurves balanced on their laps. My mother and sister—strange and beautiful to see them here, in this otherworldly place, a place none of us had ever been before, and would probably never return.
For a while I just watched them, and time seemed to melt away. Then I looked at my two sons, who had quickly situated themselves in front of the window, cheek to cheek, watching seagulls sweep across the sea.
My husband appeared beside me, put his arms around my shoulders, asked me if I was feeling better, and walked me down the aisle toward the ones I loved.
•••
WENDY WISNER is the author of two books of poems. Her essays and poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Washington Post, Literary Mama, The Spoon River Review, Brain, Child magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, Huffington Post, and elsewhere. She is a board certified lactation consultant (IBCLC) and lives with her family in New York. For more, visit her website www.wendywisner.com. Connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.
I don’t typically go out to bars alone. In fact, I never do. But I’m in Provincetown; I’m cute, tall, and twenty-three. I should have no problems making friends. Or at least that’s what I’ve been told.
After spending some time with my uncles at the P’town Theater, I head directly over to A-House. I walk in and immediately beeline it to the bar. Head on a swivel, I look around, hoping that my smile will be enough to bring people over to me. It does not. I stand next to the bar, only to notice how salient my sobriety feels. I order a Jack and Diet. I notice no one. No one notices me. Chug my drink. Order another. I notice him.
Cut jaw, blue eyes, big lips, scruff. Tight dark jeans cuffed at the bottom. Perfect bubble butt. Black low-laced boots. Light blue button down shirt. Untucked. Top three buttons undone. Humble chest hair. Tattoos everywhere. Backwards hat. Short blond hair underneath. Feather earring. Necklace. Rings. Bracelets.
He’s alone at the other side of the bar. I see him laugh as he talks to the bartender. The music is blaring, but somehow I can still hear him. He opens his mouth wide as he laughs. A real heartfelt laugh. His teeth are white and straight. His tongue, pierced.
I stare. I stare for a long time. He does not notice. I finish my drink and order another. Liquid courage begins pulsing through my veins. He moves to the dance floor. So do I.
I walk up to him.
I love your earring.
Thanks.
We introduce ourselves.
Wanna step outside to talk? I smile and nod. That is exactly what I want.
Do you smoke?
No, I don’t.
Good you shouldn’t. He takes out a cigarette and lights up.
We talk. About places. Where we have lived. Where we will live. Why we’re here. Me, visiting my uncles for the long weekend. Him, for the summer, but moving to Crown Heights shortly.
He’s confident and honest. Comfortable in his own skin. Maybe that’s the difference between being twenty-three and twenty-seven. The difference between my age and his.
His honesty is not abrasive. Not too soon. With anyone else it would be. He grew up in foster homes and left home when he was fifteen. He is the first person in his family to go to college. He created his own major there. Social Entrepreneurism. He was in India for work, helping impoverished children with cancer. Related to a startup he headed. Almost too clichéd. Almost. He comes home to find his husband of four years gone. Picked up and left. It led to a downward spiral of alcohol, drug use, and sex. Mistrust. With himself and others. I can’t blame him.
You’re cute.
Thank you. I would return the compliment, but he is much more than cute. Calling him cute would be insulting.
He recognizes a friend and calls him over. He starts talking to him and introduces us. His friend has a friend. That friend starts flirting with me, while his friend talks to him. The friend of a friend is drunk but kind. I don’t listen to him as he speaks. I eavesdrop. He acts the same with his friend. Confident. Charismatic. The four of us reconvene.
You two are too cute. Do you guys plan on having sex tonight?
He looks at me and smiles. Well, I hope… if—
I look at him. I really hope so.
We smile at each other. Naughty smiles.
A-House is closing. I grab my jacket and take a leak.
I can’t find him when I come out of the bathroom. Minutes go by. God damn it.
He comes up behind me and grabs my hand.
I’ve been looking for you.
I’ve been looking for you, too.
I stare into his blue eyes. They’re intoxicating. His whole face, intoxicating. High cheekbones. Full lips. A subtle rosy completion. We head back to his place. On the way he whips out a pair of prescriptionless hipster glasses and a slingshot.
Please tell me you’ve been carrying around this slingshot with you for the past ten years.
I wish. I got it today at a yard sale.
Why did you ruin the illusion?
Here, look how much fun it is.
He helps me grip the base.
I shoot at a sign.
See! Isn’t it fun?
I smile. Yeah. It really is.
He pulls back the slingshot and cuts his lip. It bleeds. Good. I was beginning to suspect he wasn’t real.
He pulls down the bottom of his lip to show me.
How did you do that?
I don’t even know.
I lean in to kiss it. He pushes me away. I start to worry and stop myself. He’s just waiting. This isn’t the moment. We head back to his place. It’s nice. Really nice. He made friends with a rich man who doesn’t charge him rent. He offers me a beer. I take one. He does too.
Hi.
He’s looking into my eyes. I meet his gaze. No blinking. No smile. He breaks eye contact first to blush.
Sorry, you’re just really cute, and I get awkward.
If anyone else had said that to me, I would have known he was playing me. A game. I trust him. I believe him. He’s nervous. Human. Real.
Don’t be. His eyes lock with mine again. We stare. At the same time we both lean in to kiss. A slow, soft kiss. His lips are slightly chapped, but I don’t mind—again, reminding me that he’s human. I inhale deeply as I close my eyes. He smells of man. No deodorant. It’s a short kiss. Little tongue. He breaks away first.
Wanna head to my bedroom?
I do.
I use the bathroom before heading in. His pants are already off. He wears boxer briefs. Hanes. Nothing flashy. But they fit in all the right places. I take off my boots and jeans. Boxer briefs. Champion. Nothing flashy. He offers me a bedtime shirt. I decline. I know I’m going to take it off shortly.
He keeps the lights on. I like that. We begin kissing. Slowly. I open my eyes to see his closed. To see him losing himself. Losing himself in me. I close my eyes and feel him. Toned. All hair and muscle. Six-foot-one and one-hundred-eighty-five pounds of man.
We get naked, but don’t have sex. We don’t need to. It’s incredible to be with someone my size. His weight on me. His body against me. Holding one another. He falls asleep in my arms. Snoring. I don’t mind. I like hearing him.
The next morning we wake up. Naked. We make out. Cuddle. Feel one another. We lounge around. Still naked. Talking. About work. Family. Friends. Provincetown. Lovers. Past and present.
Do you have boyfriend?
No. I don’t. Do you?
No. There is this guy I talk to in D.C. But no, I don’t. You’d be surprised how many times I ask that and the answer is yes. Why don’t you have a boyfriend?
I’m not sure what to say. I just don’t. Men are new to me. At least dating men. I tell him the truth.
I was faux-dating this guy for many months. I broke things off with him recently. I knew he was perfect for me. I just wasn’t attracted to him physically. I hate myself for it. I know physical attraction is important, but I can’t help but feel shallow when that’s the only reason. I tried forcing it for a while, but that didn’t work.
Yeah, you can never force something like that.
I know that now. The whole thing was so frustrating.
I’ve been there, too. We all have. Doesn’t make you a bad person. You just know what you need now.
I do.
He looks into my eyes again. How do I feel so vulnerable and yet so comfortable? He smiles and gives me a big kiss.
When do you leave?
I’m not sure. I need to head back to my uncles later today, and I’m leaving in the afternoon.
It’s a shame. This always happens. Where I meet someone right before I am leaving for some place new. I like you. I could see myself really liking you and enjoying the process of getting to know you.
I know. I have nothing more to say. I agree.
Well I can be your twenty-four-hour boyfriend.
I would like that.
He kisses me, and we cuddle in various positions. Still naked.
He shows me cute pictures of himself in drag. I try on jeans he throws at me. They fit surprisingly well.
I think I’m gonna steal these.
Don’t you dare! We’ll grab you a pair today in town.
We hop in the shower together. Kiss. Scrub each other. We hop out. I put on my clothing from last night. He puts on something new. Cute. Hip. Tight shirt. Short sleeves. Jeans. Faux boat shoes.
We get brunch. He knows the owner and the waitress by name. It’s incredible seeing him interact. You would think that he’s best friends with everyone. He invites both of them over later to help him make applesauce with all the fallen apples in his yard. He had invited me earlier, but I told him I wouldn’t be around for it. It’s clear he’s never hung out with them before. But he’s happy to invite them over. To meet new people. Experience new friendships.
Eggs Benedict and gluten-free peach and pineapple pancakes.
Do you like ketchup?
Yeah.
Do you like pepper?
Yeah. I like everything.
That’s good. You’re a yes guy. I like that. I could never be with anyone who isn’t a yes guy.
He leans over the table and grabs my arms. I look into his eyes. He kisses me, moving his hand slowly down my jaw. He puts his leg on me as we eat. I pet it throughout brunch.
We split the bill and walk into town.
So you have the one tattoo?
Yeah.
Why just the one?
I got it with my best friend in college. I know it’s silly, but I like it. I’d be happy to get another one; I just don’t know what it would be. I wouldn’t want it to be a joke tattoo like this one. I would want it to mean something. At this point in my life, I don’t think I’ve accomplished anything, or simply lived enough to get another tattoo that means something.
That’s not true at all. Of course you have lived. Just in the short time I have spent with you and from the little you’ve told me. Of course you have lived. Don’t put yourself down like that.
I don’t mean to put myself down, I just … I don’t know.
You’re twenty-four?
Twenty-three.
I know you’re probably thinking that you should have your masters and be able to suck fifty dicks at the same time, but—
Well, I mean, I can.
He laughs. I know you can, but in all honesty, think about it like this. Think about all the things you can teach people. Every little thing from the very small to the very big. I bet you would have a really long list.
Yeah, I guess I would.
A professor once told me that. I like to think about it from time to time.
Yeah. I like that. It’s trite. It’s cliché. It’s something that can be put on an inspirational poster. I know all this. But when he says it, it means something. When he says it, I feel better. I believe him.
We walk into a boutique. He asks the owner, a friend who he lived with previously, if they have jeans my size. They do, but not in a cut he thinks will fit me well. We shop together. Try on hats and glasses. He buys a cute sweater.
We walk down Commercial together. Holding hands. He picks his long board up from a friend’s house.
Have you ever ridden one?
No.
Do you wanna try?
Sure.
He steadies me as I hop on the board. His hands on my waist. He’s got me. I know I won’t fall. He helps me kick off, and I ride a little bit. He pulls my hand so I can actually pick up some speed. I hop off.
The walk back to my uncles is about two miles. We talk more. We hold hands. We stop in the street to kiss periodically. He tells me how he got expelled from high school. He beat up a kid who called him a faggot. I like hearing stories like these. People who stand up for themselves.
I don’t know what it is. If it’s just that I know you’re leaving, and I won’t ever see you again, or see you again like this, or if it’s really something more. But I can see myself with you.
I know. I feel the same way. And honestly, I don’t know. It might be both. I shouldn’t have said it—admitting that it may not be real, but I did.
Yeah.
We reach my uncles’ place. He gives me a kiss. A long, real kiss.
Text me. Or don’t.
I know how he means it.
I will.
I’m really glad you came up to me at the bar.
Yeah, and to think I was about to leave right before meeting you.
I’m glad you didn’t.
Me too.
I kiss him again. I don’t want him to go.
Bye.
Bye.
He hops on his long board and rides away. I want to cry. Not tears of joy. Not tears of sadness. Tears of emotion. Raw emotion. What just happened?
Provincetown is already a surreal fantasyland where time stops. Where I feel far away from the city. Where everyone is friendly and queer. In my fantasyland, I met my dream boy.
I didn’t love him. I know that. But it was more than lust. What happened was ineffable. I felt connected, as if I had known him for years. I let myself go to him. I didn’t hold back, knowing there was nothing to lose.
Maybe I’m just a sucker for blue eyes and a pretty smile. Even though this was the first time something like this happened to me, I know it wasn’t the first time it happened to him. His personality, his whole being, lends himself to love and be loved. To real connections. And I’m sure he’s had real connections, just like this one, before. But that doesn’t matter. For twenty-four hours, I was his, and he was mine. All mine.
I don’t know if I’ll see him again. Of course, I could. I’m in New York once every few months anyway, but there is a part of me that wants to keep this a fantasy. To keep this perfect. The moment I see him again, outside of Provincetown, he becomes real. Our relationship, or whatever it was, will be real. Not this perfect dreamlike fantasy. And I won’t be able to think of him as fondly as I do right now.
Still, I have to see him again. Even if it ruins it. Normalizes it. Realizes it. If he made me feel so much in twenty-four hours, imagine what more he can make me feel. Odds are it won’t work out, but it’s a risk I have to take.
•••
ZACHARY ZANE is a Los Angeles native who got lost and somehow ended up living in Boston. He’s a freelance writer and contributor at PRIDE. When he’s not trying to get his book published, he spends his time pondering about relationships and sexuality. You can follow him on Twitter @ ZacharyZane_
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