Animal Me

By Beth Kephart

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

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

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

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

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

I form sentences I never speak.

I write letters I never tuck into his box.

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

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

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

•••

Safe from me.

•••

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

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

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

•••

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

My twisted kite tail of a body.

My plump pumpkin-shaped face.

My monster self.

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

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

•••

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

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

•••

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

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

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

Mwah mwah mwah, I said.

Mwah mwah mwah. Now I was screaming.

I was aware of my husband’s sudden horror.

I was aware of my father’s stepping forward.

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

The animal in me went after him.

I was not who I thought I’d ever be.

•••

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

And undangerous.

•••

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

I went after him, feral.

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

I felt my father hook one arm.

I felt my husband hook another.

I heard my husband saying, What the hell?

Hit the man, he’ll hit you back.

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

•••

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

•••

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

•••

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

•••

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

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

•••

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

Just. Don’t.

By Catherine Newman

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

•••

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

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

•••

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

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

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

•••

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

•••

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

•••

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

•••

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

•••

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

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

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

•••

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