Baby Jesus

By Jenny Hatchadorian

As we drove back from our daughter’s two-month check-up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, my husband Aaron and I were primed for an argument. Once again, the pediatrician’s message was that we were bungling things, especially in regard to our daughter’s constipation. “Pear juice hasn’t worked. She won’t drink it,” Aaron said in clipped speech.

“What if we make the bottles with more water?” I offered.

“When it seems like she has to poop, we need to hold her knees up to her belly. It will help, ergonomically. That’s how Baby Jesus designed us.”

Up until this moment, the utterance of Baby Jesus was accompanied by sarcasm, but I could tell by the coldness of his words that he wasn’t joking. Just in case, I clocked him for a smirk, but it only arrived after my second glance.

Baby Jesus first entered my lexicon when I met Aaron’s parents nine years earlier in North Carolina. In advance of the visit, Aaron mentioned his parents had become more conservative since they’d moved from Cleveland, but this didn’t concern me. I was raised by Republicans.

Compared to my fiscally conservative and socially still quite conservative parents, I found Aaron’s parents hopeful, adventurous, and open-minded. They were religious, some would say very, especially his mother who possessed the zeal of a converted Catholic, but as long Aaron and I were on the same page, their beliefs were less relevant to me.

After dinner, I grabbed my suitcase and followed Aaron upstairs. Exhausted from teaching, LaGuardia, and smiling so much my cheeks hurt, I half listened as I rolled my suitcase on the ivory carpet. “This is the frog. It stands for ‘finished room over the garage.’ It’s the only guest bedroom with a bathroom,” Aaron pointed to a large, sunken room. He walked further down the hallway and gestured to a bedroom with a twin bed and ceiling fan. “This is Denver Broncos. When we moved in, it had Bronco’s trim.”

Then he stopped at a guest bedroom next to a bathroom. “Here’s your room.” He gestured inside. “Jeanene Horses.”

For the moment, I put aside Jeanene and her horses. “My room?”

“Yeah, I’m in Broncos.” He rolled his eyes.

“But we live together.” We shared an apartment in Brooklyn, as we had in Los Angeles.

“It’s just because of Baby Jesus.”

Like Jeanene Horses, he seemed to think the phrase “Baby Jesus” communicated something to me, but it didn’t. “What does that mean?”

Aaron pulled his arms close like a T-rex, made his lips loose and gurgled like a baby. Then he stood on his toes, glared down at me, and said in a high-pitched voice, “You’re not married.” For effect, he twirled his arms and let out a high-pitched, maniacal giggle.

I pursed my lips.

“We’re not married,” he said in his normal voice and wiped drool from his lips.

“I see,” I said. As I wheeled my suitcase into Jeanene Horses, the ivory carpet muffled the sound.

On the last night of my visit, I sat next to Aaron’s mother at dinner. I knew not to discuss politics, but on a personal level she was sweet and curious. Unlike many religious people I’d met, she was open-minded and kind. Against type, she was knowledgeable and well-spoken. Even her obstinance was charming because she wore it with such confidence. Until, like any good heathen, I curled away when she let loose some disparaging comments about gay people and the doozy “I don’t think young people today feel enough shame.”

It was 2011. Shame was everywhere. There were more abortion restrictions than in the previous three decades and several states enacted the strictest voting laws since before the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I swallowed my rebuttal with my Brussel sprouts, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her comment.

As I ate, I weighed her comment against other family intel. Aaron’s cousin once told me a lengthy story about how she’d briefly joined the Church of Scientology. While she spoke, I tried to focus on her ability to feel a level of rapture and rhapsody I would never feel and not on the fact that Scientology rejected psychiatry, demanded a large amount of its followers’ income, and pushed an expensive list of courses called The Bridge to Total Freedom. In fact, several of Aaron’s family members were prone to spirited, irrational assumptions, but when I brought up his cousin’s involvement with Scientology, Aaron assured me he too was alarmed.

I was an atheist, raised by atheists who were overtly skeptical of organized religion. My family could be impulsive, demanding and capitalist, but we were logical. There were many lawyers among us, and we could distill any argument to a rational motivation. Throughout my life, I’d been repelled by organized religion not only because of everyone the church left out—women, gays, trans people—but also because I couldn’t bear irrational people.

In the 1990s, I grew up as the rare child of divorced parents in a heavily Catholic Cleveland suburb. In middle school, my boyfriend broke up with me because I did not attend Parish School of Religion classes. PSR classes were taught at several local churches and provided catechetical education to kids in public school, but because it was a loosely disciplined after-school activity for thirteen-year-olds, it was also a meat market. Even as a teenager, I knew it was nonsense that I was dumped over PSR. I knew religion was nonsense. Now as a filmmaker and adjunct professor in New York, my distrust of religion had grown. Essentially, I didn’t think I could spend my life with a religious person.

“That sucked what your mom said about gay people,” I whispered to Aaron during a clandestine visit to Denver Broncos.

“Oh, she just thinks they’re defying Baby Jesus,” Aaron said and dismissed my concern with a swipe of the hand.

I’d always cherished the fact that he was the black sheep of the family, but this was the second time he’d mentioned Baby Jesus. I looked at him. Were beliefs and personality innate? Even if buried during his rebellious twenties, later in life would his upbringing rear its ugly head?

He smirked at me. “You know I’m not religious at all, right?”

I dug my toe in the ivory carpet. “Were you ever?”

He shook his head like he was annoyed to answer. “Even in eighth grade, I refused Confirmation. I knew it wasn’t for me.”

In that moment as the two of us stood in Denver Broncos against the wishes of Baby Jesus, his comment was enough. We wrapped up the trip sure we were on the same side of the divide.

•••

Little changed in the next nine years of our relationship. Looking back, those were blissful years where we flouted God-fearing values, had sex for pleasure, teased heteronormative expectations, and bashed the church with abandon.

Occasionally, there were inklings of Aaron’s religious upbringing. When a performance class at our Los Angeles film school planned a visit to a Baptist church in South Central LA, Aaron refused to go. The professor thought the vocal stylings of this particular Baptist preacher were affecting, winsome, and authentic, but Aaron wouldn’t bite. “I’m not comfortable laughing at people in church,” he said.

“That’s not what the field trip is about,” I said with a half smile. I was excited to use the word “field trip” at the age of twenty-five, while at the same time I related a genuine sentiment. If anyone laughed, the alternative but deadly serious professor would have reprimanded them, but the notion of attending church for anything other than worship pulled at Aaron’s heart strings.

Concerned, I turned to my trusty astrology book. I preferred this book because it listed horoscopes not by month, but by day, and it grounded its descriptions in personality traits. As I turned to Aaron’s page, I knew this route wasn’t entirely logical, but I needed guidance and I’d rather have it from the occult than white men in robes who stood behind podiums. Unfortunately for me, spirituality was all over Aaron’s page. The meditation for his birthday, The Day of Inner Fervor, was See God in everything. Notable passages of his horoscope included Belief is an important theme in the lives of December 10 people. Devotional types, they pray at the altar of character, wisdom, morality. The final sentence was the kicker: They may put their faith in God, the Universe, scientific laws or in a moving Spirit behind all things, but they generally put their faith somewhere.

To calm myself, I chose to believe Aaron put his faith in art. He had a BFA in photography, nearly an MFA in filmmaking, and he worked as a producer on film sets and as an artistic director for a record label. He had such a blind devotion to artmaking that he put up with many things I would not. On set, he spent fourteen hours a day on the Canadian border in below-zero temperatures and bathed in an outdoor shower in November. He wrote emails at 4 a.m., and he drove three hours to buy an actor a Peloton, all in the name of art.

I, too, worked in the arts, although sometimes begrudgingly. I occasionally fantasized about having a more stable or lucrative career, but Aaron couldn’t fathom it. He didn’t see the point, even when we were so broke. After years of supporting us in reality TV, he’d pulled the plug on his stable job when we’d saved enough for a sandwich. Aaron and I also diverged in how we categorized artists. I thought an artist was someone who exhibited work, while Aaron thought an artist was someone who saw the world through an aesthetic lens … which sounded awfully … spiritual. So, he was spiritual, that wasn’t bad. His faith was in art, I told myself as I settled under the sheets at night.

•••

Suddenly, when Aaron became a dad, Baby Jesus was uttered not with sarcasm, but as a salve during intimate moments and a solution in times of stress.

As new parents, our anxiety was completely intertwined with the frequency and texture of our daughter’s excrement. We had graduate degrees, we were award-winning filmmakers and writers. We had slowly, steadfastly crafted the lives we wanted—but everything we held dear was at the whim of our daughter’s poop. When she was backed up, she wouldn’t play, sleep, or sit. She screamed, fussed, and was inconsolable, and our lives came to a screeching halt.

Generally, after a day and a half without a poop, we began to troubleshoot. At our disposal, we had a variety of strategies our pediatrician encouraged, and some he allowed with reservation. Judging when to utilize the emergency measures was obviously a fraught decision. When the lack of shit hit the fan, it was no surprise that Aaron tended toward abstinence, or divine intervention. As the vessel who carried our daughter, her screams pierced not only my ears, but my uterus and soul, or maybe I was just a wimp. I preferred to use everything in the medicine bag until the turd left the building.

During a particularly long bout without a poop where we followed Aaron’s method of doing nothing, our daughter clung to us and whimpered for the better part of three days. When the moment finally presented itself and our daughter passed a boulder so well-packed, she screamed in pain, I shouted over her cries, “I told you we should have used the mineral oil.”

“That’s not how Baby Jesus made assholes!” Aaron screamed. There was not a smirk before, after, or anywhere in the vicinity of his comment.

Our warring perspectives were probably not helped by the fact that our daughter was born in February 2020, a few weeks before the Covid-19 lockdown. We suffered not only the isolation of new parents, but the seclusion of the pandemic.

At night, we were relegated to our movie projector. Like any two people, our tastes diverged, and we were both filmmakers, so obviously we argued about movies. I was a film professor who could handle more academic material, while Aaron’s taste drifted commercial. In the past, we’d disagreed over Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which he considered romantic, while I found it depressing that the hero only loved the heroine when she was disguised as another woman. I’d put off watching It’s a Wonderful Life until my mid-thirties because I sensed it was… well… Catholic. When I finally saw it per Aaron’s suggestion, he cried at the movie’s sense of love and sacrifice, while I thought it was blaringly disheartening that Jimmy Stewart never left his dying small town and instead lapsed into depression and alcoholism.

Once Aaron became a father, his taste skewed in a direction I could not grasp. Over his former preference for stand-up, horror, and boundary-pushing foreign films, he chose family movies. Weeks after our daughter was born, we streamed the TV show Virgin River about a woman who finds love in a small town, followed by both the original and remake of the maternal suburban The Stepford Wives, before landing firmly in the 1950s with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. This riveting piece of cinema culminated with Elizabeth Taylor lying that she was pregnant to please her extended family. This was not the impetus to the story; it was the end. In the final frame, Director Richard Brooks winked at the audience with a kaleidoscopic fade on a long kiss between Elizabeth Taylor and her husband suggesting that maybe, finally, she’d just do what everyone wanted and get pregnant. After that hot mess, Aaron and I settled for less confrontational content, but, even ironically, there are only so many times a film professor can watch the Hallmark Channel.

A chilly spell at the end of April caused me to bring out our daughter’s stroller sleeping bag. With her zipped in the bassinet, I walked laps in Prospect Park amongst socially distanced crowds. After the genius move of not discussing whether we should have a child before I became pregnant, Aaron and I followed that up with the winning decision of not reviewing how we would raise our daughter. In forty-degree rain, I was desperate to talk to other urbanites. All I needed was a quick jab or poke at religion, but even with a mask on, no one would come near me.

As I pushed the stroller back toward our apartment, I was sympathetic toward my husband, to a point. For me, everything changed a year ago when I became pregnant. For him, things didn’t really shift until two months ago when our daughter was born. The entire time my body ached and ballooned, I mourned the loss of my childless life, but I also promised myself that not everything would change.

When I returned home, Aaron stood in the kitchen and unwrapped a cardboard box that had arrived in the mail. On my walk, I’d concluded that a pandemic not only prompted isolation, but fostered beliefs of the less sound mind. Maybe my logical husband had fallen victim to the mental toll of the pandemic. As I set our sleeping daughter in her crib, I approached him with extra compassion.

He pulled the last piece of bubble tape off what was clearly his childhood advent calendar. The calendar that hung in my childhood home was fluffy and bright with candy canes, mittens, and snowflakes. This austere, biblical calendar featured a wooden baby cradle, an ornate urn, and a goblet to drink Baby Jesus’s blood. I was mortified. Also, it was April. I took a deep breath and remembered my sentiment of compassion, but my gaze narrowed on the urn. “What’s with the urn? Whose ashes are in it?”

He shot me a glance.

I smiled, willing warmth into my face, if not my words.

“It’s not an urn. It’s a jar of frankincense, or perhaps myrrh. It’s one of the wise men’s gifts. See?” He pointed to the nativity scene at the top of the calendar.

“It’s April.”

“It’s homey.” He walked to the sink. As he fetched a glass of water, he added, “It’s good for her to become familiar with the iconography.”

“The iconography?” I blurted out.

He nodded as he drank. My compassion left the room, so I did, too.

The next day, I woke from a nap in our railroad apartment to hear Aaron bouncing our daughter on his knee in the next room. “Baby Jesus made these toes, these legs, this belly,” he sang. He kissed each body part after he named it. It was cute. Cute, and troubling. I rolled over, acquiescing that Jesus was in the house.

•••

Two months later we were forced out of New York. Moving during the pandemic was no treat, magnified by the fact that Aaron found work well off the beaten path in Bozeman, Montana. Days before our car transport service arrived, the company tripled the price, so we decided Aaron would drive, and I would fly cross-country with an infant and a cat.

Alone in the apartment, I took care of our daughter and cleared the wreckage of our presence. The day before our flight, Aaron called.

“Hey!” I said, sidetracked with the list of things I had to do before I turned in our keys.

He merely breathed into the phone.

“Honey? Hello? Are you there?”

“Yeah.”

“Where are you?”

“South Dakota.”

“Good, you’re almost there.”

“I think I should turn around.”

“What? No. Why?”

“I don’t know about you flying alone.”

“I can do it. It’s fine.” Four months postpartum, taking two flights with an infant and a cat was not a walk in the park, but I could do it.

“What if they take the baby?” he asked in short speech.

“Who?”

“TSA.”

My glance darted around our empty apartment and landed on a wall mirror—here on the heels of Baby Jesus was the spirited irrationality. I looked at myself in the mirror. “TSA is not going to steal our daughter.”

“You don’t have her birth certificate,” he said.

This was true. His family had planned a trip to Ireland, so we’d sent away for her passport. Still, TSA was not going to take the baby. “I have other documents. You just miss her, but she’s doing great. She pooped today. Actually, she pooped twice. Soft and large.”

There was a time when news of our daughter’s silky excrement was enough to elevate Aaron to a state of euphoria. This was not one of those times.

He sighed into the phone.

“Stay the course, honey. It would take longer to get back here. You wouldn’t make it before our flight,” I said as the tires of our basement-level Prius C hummed into the phone. It was his third day on the road, and my heart went out to him. “It’s crazy to drive alone for that long. It messes with your head. You’re almost there. We’ll be there tomorrow, and we’ll meet you.”

“Not if it’s up to TSA…” he muttered.

“Remember, she has my name. That’s why I’m flying with her. It’s cleaner, logistically. Plus, we didn’t steal her, so it’s all good.”

“They don’t know that.”

“Honey.” I bit my lip. “TSA is not going to take the baby. It’s a domestic flight. They’re not even going to check for identification.”

He seemed to mull over my words. As I counted the dust bunnies on the adjacent wall, I prayed that I got through to him. If I put my faith anywhere, it was in my husband.

Right now, he was probably cruising on a desolate stretch of I-90. Sioux Falls was at one end of the state, but it was a long six hours until The Badlands, Black Hills National Forest, and Rapid City at the other end. In between, there wasn’t much more than a raw sun and an occasional shopping center, or maybe a field of sunflowers. After three days of fast food, lumpy motel beds or—if I knew Aaron correctly, reclining in the driver’s seat at a truck stop—he was wan, uninspired, and sprouting acne. Alone in the car, he went without A/C in late June to save gas. With his t-shirt and the driver’s seat coated in back sweat, he drove, feeling the strain and uncertainty of another move while missing his wife and daughter.

I could handle a spiritual man but not an irrational one. Aaron was logical; he was under the stress of becoming a new parent and moving across the country during a pandemic. He was living proof that personality was not innate. Nurture triumphed over nature. Aaron knew the TSA did not steal babies; he was rational. In his long, slow breaths that permeated the line, I could hear his brain working it out this very moment.

Then his breath quickened right before he wailed, “But … what if they take the baby?!”

•••

JENNY HATCHADORIAN has been published by Story Club Magazine, Role Reboot, and Little Old Lady. Her comedic essay New Family won Story Club Cleveland’s Audience Award. She is working on a book of comedic essays titled Midwestern Witch. Follow her on Instagram @hatchadorianhere or Twitter @hatchadorian

Between the Cow and the Buoy

Photo by Gina Easley

By Charlotte Gullick

2009

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

“And you do okay, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

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

“You’ve lived in cities before.”

“Not with a kid.”

My sister remained silent.

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

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

•••

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

•••

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

To Punctuate

Photo by Gina Easley

By Magin LaSov Gregg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

( )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“ ”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My diagnosis punctuates that silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

Behind the Clickbait

By Sarah Broussard Weaver

She Stopped Taking the Pill—but What Happened Next Shocked Everyone!

She and her husband wanted a child—a “little-Nick-and-Sarah-baby.” She stopped taking the tiny daily pill. Nothing happened. Her body, young and healthy, refused to ovulate more than three times a year— a practice of inadequate irresponsibility it had begun with Menstruation Number One, when she was almost sixteen. She worried, a lot. She could become one of the women forced to smile through tight teeth. The mouths sing-songing, “We’re trying!” “Whenever God blesses us!” “Someday!” The ones who cry to see blood on the soft, snowy cotton, those who stare surreptitiously at the lucky. The experts on aiming a bad-news-bearing pee stream on a plastic stick, the minds trying to will nothing into a pink line.

After Months of Suffering, She Made an Amazing Discovery That Would Change Everything!

In the end, her body would fail for only a little over a year. The worry had eaten away at her for no reason. She could have saved the tears for something better. When she felt her way to the gray dawn bathroom and she vomited into the bowl, she knew it must be true and it was. It was a bad time—they had just moved across the state—and they had stopped actively trying, wanting to get more settled in their new city. But she hadn’t started using birth control again; she’d been lulled by their failure thus far. Now they were, at the same time, happier and more worried than they had ever been.

The Appalling New Ways in Which Her Body Betrayed Her!

She should have spent those worry-months picking up extra waitressing shifts. When the sickness came, she wasn’t ready. Her body failed her in a new way now. Her blood rushed harder through the highways. Her doctor, bony and cruel faced, the only female doctor who’d accepted Medicaid, berated her for gaining weight—it was too much, too quickly. She’d thought only a woman could understand what she was going through, but she saw no sympathy in the stony eyes, just disgust. The prescription for high blood pressure—get off your feet and stop eating so much. Her worry over her inability to conceive morphed quickly into another worry, as her body struggled, as the money quickly became not enough.

Groundbreaking Research Uncovers the Top Five Things to Avoid When Pregnant!

She needed to keep waiting tables—they couldn’t pay their bills with only his tips. She left her restaurant and he left his, so they could get a new restaurant together. This way, he could carry her heavy trays. Sinking into their sofa after midnight, after working a double shift, her feet and legs rebelled. They tingled, ached, screamed at her as she held onto the stove for support. She stirred canned soup and heated hot dogs—all against doctor’s orders, but they were quick, cheap, and she was too tired to deal with more. They sat on the green sofa with the Southwestern design—ugly but free—and binge-watched episodes of Friends he had downloaded—illegal but free—as they fueled their bodies with salt, sugar, and fat. These nutritional sins were the only luxuries they could afford so they savored them. They went through all 236 episodes in that dark apartment. She doesn’t think Friends is funny, anymore.

They Had Nowhere to Turn—and Then, an Unexpected Phone Call!

They had to choose which bills to pay. The apartment’s rent was the most important, of course, the truck payment second. All frivolities had already been cut, and all bills were already in or past their grace periods. The truck insurance was allowed to lapse, which meant they now were in danger of their only vehicle getting repossessed. One chilly night, his parents called him. They weren’t rich, or even super comfortable, but they had read between the stress lines in foreheads and the pauses in phone calls. They offered to share what they had. They offered to make room. She threw everything in cardboard boxes, nervous and relieved about the offer. He used their last dollars to rent a U-Haul, and they drove it, along with their uninsured truck. They drove from Dallas to the Hill Country; from the cold apartment complex surrounded by strangers to the warm house surrounded by family.

The Aging Effects of Stress—Doctors Say You Can IMPROVE YOUR MENTAL HEALTH by Letting Go of Unrealistic Expectations!

The stress wasn’t over, but it was lesser. It was now the stress of preparing for childbirth, of two women sharing a kitchen, of heads butting, of chore parceling, of packed cardboard boxes in the garage with no plans to unpack them anytime soon, and of feeling beholden by the knowledge that this graciousness could not be repaid. It was no longer the stress of unpaid car insurance, eviction, and having to choose cheaper food over healthier food. She still couldn’t bring herself to care what the scale said—she’d deal with it later. Her new doctor-who-accepts-Medicaid was a man; she felt that she could accept the advice that resonated in her and release the rest as “something he knows nothing about.” He didn’t mention her weight—either he was more compassionate toward her feelings or too busy and uncaring to take the time. Either way, she was grateful to ignore it for now.

The Shocking Aftermath of Her Life Choices!

She gave up canned soup, doctors with cold eyes, waitressing, and Friends. She gave her body her blessing to grow their baby girl for the remaining three months. His parents gave all they could spare to the preparations for their granddaughter’s arrival. She and her husband felt the relief of release as hope returned to their eyes. It wasn’t the perfect start for a young family, but it was a safe and loving one. They accepted it gladly.

•••

SARAH BROUSSARD WEAVER lives on a hill in beautiful Portland, Oregon. She is a senior at University of Portland. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Eastern Iowa Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and Mulberry Fork Review among other journals. You can visit her at sbweaver.com or tweet hi @sarahbweaver.