Following Frank

By Kristin Ohlson

I first saw Frank when I was twelve, a jittery small-town California girl during my first week in a public school at the weedy edge of town after six years at tiny St. Thomas Elementary School. I would now eat lunch in a cafeteria instead of bringing a mortifyingly wholesome meal packed by my mother. I was in the cafeteria line, thinking less about the sulfurous vats ahead than about where I would sit with my tray. Then I beheld this boy on the other side of the counter helping the lunch ladies, wearing a hair net and smock just as they did. It did nothing to diminish his beauty. I experienced my first sexual swoon, my brain lighting up with the astounding and unprecedented words, “I want to kiss him.”

Not that I had never fallen in love before. Since the age of three, I had been in love with my cousin Judy’s husband Pete. I’m sure every girl or gay boy was in love with him. He was as handsome as a movie star (think George Maharis, but laughing instead of smoldering) and always kind, and he was the star of the summer lake scene. He once jumped from the top of a boathouse in a tuxedo to land on one ski and slalom merrily away from a wedding, a ten-foot watery rooster tail bursting in his wake.

But I never desired Pete; I just adored him. I hadn’t desired any boys in my short life. I hardly noticed them unless I wanted to beat them at some game. A few had crushes on me. A boy named Clifton sat near me in second grade and pointed to a picture of a pot of honey in a book and then gestured at me, suggesting that I was sweet. A boy named Jimmy—he looked just like The Little Prince, which was not an asset—gave me a necklace and took me to the movies (with his parents) in the third grade. But I was dedicated to horses and books and searching for arrowheads and buried temples. I wasn’t interested in boys or even flattered by their attention.

But that vision of Frank flipped a switch. I tried to spot him when we were outside for recess—there were eight classrooms each for seventh and eighth grade, and he was in the eighth grade wing—and observed him from behind the curtain of my friends. His dark hair was on the long side before long hair was a countercultural totem, and he was skinny—pretty much everyone was skinny in the early 1960s. He might not have been as shy as I was, but he seemed quiet and nice. He looked unvarnished by money and expectation, and this appealed to me and, maybe, set a pattern for life. My parents were among the more monied families in our little agricultural town, and it was a constant source of discomfort. Frank was different from the boys my parents would later urge me toward, boys who had been given everything and still hungered for more.

I couldn’t help talking about him to my friends, and they couldn’t help teasing me. When my friend Kimmie and I rode my horse, me in front and her behind, she’d nuzzle the back of my neck and croon, “It’s Frank!” When my friends and I danced into the sunshine of recess, they’d sing out his name, knowing that would make me bolt back into the shade. I’m sure he had some inkling that there was this seventh-grade girl who was crazy about him, but the more I pined for him, the more terrifying his presence was. My friends finally approached him and set up a rendezvous that was supposed to take place in one of the hallways during recess, but I panicked and hid in one of the bathroom stalls until long after the bell rang.

And that was that. However much (or little!) his interest had been piqued, it was clear that getting to know me was too much trouble. I think I stopped talking about him to my friends, and they stopped teasing me. He graduated from middle school and went on to high school. I went on to boarding school and off to a college across the country and wound up living in Cleveland for forty years. I never saw him again.

Until I found him on Facebook a few months ago during a bout of procrastination that included looking up girl friends from long ago—including a clever mean girl who made my life miserable off and on—a few old boyfriends, and Frank. And there he was, fifty-eight years later, still in the Sacramento Valley near our hometown, still pretty freaking cute despite the inevitable weathering. But now a Trump supporter, now with a wife who looks like a blonde, toned Fox News host, now an insurance agent.

Friends ask if I have spent hours looking at his profile because I daydream about, “What if we had gotten together?” But that’s not it. I’ve had a lovely man in my life for going on six years—I finally learned to say “I want YOU”—and don’t muse about other possible pairings.

Part of the fascination is that stalking Frank on Facebook allows me—a liberal now in Portland, Oregon—to ponder the nuances of someone who’s fulminating at the other end of the blue/red spectrum. Because he keeps surprising me, both with the extremity of his Trumpy ideas and with ideas that people like me assume people like him never have.

I roll my eyes when he calls California “Commiefornia” and when he calls the governor “Nuisance” instead of Newsom. Also when he posts right-wing articles from faux news websites like www.yourbrotherinlawsbasement.com—I made that one up, but they’re all about that credible. Most infuriating, most bewildering, he and most of his friends are among the nearly one-third of Americans who think Trump lost because of voter fraud. One of his Facebook friends claimed to have voted for Biden 400 times in Florida and another 700 times in Pennsylvania. Hilarious!

But he doesn’t completely insulate himself with Trump dogma. Among his Facebook friends are a few that cop to different thoughts. He posted a question several months ago asking who voted for Biden, and when a few brave souls admitted that they had, he was respectful. And when one of his Trumpy friends said that the real criminals were the people who voted for Obama, Frank outed himself as one of them—leaving me to agonize again at the cultural shredding that’s been going on since he and I were on the same side of the ballot.

Frank has surprised me in other ways, too. Despite succumbing to so much misinformation—maybe we should call it malinformation—he routinely pushes everyone he knows to get the Covid vaccine and puts up with no small amount of shit for it, all in a good-humored way. When the vaccines first started to become available, he announced over and over where people in his area might find them. Now he posts stats from local hospitals showing the huge discrepancy in illness and mortality between those who are vaccinated and those who are not—and he keeps at it, no matter how many wacky claims some of his friends make in response.

And I don’t know what inspired it, but one day last March he posted a big colorful box saying, “Stand Together Against Asian America Hate.” Fourteen of his friends liked that post, but no one commented. It seemed a risky thing to say if you’re running in a deep red crowd and you revere a former president who seems eager to stoke hatred of Asian Americans. I was proud of him. I almost gave a thumbs up to the post myself—just as I’ve almost argued with many of his other posts—but am determined to remain an anonymous stalker, one who will soon ditch this preoccupation altogether.

Still, I’ve come to realize that I would probably like Frank if I knew him in person. Not “like like,” as my grandchildren would say, but appreciate him even though I disagree with most of what he thinks and would probably loathe many of his friends. He seems kind and is always posting messages about various people in the community who need help. Most of his recent posts have been about the fires that ripped through the west coast. We could at least share our anguish about that.

I can’t help but wonder how much more we would share if I hadn’t left my hometown, along with everyone else in my family. We’ve all learned over the past five or so years how much individuals are shaped by the company we keep and the communities in which we live, how both taste and truth seem to have their own terroir. Would I look more like his female friends than the women I’ve surrounded myself with in Portland, all of us flaunting our gray hair instead of dying it? Would I still have two different containers of artisanal kimchi in my refrigerator? Would I be reading different books—maybe more Jody Picoult and less Elena Ferrante? And would I be simmering along with Frank—sometimes with humor, sometimes with fury—about Trump’s claim that the election was stolen? My old crush’s Facebook page brings that other possible self into focus, and it’s hard to look away from her.

•••

KRISTIN OHLSON is the author of The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers and Foodies are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet, which looks at the movement to create a new agriculture that respects nature, heals landscapes, and produces plenty of food. Based in Portland, Oregon, she is an independent journalist who has published articles in the New York Times, Discover, Gourmet, and many other publications. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing and Best American Science Writing. Her new book, Sweet in Tooth and Claw: Stories of Generosity and Cooperation in the Natural World, will be published by Patagonia in September, 2022.

We Were Never Alone

Photo by Gina Easley

By Antonia Malchik

About two years ago, my sister and her family reached the edge of a financial cliff, one far too familiar to far too many Americans. My husband and I talked about the choices they had, the importance of being there for family during hard times, and our deep desire for privacy. And then we invited them to move in with us because in an America where the average person’s wages have stagnated for forty years and counting, what choices do any of us have?

Before we started sharing a house, I’d spent years working towards a zero-waste home. Paper towels were replaced with cut-up cloths from worn-out bath and tea towels. All food scraps were composted—even chicken bones after they’d been stripped of meat and drained of protein in a stock pot. Every plastic grocery bag at supermarkets and pharmacies and farm stands was politely refused. I bought raw milk straight from the farm in half-gallon Mason jars once a week and packed my kids’ snacks and lunches in cloth snack bags or little stainless steel containers.

I bought a lot of cloth snack bags and stainless steel containers and reusable grocery bags, all of which arrived in oversized cardboard boxes padded with puffed-up plastic bubbles. I used untold gallons of oil driving to farm stands and milk producers and butchers and flour mills to avoid buying food wrapped in plastic packaging. So much oil to save a certain amount of plastic, but to me it felt important, a contribution to shifting society away from dependence on disposables.

My niece was three when we started living together. She had an individually-wrapped organic fruit leather almost every night after dinner. She’d run over to the snack cupboard, where we kept the shared organic crackers and the big batch of granola I made for the household every week, and bring the package back to my sister or her husband. They ripped it open from the tiny slit at the top, placed there for the smooth convenience expected in a consumer culture where every scant resource of the planet is bent to the will of our ease, or our pleasure.

The fruit leathers are delicious. Sometimes I’d let my daughter have one. Not often because foods like fruit leather and raisins are nearly as bad for children’s teeth as candy, I’ve been told by pediatric dentists. They snuggle into the grooves of molars and the sticky residue is hard to brush out.

Sometimes I ate one, too. After a childhood of daily Pepsis and powdered milk and an almost complete absence of dental care, my teeth are shot anyway. I have more fillings than teeth, and three poorly-shaped crowns. I’ve lost track of my root canals.

The fruit leather’s wrapper went in the trash. There was always a lot of plastic in there. Soft, pliable wrappings and baggies. Crinkly plastic bags. Diapers and overnight pull-ups. The firm-flexible lids of yogurt containers.

The trash was full of food, too. It pained me to throw carrot ends and coffee grounds and the strings from beans into the garbage, but that started before my sister’s family moved in, when we’d relocated to a neighborhood where compost bins attracted deer and neighborhood dogs, as well as bears and mountain lions.

The fruit leather wrappers and food and thin plastic grocery bags headed to the landfill every Tuesday. They were dumped and buried with all our other trash, closed in the womb of land that surrounds and nurtures us. From there, they compressed on top of the aquifer that a local farmer had recently gotten the rights to tap for the water bottling plant he wants to build. Siphoning water from hundreds of feet under clay and sand and rock to pipe into molded plastic bottles that will be shipped to the hands of consumers reaching out for a convenient guzzle of cool mountain water. A picture of our valley, with its snow-capped peaks, will probably grace the bottle. And maybe the water will contain microscopic particles from the fruit leather wrappers that departed our house in plastic bags, nestled next to the chicken carcasses and diapers.

The living situation was difficult. We were squeezed together in a small house where my two school-aged kids and my sister’s preschooler bounced around on their blow-up Rody donkeys and played dress-up and shared a wide variety of cold viruses and stomach bugs. We adults managed meals and tried unsuccessfully to give one another the privacy we all craved. We thought constantly about the day when we could live in our home spaces as we wished without having to adapt to one another.

We all tried so hard, tried to get along, tried to meet one another’s needs, tried to step quietly around the house when others were sleeping and one of us needed to go to work early. It’s a testament to how much we care about one another that we were able to do this with minimal (though not nonexistent) friction. But every day I looked at the fruit leather wrappers and plastic grocery bags and thought about endocrine disruptors and the floating Pacific garbage patch and the damaged health of humans and ecological zones near the chemical plants that make these objects and wondered: what is the point of learning to live well together if we change our ecosystem beyond our species’ ability to adapt? And yet, what was the point of all my plastic-saving angst if we can’t learn to live well together?

•••

In August 1941, as Hitler’s Army Group North blew up roads and train lines in ever-closer encroachment on Leningrad in the Soviet Union, my father’s mother and her two older children, my aunt and uncle, took the last train out of the city. They spent a month living on kasha—hot buckwheat cereal—in the train car with other families, winding through the country to avoid bombed rail lines before landing in the Ural Mountains. Government mandates assigned the war refugees to local residents’ homes, and the family my relatives were housed with hated them. They hated sharing their space, hated having Leningraders in their home, hated being forced to split their resources with refugees.

Once there, my grandmother, a metallurgical engineer, worked as a manager at the metallurgical factory, and nights she worked on the factory line. When she was home she chopped wood to keep her children, and the other family, warm, since the grown sons who lived in the house refused to do so on principle. She grew potatoes to feed her kids and gathered mushrooms in the woods, while in Leningrad my grandfather, a nuclear engineer, continued his factory work and every month watched thousands around him starve to death during the first winter of the Siege of Leningrad. During a stealth mission to carry messages out of the city across enemy lines, he was nearly hit by a German bomb and fell into frozen Lake Ladoga along the doroga zhizni, the Road of Life that provided the only way out of the besieged city. Two nurses dragged him out of the icy water, and my grandmother finally found him in a hospital 1942, so skeletal in the near-final stages of dysentery that she said he looked like a monkey, almost unrecognizable.

At its most basic level, immigration is simply a matter of logistics. Physical logistics—how to house and feed people—and social ones—how to help them integrate into a different culture. Tensions in immigration often result from a failure to pay enough attention to and plan for those logistics, leaving everyone vulnerable to misunderstanding and resentment. Refugees, though, are not simple immigrants. Their status is sudden and unwanted and necessary, as my grandmother’s was. It’s a sad, repetitive tale of human history, that one dictator or power- or resource-hungry authoritarian wages war, or environmental devastation hits, and a country’s borders burst open with refugees, people who, until a short time before, had simply been going to work and sending their kids to school and making dinner, who are then welcomed by some but hated by others, those who wish to not have the strain of caring for them.

•••

One day two winters ago I stepped outside, while it was still dark, to look at the stars. I try to do this most mornings before getting my kids up for school. It’s my stand-in for meditation, and it became particularly important after our house folded in three more people than it was designed for—four, after my sister’s second baby was born. I craved space, quiet, privacy. We all craved it.

It was silent out there in our yard at that time of day, even in the summer when the sunlight was already growing pink over the far mountains. I loved it best when it was still dark, and the neighbors’ larches and lodgepole pines shifted in the morning chill.

High cumulus clouds divided the sky into patches of constellations. As I glanced from one star-specked patch to another, I realized that I could only see Orion’s Belt out of the side of my eye. If I looked straight at it, it disappeared; if I looked away I could see the three stars lined up bright in the periphery of my vision. I squeezed my eyes shut. A rectangle of light appeared front and center. I opened them again, and the rectangle popped shadowy and dark up against the stars. I recognized that shape. It was my iPhone.

I’d been scrolling Twitter just before I stepped outside. In recent months I’d become an addict, checking my feed obsessively, opening every article about politics, about protest, about the lessons of history, that appeared in my timeline. I tried to talk friends and colleagues out of doing the same—the world might descend into hellfire, I kept saying, but it would do it just the same whether you were checking your Facebook feed every minute or not—because the obsession with the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and its results was affecting everyone’s ability to work and focus and frankly do anything productive with our lives.

I couldn’t listen to my own advice, though. I kept opening Twitter while I made my coffee just past four in the morning. My eyes always felt strained and painful afterwards but I told myself it would pass, and I needed to keep on top of things. The eyestrain didn’t pass, at least not quickly, and the truth was I didn’t need to keep on top of things. Keeping on top of things throughout every hour of every day is about as futile as trying to keep my email inbox empty. And in convincing myself that I was just checking in briefly but necessarily with the day’s news, I was blinding myself to the solace of the night sky.

•••

The morning after the presidential election of Donald Trump, I woke up still unable to believe the results. It was late. I usually get up between four and five in the morning to work and stargaze, but instead had stayed up until three texting with my mother-in-law in England, as we’d done when watching the Brexit votes come in a few months previously. I was exhausted and bewildered, but like millions of other exhausted and bewildered Americans, as well as the millions of exhausted and elated ones, I still had to get my kids up to go to school.

I went upstairs and heard voices from the section of the house we’d curtained off for my sister and her family. On the rare mornings my kids got up before I woke them, they liked to wander in there and play with their younger cousin, so I peeked around the curtain. My sister was on the couch nursing her baby. I’d been wanting to hold myself together for my kids, but that resolve evaporated on seeing my sister’s stunned, disbelieving expression.

Everyone’s eyes perceived the election differently. To mine, it culminated in mass acceptance that the rule of law and democratic ideals could be subsumed under hatred, desperation, and fear of a mythical “other.” I had to remind myself of one of the hard truths of America, one that someone of my skin color is mostly insulated from: that for many people, the rule of law and democratic ideals had never worked in the first place. Pale-skinned, middle-class, and upper-class liberals, or people like me who’d grown up white and poor and Christian and progressive, who’d always believed a better world was within our abilities to create, were just facing it directly for perhaps the first time. After all, the ground I step on when I look at the stars, the mountains and larch trees I love so much, are all part of land that was forcibly taken from Native American nations and handed to homesteaders like my great-great grandparents. The public lands and wilderness areas I now defend with my votes and phone calls have been, for tens of thousands of years, home to people who have now spent centuries facing the traumas of invasion, genocide, and betrayal.

•••

A few weeks later, near Christmastime and less than a month from when my family and I would move out of the shared household, my sister and I were talking in the kitchen about our father’s mother. When the Siege of Leningrad was over, four years after it began, and the family returned to Leningrad from the Ural Mountains, it was to find their apartment taken over by an autocratic Communist Party bureaucrat. My grandparents, my aunt and uncle, my father (who’d been born in the Urals), and our grandfather’s mother were allowed to live and sleep in one small room. The kitchen was shared communally with other families.

“How did she do it?” I asked my sister. Though we loved each other, and our husbands got along, the strain of living together had felt extreme. But we also knew that those strains were based mostly on small and inconsequential differences in how we preferred to exist in the privacy of our home. The forces pressing on our grandmother’s life were exponentially larger. How did she keep sane, keep moral, keep honest and humane, in a situation where little about what she valued, or loved, or honored, had any space?

“I don’t know,” said my sister.

“I keep saying I want my life back,” I said, as she jiggled the now-eight-month-old on her knee and I waggled my fingers to make my newest niece smile. “I’m sure you guys have said the same thing.” To which she answered, “Yup.”

Tangled together physically and psychologically in this small house, we wanted our priorities back, our ability to direct our own schedules, moderate our footfalls to our own families’ sleeping habits, maintain a level of cleanliness or graceful dishabille as we saw fit, not to constantly bend, change, trim ourselves to the lives and needs of others. Don’t we all want that? Like a poorly thought-out immigration policy, we had failed to plan the logistics of living together successfully, although we were learning. I wanted my sister and her family to stop using so much plastic. They wanted me to be less twitchy about toast crumbs crunching on the floor and less lackadaisical about the quality of our shared dinners. We’d hit a point, all of us, when we couldn’t change, couldn’t adapt, any more, without feeling that we were changing who we were.

My father’s parents were deeply ethical people who managed to get along in a profoundly compromised world. My mother’s parents were lifelong progressives, her father a Montana rancher, her mother a live-and-let-live Episcopalian. My sisters and I practically have a genetic blueprint for seeing the world from others’ points of view, for adapting. We have the self-awareness to want to bend further, to be the better humans. And even we found we could only adapt so far. Photographs of my paternal grandmother show deep, anxious lines between her eyebrows, but also kindness in her eyes and years of smiling about the lips. She knew something about living with the worst of others while maintaining faith in the goodness of humanity. She knew things about tolerance and adaptation that I will spend the rest of my life trying to learn.

There is no instruction sheet for how to meet the world when it swiftly becomes a place you don’t recognize. But there is, actually, a qualitative difference between wanting one’s life back and those who want to “take our country back” through violence and expulsion: the desire to live well with others, to understand that all our spaces are shared with people whose lives we might not understand. And that at any moment we, like my grandmother, could become refugees, could transform into the “other.”

•••

I attended an environmental writers conference some years ago, a collection of poets and essayists, geologists, and ethnobotanists, people from many different disciplines brought together in the Vermont woods through shared care for this planet and worry about its future.

A few of us went for a rainy walk one afternoon, in a forest much wetter and leafier and more disorienting than the pine-carpeted paths of my Rocky Mountain homeland. As we walked through and under dripping leaves and paths that kept disappearing on us, a perfect setting for fraught existential questions, I wanted to ask everyone: what worries you most? We’d had frank discussions of environmental devastation and climate change throughout the week, so, I thought, let’s get down to brass tacks. Let’s air our fears.

It took that walk and me asking everyone else the question that haunted me to articulate, finally, what I was so scared of: not that it—civilization, humanity, futures and supply chains we can depend on—would all go to shit. For many people who pay attention to actual climate change predictions and our lack of commitment to doing anything about it, that is now assumed. No, I wasn’t worried about everything going to shit, or at least, I was, but it wasn’t my deepest worry. What worried me, what continues to worry me, was that it would all go to shit and we won’t have learned anything. That remaining pockets of the human race would start all over again with wars and greed and resource hoarding and violence toward whatever or whomever they deemed “other,” including the entire non-human world.

If the best hope we have is that enough of us will manage to survive and that we’ll make the same mistakes all over again, what’s the point of us? What is the point of saving this beautiful planet from the worst ravages of our fossil fuel addictions if we don’t learn how mutually interdependent we all are? If we can’t learn to treat one another, and to share our spaces and countries, from a starting point of kindness?

Or, as my brother-in-law who spent too long putting up with my exasperating fixation on crumbs on the kitchen floor might say more bluntly: Could we try not being assholes to each other?

•••

The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World, co-written by the Dalai Lama and an American psychiatrist, was the first book I read after the 2016 election. It’s not an easy read. The Buddhist practices and neuroscience research build a path out of the primal human jungle that answers so readily to tribalism, but it has to first walk through some gut-wrenching places. The early-1990s genocide in Rwanda, when neighbors and relatives turned on and slaughtered one another. The mid-1990s Serbian war, when Serbs and Croats who’d lived in the same villages for generations dehumanized and killed each other. The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. A belief in difference, culminating in beliefs of racial or tribal or cultural superiority, drove these events, exacerbated by intentional radicalism.

The mindfulness methods used to counter those beliefs seem painstakingly slow and impossibly small. Look at pictures of people of different ethnicities, one method suggests, and for each face, ask yourself what kind of vegetable that person might like—a method that has been shown to decrease active racism, to humanize every individual.

While my sister and I and our spouses subconsciously, and frequently consciously, engaged in many of these practices over the year-plus-a-bit that we lived together (focusing most on the benefits to our kids of a shared household—they loved living with extended family), it seems a ludicrous effort when set against the reality of white supremacy normalized in the White House and angry diatribes unleashed against those perceived to be outsiders.

What else can we do, though, besides gather to protest and at the same time make these small steps, these tiny efforts? Progressive values may in the end win over each generation successively; that doesn’t mean the neurological structures that make tribalism and racism easy paths to follow will simply disappear.

The ability and desire to be the better humans are like the stars, though, ever-present no matter how hard they are to see in troubled times. No single day since the election of America’s forty-fifth president has lacked a story of violence, prejudice, bigotry, hatred, misogyny, or racism. The election itself was like a giant eruption on the surface of humanity, gathering together elements of anti-immigrant strife in Europe, sectarian war in the Middle East, growing authoritarianism in Russia and Turkey and the Philippines, and even a backlash of hatred against environmentalists simply seeking clean water, clean air, and less endocrine-disrupting, ocean-choking plastic pollution for all people.

But those news stories also never addressed the increase in small everyday kindnesses. How could they? These extra efforts are going on all around us, a hundred, a thousand times a day, and we’re all part of them, but they are not news in the traditional sense. The doors held open, the chasing after people with dropped gloves, the encouragement to tell one another’s stories and help new acquaintances find their places in unfamiliar worlds, the clearing of a neighbor’s snowy sidewalk, the eyes met and held for a beat longer than usual, acknowledging one another’s equal humanity. The family members we open our homes to, the babysitting of the newborn and the sweeping up of the crumbs, all out of the burning simplicity of love.

•••

ANTONIA MALCHIK’s essays and articles have appeared in Orion, Aeon, High Country News, The Atlantic, and many other publications. Her first book, A Walking Life, will be published by Da Capo Press in May 2019. She lives in northwest Montana, and her website is www.antoniamalchik.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.

Hooked Up

Photo by Gina Easley

By Leanna James Blackwell

Nine p.m., the appointed hour. The person who opens the door is a surprise. I’d pictured someone in her sixties, calm and professional, with a tidy bun and a crisp white uniform, a clipboard in her hand and a name tag that says “Marion” or “Florence.” Someone who knows what she’s doing. Someone with steady hands and a soft voice. But it isn’t Marion who greets me, or anyone remotely like her. I consider backing out, but it’s too late for that.

The fact is, I need comfort. I need answers. I haven’t slept through the night in more than a year. Not since, to be exact, November 8, 2016. I’ve become a tightly packed box of stress, shaken and furious after every White House tweet and new revelation about sexual abusers in Hollywood, in government, in the media. My phone notifications are a constant trigger; my long-ago post-traumatic stress diagnosis, the legacy of a past laced with violence and sexual abuse, is suddenly relevant again after years of relative peace. Before the election, I had a pretty good routine. Morning meditation and writing before work, gym several times a week, anti-depressants and Vitamin D, regular therapy and a wholesome “eating plan”—my life so damn virtuous it would have bored the habit off a cloistered nun.

After the election, my routine wasn’t cutting it. Night after night, sleep evaded me. I laid awake, churning. I could run screaming into the streets—and did, with thousands of others—but you can’t march every day. I’d have to step up my daily plan.

Melatonin. (It works, but only for a few hours. By three a.m., I’m up.)
Chamomile tea. (I have to drink pots of the stuff to get sleepy. Then I’m up all night peeing.)
Warm milk. (One word: revolting.)
No electronics for two hours before bed. (No difference.)
Books about English gardening. (I remain awake but in a state of clawing boredom).
Soothing audio recordings. (“Rain” sounds like a dripping faucet; “waves” induces mild nausea.)

My efforts only resulted in a series of hollow-eyed mornings and a fatigue so deep I spent my days feeling like a sluggish fish, lurking depressed at the bottom of a slow-moving river. Finally, my doctor ordered an overnight test at a “sleep medicine clinic,” which has led me to a nondescript building on a side street next to a real-estate office.

Is this really a clinic? Am I the only patient here? The guy waving me inside is twenty-five if he’s a day, tall and gangly, with unconvincing facial hair, baggy blue scrubs, and a super-casual vibe. I half expect to find a bunch of his friends sitting inside on a saggy couch, passing a bong. His name tag says “Brad.” Where’s the sleep clinician? Maybe Brad is the greeter, like in Walmart, and then the clinician comes in?

“How ya doin’? Everything good?” Brad lopes ahead of me down the hall. We pass a brightly lit room with a bank of computer screens at which another guy in a bulky hoodie appears to be dozing.

“Fine, thank you. And you?” When I’m anxious, my mother’s manners kick in big time. I’d remember to say “please” and “you’re welcome” in a fire.

“You can change in there,” Brad informs me, gesturing toward the open door of a bathroom—sink, toilet, wastebasket, harsh overhead light. “Once you get in the sleep room there’s a camera on you, so you wanna get your pajamas on before.”

A camera? No one told me about a camera! Will it be on all night? On me? Who watches it? Will it be live-streamed? Brad laughs—you’re one funny lady—and explains that he will watch it, along with the other dude. It’s just procedure. Making sure I’m not sleepwalking, tearing out my wires, falling off the bed…trying to escape. He doesn’t actually say “trying to escape” but I suspect that’s the real point. Or something worse. But I can’t think about it. If I think about it, I’ll never go through with this.

In the bathroom, I brush my teeth and change quickly into my sleep clinic outfit: an oversized tee-shirt, pair of old yoga pants, and woolen socks. Brad waits for me down the hall. My hands are damp. My heart is jumping. Summoning my courage, I exit the bathroom and creep boldly into the testing room, which is tricked out Holiday Inn–style. Carpet, curtains, dresser with lamp, framed print on the wall (boats), and queen-sized bed with coverlet in a queasy pattern of peach and blue swirls. The only difference is the absence of a window—I check the instant I walk in—and the infrared camera mounted on the wall in the corner. I turn my back on it, a brief moment of middle-aged rebellion.

“Everything good?” This must be Brad’s signature phrase.

“Okay.”

“Great, great. Just sit here on the bed and we’ll get you hooked up.”

“Hooked up” means just that. An electronic box, about the size of a loaf of banana bread, sits on the bed waiting for a thicket of wires to be attached to it. But first, the wires need to be attached to me. All over my body. My skin seems to tighten in resistance, as though trying to harden, like a protective hide. I would like to be a rhinoceros during this procedure. No one fucks with a lady rhinoceros. The last hope for Marion, the matronly clinician, flickers and dies. Eyes closed, I stiffen as wires are snaked down my pants leg—both sides—and attached with sticky pads to my chest, to my lower and upper back, my neck, my wrists, and all over my head, 72 different-colored wires in all. Are there 72 colors? What are the wires doing? To calm myself, I make conversation during the ordeal, the kind of chat you might have with a fellow guest at your cousin and his wife’s anniversary party. Except there’s no punch bowl or cheese platter.

“So, how do you become a sleep medicine clinician? Is it a branch of nursing or physical therapy or something…?” I hear myself emphasizing medicine, as though by saying it I can make this place feel more like a clinic and less like the weirdest motel in America.

“Nursing! Nah.” Brad chuckles at the idea. “You just do this two-week training and figure out which wires go where. It’s pretty hard at first”—he’s concentrating on the purple wire now, which is snaking around my arm—“but then you kinda get the hang of it.”

Kinda is not reassuring. “What were you doing before?” Brad’s professional history has become extremely important to me.

“Working at Antonio’s. You know it?”

As a matter of fact, I do know Antonio’s. The place is a mile from my house. Many a Friday night we’ve had their pizzas delivered. A month ago, Brad easily could have stood on my front porch, handing over a large sausage and mushroom pie and pocketing my husband’s tip before jogging back to his white delivery truck. “Thanks for the fiver, dude. Have a good one.”

And this is the trained professional who will be watching my movements on camera. This is the clinician who supposedly knows what all these wires do and how to read the information that will be fed to the computer screens as I sleep.

Sleep! Who can sleep like this? I’m now fully encased in a tangle of wires, including a clip-on thing on my index finger and two little clips pinched inside my nose. The camera watches me clamber awkwardly under the covers. Then I’m lying on my back, staring up at Brad. He stares down at me, looking for all the world like a bumbling young dad ready to tuck in his kid. I almost expect a bedtime story. Or a prayer. A prayer might not be a bad idea.

“Brad?” My voice squeaks.

“Yeah?”

“What if I have to go to the bathroom?”

“Just call me.”

“How? Is there a button?”

“Nah, just yell my name. I’ll hear ya. I’ll be in the other room looking at the computer.”

Just yell his name? I imagine lying immobile, held down by wires, bladder full, shouting “Brad! Brad!” into the darkness.

“Well, g’night!” Brad ambles from the room, shutting the door behind him. I catch a glimpse of the person in the hoodie, still slumped, motionless, in front of the computer screens. Is he even real? Maybe he’s some kind of sleep clinic mannequin. Or robot. A sweatshirted robot that used to toss pizza dough at Antonio’s. Anything is possible. The screens will display my brain activity and my movements—do I thrash around, kick, sleepwalk, try to ride a bicycle in my sleep? Do I lie there like a mummy? Do I fall immediately into REM sleep (as if), do I wake up fifty times a night, do I stop breathing? If the test shows that I stop breathing, I’ll be prescribed an apnea mask to wear over my face at night. It’s called a CPAP and looks like something an astronaut would wear on a discovery mission to Pluto. I resolve to breathe.

Now Brad’s voice comes crackling out of the speakers in the room. “Just a little test before you go to sleep. Okay? Move your eyes to the left.” My eyes obey. “To the right. Up. Down. Around.” Then it’s time to test my voice. The reason for this is not explained. “Say the word milk five times.”

“Milk?”

“Yep, milk.”

“Uh. Okay.” By the end of five “milks,” I’ve dissolved in semi-hysterical laughter. The weirdness keeps increasing. Why “milk”? Why not “leaf” or “stick” or “dog”? Are we supposed to think of being babies? Will I be given a bottle next? I might accept it. Especially if it has brandy in it.

Then I hear another voice, coming from the other side of the hall. Someone else is being instructed to move their eyes and repeat the word “milk” like an imbecile. Someone else, in an identical room across the hall, is wrapped in wires and unable to get up. A mystery sleeper! I wonder who it is. A stressed, pissed-off writer/academic/mom with PTSD like me? Any or none of those things? It doesn’t matter. A sleepless plumber, an anxious accountant, whoever it is, we are united. I imagine communicating telepathically with mystery sleeper. We could talk until we fell asleep, two strangers in pajamas at the oddest sleepover in the world.

“Are you asleep yet?”

“No, are you?”

“No. Wide awake.”

“Do you believe cats have souls?”

We’d talk for hours until one or both of us managed to drop off.

But no answer comes when I signal hello with my mind. Mystery sleeper has his or her or their own thoughts and problems. I’m on my own. And I’ve got to sleep. The test won’t work if I don’t sleep. My body lies rigid, alert to the knob on the sleep room door. What if it turns in the middle of the night and Brad creeps in? Or the other one? How am I supposed to relax? How could any woman relax, alone and tied down in a faux motel room with male strangers right across the hall who have total access to her room?

I lie in the bed, remembering things I don’t want to remember. Times I was touched, grabbed, patted, squeezed, felt up, held down, much more and much worse, by male relatives and boys in the schoolyard and guys on dates and bosses at work and men on the street. Men who believed, for the simple reason of biology, that having unfettered access to my female body was their divine right. Men like my grandfather, who installed a swing in the barn and invented a game for just the two of us when I was four. We had to play the game each time my parents left me there for a visit. Men like the boyfriend of the woman whose son I babysat on Friday nights when I was thirteen. He always drove me home but didn’t like to let me out of the car once we got there. Men like the guy in a business suit who picked me up hitchhiking one day (I know, I know) when I missed the bus. He accelerated past the high school, unzipping his pants. I jumped out of the moving car and landed on the curb, my backpack saving my skull.

And now, men like the ones running, unimaginably, our godforsaken country. Who have dug up the past from the dark soil of history—what I thought was the past—and flung it back into the present.

It’s chilly in the room but I’m sweating bullets. What doctor could possibly think this is a good idea? I’m going to sue him when I get out of here.

It’s not long before the door knob turns. My breath stops. A dark shape is standing over me. My heart thumps out of my chest and vaults through the roof.

“Sorry,” Brad whispers. “Your nose wire fell out. I saw it on the screen. I just need to fix it.” He leans over me, delicately adjusts the wire, and tiptoes out of the room. “Sleep well,” he murmurs as he shuts the door. And he doesn’t come back. He’s in the computer room, watching the screens all night, making sure my test goes well. Hours go by, but the door remains shut. Brad, it seems, is not going to hurt me. He’s just a guy. A guy doing his job.

Gradually, my heart slows. Gradually, the sweat on my body dries. Gradually, I start to feel tired. And then, somehow, miracle of freaking miracles, I fall asleep. And I stay asleep until four in the morning, when the army of garbage trucks come, roaring behind the building as though announcing the apocalypse and sending me rocketing from the bed, pulling out several wires. Now I am yelling Brad’s name. I hear his hurried footsteps immediately. When he opens the door, he is grinning.

“Ready to go?”

“Hell, yes!”

At this, Brad actually giggles. “Hey, no problem. You slept for a few hours. I got the data. And you didn’t stop breathing. That’s good news!” He seems genuinely happy for me. I’m happy, too. It’s over. I’ll never have to do this again.

Brad hums as he helps me remove the wires. A couple of them get stuck in my hair and we laugh. But my sleep medicine clinician—by now, he’s earned the title—is patient and calm, untangling me wire by wire until I’m free. Free! I stand up, feeling as liberated as the moment just after confession, when my childhood sins had been pardoned and I could step out of the dark booth, cleansed and holy, and burst out of church into the forgiving sunshine. I throw on my clothes in the bathroom, slip on my coat, grab my bag, and head down the hall. I feel like skipping. There is no sign of my companion in the other room. I hope mystery sleeper had a good night, too.

“Have a good one!” Brad calls as I open the door.

“You, too, Brad.” I mean it. I drive down the silent streets toward home. A few fading stars are left in the sky. There are patches of paste in my hair, and an itchy sensation on my back where a cluster of wires was attached. But hot coffee waits for me, and my husband and daughter. And cat.

I’m intact. I’m all right. I did it.

A week later, I get the results. They are unremarkable. I don’t sleepwalk or talk. I don’t thrash around. I don’t have sleep apnea, so I won’t have to wear the dreaded mask. My sleep problem is something else. “Maybe it’s stress,” the voice on the phone suggests. “Have you tried melatonin?”

Two days after the phone call from the clinic, a far-right candidate for a Senate seat in Alabama—and accused sexual predator of adolescent girls—rides his horse to the voting station on election day, supremely confident of a win. His confidence is misplaced. The candidate’s opponent is declared the winner, the first time a pro-choice liberal has won in that state in a quarter-century.

That night, millions of women sleep through the night.

That night, I am one of them.

•••

LEANNA JAMES BLACKWELL is a professor of creative writing and director of the Bay Path University MFA in Creative Nonfiction. An essayist, theatre director, and playwright, she is a member of the Northampton Playwrights Lab, former artistic director and playwright-in-residence of TKO Theatre and the Inner Stage in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the co-founder and director of The Place for Writers at Mills College in Oakland, California. Her most recent play, Grimm Women—a radical re-imagining of three fairy tales told from the witches’ point of view—was included in 2016 Play by Play Festival in Northampton, Massachusetts, and funded by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is currently at work on a collection of essays and a play about race and adoption, New Soul, which will receive a staged reading in September 2018.

Make America Date Again

Photo by silkeybeto/Flickr

By Laurie Graff

“Well, I can see this afternoon’s going steadily downhill,” said my online date.

We were but twenty minutes in, and he happened to be right. I mean that, literally. What were the odds, but there I was in Riverside Park with a Jewish man from the Upper West Side, in publishing no less, and he turned out to be for Trump.

Our email exchange had been sparse. He just asked to meet. I didn’t ask questions. I just wanted to go. I used to kiss a lot of frogs. Then dating moved online. I now delete a lot of toads. Yet I felt all flushed when his face popped up on my screen. His profile, smart and to the point, matched the twinkle in his eye. He was a reader. Someone curious. Creative. He liked riding his bike and long summer drives. It would be a plus if he had a car, but I was just psyched to see he had hair. I wrote right away. He didn’t write back.

A week went by. I tried him again.

Hi! Are you playing hard to get? If so, I’ll play too… just tell me how! I can’t stop thinking about you. Okay, so maybe that’s not true but I do want to know you, and I would love to hear back. We’re both Upper West Siders, the river’s a favorite spot and the weather might actually be getting nice….

We made a plan to meet Sunday. He suggested one-thirty at the river. My class at the gym ended at one. I thought we could walk down together. Swing by Zabar’s café and get something to eat at the picnic table, on the new dock. He agreed. That morning, before heading out, I checked my email.

A slight change of plans… Instead of meeting at 1:30 on Broadway, I’ll meet you at the dock at 2.

All through the class I wondered what was up. On the one hand it seemed insignificant, but online dating was like a chess game. Every move meant something. Perhaps he planned to ride his bike, or maybe he knew wouldn’t be hungry. But I was, and made sure to eat before I arrived which (uncharacteristically) was precisely on time. At 1:59 I cut through the Boat Basin where, from the top of the patio, I saw him in the distance. He was leaning over the wood railings, looking out at the river, contemplating the cloudy Hudson. My heart and head connected as I thought, oh my, he’s cute.

That hardly ever happened, and I dropped my concerns rushing past all the people down to the dock. “Hi,” I waved. “It’s Laurie! Hello!”

“Hi!” He shook my hand. He smiled. “How was Pilates?”

We began chatting away as we checked out the boats and each other. It was always strange to come face to face with the live, 3-D person ordered up online. It was kind of like unwrapping a package from Amazon on an item whose size and color you gave an educated guess, and hoped would work in person.

“You want to walk?” he asked, pointing north on the promenade.

We were walking and talking. Getting-to-know-you talk. Trading questions with snapshots of answers. Conversation was easy, and he was easy on the eyes. I liked his black tee shirt and North Face pullover. He looked nice. He was warm. I’d go as far to say he was a mensch. Could I have met somebody?

“So where’s your office?” I was really happy to hear he still worked. Besides which, it was interesting to have met a man on the production side of magazines. “You know, there’s a Chinese place in a brownstone right across the street from you, seems very Mad Men-esque. White linen tablecloths. Art. I always wanted to go there. Maybe we could meet for a lunch special?”

Just so you know, for me that was a big deal. To signal, early on, I hoped to see him again. That I wanted to. He, meanwhile, was scrunching his face giving thought to the Chinese food. I recalled his profile saying he was a simple burger and jeans type guy.

“You should go if you want to try it,” he finally said, taking the lunch date off the table. But he continued to ask all about my work and he was attentive, so I resisted reading beyond the moment. Maybe he didn’t even take lunch, I thought, and bulleted through my years as professional actress, freelance publicist, and published author.

“So how do you get your health insurance?”

After saying I’d written three published novels you’d think the next question would be, “What are they?” But we were dating in the twenty-first century and, considering my chicklit titles, I actually figured this to be the safer question.

“Obamacare,” I said. “Fourth year. I was covered for twenty-three years through actors’ unions, and then through the Author’s Guild,” I explained, because it sounded substantial. “Then all the groups were disbanded so everyone’s on their own. It’s been good, but who knows what’s going to happen now. It’s all such a mess, right?”

I thought he’d jump right in. Only he did not even answer.

“It’s all like a mess, now. Don’t you think?” Gosh, people in steady jobs really had no clue what it took to freelance and find a plan every December. “Don’t you think it’s all like a big mess?”

He stopped walking to plant himself before he said, “I voted for Trump. I’m with him 100%. No resistance, no regrets. Behind him all the way.”

He whaaaaat?

His face deadpan, he rattled off that speech like an actor in a play. He had to be pulling my leg.

“Are you serious?”

“Yes,” he said. Seriously.

“Why?”

“Anything’s better than eight years of Obama,” he said, while I neglected to point out that Hillary, not Obama was the one who’d been running.

“I’m just… shocked.”

“Why would you be shocked?”

“Did you ever hear him speak?” I asked. I could practically see the air letting out of my balloon. “I just don’t ever meet anybody that’s, uh… for him. Especially here,” I pointed to Riverside Park as proof positive of the Democratic society I knew to exist on the Upper West Side where like-minded folk commiserated in the gym, in stores, on the subway and the streets. What in the world possessed this guy?

He resumed walking, so I followed. But now I could not look him in the eye. Instead, I looked down at the pavement, processing how this was about to change everything. From that moment on it was just a countdown to the end, and I passive-aggressively decided to let him take us there.

“Obama single-handedly destroyed the entire medical industry for the five percent of people who didn’t have health insurance.”

Obama? Again? The five percent didn’t count? Was that number even accurate? I’m the worst when it came to having data at my fingertips. Sometimes I memorized one stat, just to have something to pull out in these situations. I knew that 88% of the Upper West Side voted for Hillary. How’d I wind up on a date with one of the12% that was acting like the one percent?

“The problem’s with the insurance companies,” I said. “The problem is the greed. And people can’t navigate it alone. We need the groups so it’s easy for everyone to buy. Then there’ll be more people participating and costs will go down.”

“The insurance companies want to do it but —”

“But what? The government won’t let them?”

“That’s right.”

Fiddle dee dee, I thought, and rolled my eyes, remembering the first time I saw Gone with the Wind. Scarlett only wanted to have fun at the barbeque, but all the men could discuss was war, war, war!

“Do you read?” he asked.

Do you? I wondered. But he thought I was reading fake news. And I knew that he was.

“Okay, healthcare aside,” I said, intent on staying calm, channeling my inner Erica Kane, the vixen from All My Children whose mere tone could sweeten the saltiest of statements. “What about guns? What about LGBT? What about the planet? What about women’s rights, immmigra—”

“Well I can see this afternoon’s going steadily downhill.”

No wonder he didn’t want to swing by Zabar’s. Why spend time and money on a lunch that would never get eaten once the political views had been unpacked? Who could he possibly date in this city? More importantly, whom was I going to date?

“I just don’t know how you can get behind someone so stupid?” I asked, the cracks in the pavement deepening as I kept my voice light, and deliberately dug in. “He’s ignorant, coarse, he doesn’t read, he doesn’t understand The Constitution, God, those tweets—”

Boy, I detested online dating. People shudder when I say that, and it frightens other women who feel compelled to meet that way. So let me modify. For me, online dating never works. No matter how promising it seemed there was always some insidious thing I’d have never imagined that appeared when we met in person. I could never love a man whose ideology, to me, so lacked compassion.

Maybe if we’d met during Obama… no! Maybe Bush? Maybe not. Perhaps pre 9-11? I think if we’d met at a happy hour during Clinton we could have had a good fling.

We walked in silence, little more than a few feet, when he saw an opening to the park at 90^th Street.

“I’ll walk you out,” he said, but a moment later changed his mind. “Better yet, I’ll leave you right here.”

I did a pivot, quickly walking out and away.

“Nice to meet you,” I heard behind me.

Now, there’s an alternative fact.

•••

LAURIE GRAFF is the author of the bestselling You Have to Kiss a Lot of Frogs, Looking for Mr. Goodfrog, and The Shiksa Syndrome. A contributor to columns and anthologies, the former actress is also a produced and published OOB playwright. Laurie lives and works in New York City. Her new novel, Licked, is up for sale. Visit her website and ‘Like’ her on Facebook.

My Word!

By Jonathan Kalb

From as far back as I can remember, I was what grownups called a verbal kid. My parents were both high school English teachers, my mother for thirty years, and I was lucky enough to inherit their predisposition to articulate speech. At this point, in middle age, I know that this articulateness is a privilege—a gift reinforced by a few beloved mentors and heaps of inspirational highbrow entertainment—but that’s not how it always felt growing up. Speaking precisely was no social advantage in the public schools I attended in suburban Wayne, New Jersey. I would much rather have been good at baseball.

Early on, I developed a tendency that, for all I know, is common among verbal kids, though I’ve never heard it mentioned. I began privately adopting certain words as my own in the secret belief that, like an ardent lover, only I fully understood their true colors, coded signals, and secret desires. I’m not speaking of what people often call pet words—favorite, everyday words that we all have, replace over the years, and tend to overuse. The words I mean are deeply lodged within our psyches and continue to move and sometimes bedevil us even as we age out of them.

I have intensely vivid memories of the circumstances surrounding my learning these words, which subsequently became totems and touchstones, seeding private jokes, tempering and organizing experiences, and affirming my core beliefs.

•••

“Solicit.” Google definition: “to ask for or try to obtain (something) from someone.”

One day during tenth grade, I saw an enticing ad on my high school bulletin board: “Easy work. 1-3 hours after school. Earn $50 to $100 a week.” That was big money in 1974.

The job turned out to be selling subscriptions to The New York Times door-to-door on commission. The clincher was that the guy on the phone promised I’d be paid a minimum daily fee no matter how much I sold. My mother liked his articulate-sounding voice and didn’t pay close attention to details. He picked up me and five other boys in a van the following week and drove us to a leafy section of Hackensack.

We were set loose in pairs, and my partner and I were at it about fifteen minutes when we walked up to a stocky guy standing in his driveway, who asked what we wanted.

“Would you be interested in home delivery of the New York Times?”

“Are you soliciting?” Neither of us knew that word.

“We’re selling subscriptions to a newspaper.”

“So you’re soliciting.”

“We’re selling …”

“That’s soliciting. Soliciting is illegal in Hackensack.” The guy then pulled out a police badge, yelled toward his house, and asked whoever was in earshot to summon a patrol car.

Twenty minutes later the two of us (and then four, then all six) were sitting on a bench at the station, waiting for Hackensack’s finest to decide our fate. We could hear the panicked van driver being grilled in a side room. The next few hours were a gauntlet of tedium, hunger, peremptory harangues, and supercilious questions from cops half-heartedly trying to bait and shame us.

They eventually just let us go. I thought my mother would kill the driver when we got home very late, and he explained what happened. He never paid us for the day.

The dangerous and dubious edges of “solicitation,” the word’s slightly sickening aura of unfairness, has been part of my worldview ever since. When I later learned this word’s association with prostitution it made perfect sense to me. It was a name for something casually polarizing, acceptable to some, depraved to others: not just selling but unwanted, disreputable selling. Not just asking, seeking or applying but supplication, begging, the stain of importunateness always there.

I’ve collected random bits of trivia over the years about many of my words, but particularly about “solicit.” I happen to know, for instance, that the Latin root sollicitare means to disturb, rouse, trouble, or harass. I make space in my head for the fact that Samuel Beckett used “soliciting” to describe the diabolical activity of the purgatorial light interrogating the characters whose heads stick out of funereal urns in his anti-drama Play. I’m probably the only fan of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus who looks forward to the particular slur a plebeian politician uses to trigger an anti-patrician mob reaction: “He did solicit you in free contempt.”

To this day, any neutral use of “solicit” startles and jars me. If a colleague, for instance, proposes soliciting opinions or applications, I automatically regard the appeal as disingenuous and probably futile. The colleague’s motivations seem questionable purely because of the choice of word.

“Solicit” isn’t for everyday use (unless you’re a British lawyer). It’s one of those occasional words that hangs around your brain and exerts its force over time. My sense of its effect on me is that it influenced my disposition toward decorum, convention, and propriety—the whole basket of deplorable ideas that poisons the concept of respectability. Thanks to the Hackensack police, Beckett, and Shakespeare, the word is forever linked for me to all the species of exclusion and harassment that authorities soft-soap as protection: “right to work” laws, gratuitous prohibitions in public spaces, arbitrary restrictions on journalists, protesters, students. I would guess that, more than any other word, “solicit” helped make me politically liberal.

•••

“Spontaneous.” Google definition: “performed or occurring as a result of a sudden inner impulse or inclination and without premeditation or external stimulus.”

When I was ten, I nearly set fire to my family’s house. I, like many kids, needed to test grownups’ claims, and one that struck me as particularly dubious was that gasoline was flammable since it was a liquid. Every liquid I’d ever seen meet a flame—water, soda, juice, pee—had extinguished it, and, yes, I’d done that experiment any number of times. How could anything you poured out, that splashed and sparkled, possibly burn?

One day when my parents were out shopping I rolled our lawnmower onto the driveway, unscrewed the gas-tank cap, and tipped it over—a clumsy maneuver that created a bigger puddle than I intended. Some gas dribbled toward the driveway’s edge, but it looked as if it had evaporated so I wasn’t worried. I threw a lighted match at the entrancing polychrome fluid, jumped back, and thrilled at the windy whoosh. What do you know—the adults were telling the truth!

Within seconds, however, the harmless blue flames on the pavement had spread to the bushes in the adjacent flowerbed and were snaking toward the garage. I stomped on them, waved my arms and dashed about, but the area was already too wide and I found myself surrounded by fire. Then, out of nowhere, an older boy who lived across the street—who had evidently been watching me—ran up, pushed me away, grabbed a garden hose, and doused the fire in a heart-attack minute. Thanks be for fluids that behaved themselves!

I begged him not to say anything to my parents. Then I dashed inside and dialed the Wayne Township Fire Department, asking the guy who answered: “Hey, is there any way that gasoline can catch fire without a flame?”

“Spontaneous combustion,” he shot back, declining to elaborate.

I ran to the dictionary. I didn’t completely understand its complicated definition, though the gist was clear enough and flooded me with relief: a thing could ignite on its own without heat from any external source. I’d found my alibi, and a marvelous new word. What grownup could possibly have such specialized technical knowledge?

My father saw the damage as soon as he pulled up in his Buick Electra. I babbled out my terrifying tale of having “accidentally spilled some gas” while trying the start the lawnmower, after which I was shocked to see it “spontaneously catch fire all by itself. I have no idea how!” Then he asked me to tell him what really happened.

Long story short, since he knew exactly what spontaneous combustion meant and knew it couldn’t happen out on a driveway, he confronted me. He said that if I’d admitted I was trying an experiment because I didn’t believe that gasoline could burn he would have been annoyed and probably made me pay for the bushes. Instead my lie had deeply disappointed him and had to be punished.

This is how the word “spontaneous” became inseparable in my mind from visibility and discernment. My father saw right through me; there was no hiding from him, and this incident marked the turning point in childhood when I suddenly grasped how much more adults saw about me than I’d allowed myself to perceive. All children are humored and cosseted. Adults want them to enjoy their natural curiosity and spontaneity as long as possible. But that indulgence is mostly pretense, condescension. Real respect, I realized then, can’t come from pretense. It has to be earned. I’d been expelled from the Eden of childish egoism and felt naked and embarrassed.

From that day on, “spontaneous” could never again be an index of simple or sincere expression to me. The word instead reminds me how complicated trust, honesty, and instinctiveness are. If, for instance, someone praises an actor, a musician, or a painter for the amazing spontaneity of a creative act, I might share in the admiration but I’ll also ponder the years of preparation and seasoning behind the act. If a child asks for my spontaneous reaction to something—a joke, say, or a picture, or a feat of agility—I will oblige, but I’ll also wonder what his real game is. I know something else is at stake and want to know what.

“Spontaneous” set off brain-alarms when I first noticed how overused it was in the essays of Richard Wagner. Wagner felt that his music-drama was the spontaneous expression of the will of the German Volk, and this word made his ardor suspicious well before he made clear that the German Volk excluded Jews. “Spontaneous,” ironically enough, planted cautiousness in me and reinforced my naturally analytical disposition.

•••

The earliest word I remember adopting is “shortchange.” Google: “to cheat (someone) by giving insufficient money as change.”

On a field trip to the American Museum of Natural History in fourth grade, my parents gave me six dollars to spend on lunch and souvenirs. My bill at the cafeteria, where I’d scrimped to be able to afford a dinosaur at the gift shop, was $1.83. I gave the cashier my single, searched my pocket in vain for change, and then handed her my fiver. She gave me back seventeen cents, snapped her drawer shut, and wouldn’t acknowledge or investigate the error no matter how much I protested.

My tears came, the manager came, and the upshot was that they would reconsider my claim only at the end of the business day when all the register cash was counted. A sympathetic teacher brought me back to the cafeteria then, delaying the homebound buses, and the manager handed me four dollars—“Okay, young fella. I guess you were right!” I still felt indignant since the gift shop had closed. Worse, when I showed my four dollars on the bus, a creepy little red-haired kid cracked wise that he thought I’d just been “jewing” the lady over my lunch bill.

For me this was a story of epic complication and monstrous injury. My parents—whom I never told about the bus comment, which felt humiliating—glossed it with a single word: I’d been “shortchanged!” A good word, I remember thinking, useful, self-explanatory, but too succinct for the outrageous context. It left out the condescension, the bigotry, and the still more stinging injustice that I never got a dinosaur.

Since that day “shortchange” has carried a charge of special outrage for me. It doesn’t just mean cheating, but cheating with malice, discrimination, and intolerable collateral damage. I never hear or use it without flashing back to the experience of not being believed, of belonging to a category of person (children, Jews) whose complaints could be summarily brushed off. In college, I once joined an anti-apartheid divestment campaign I’d been ignoring after receiving a flyer about blacks being shortchanged by the South African government. Recently I deleted the Uber app from my smartphone after reading a headline about the company shortchanging its drivers in New York City. The word made it impossible to believe that Uber’s error was anything but a deliberate fraud.

Even when “shortchange” is used in its softer sense of underestimate—as in, “Don’t shortchange Mitch McConnell. He’s a sly old tortoise!”—it carries a repugnant aftertaste for me, a sugarcoating on dishonesty. Someone is lying to him- or herself about the real merit of an opponent. The word is fused in my head with the principle of fairness at the core of democracy, which is no doubt because as an adult I know that bourgeois democracy, with its rational values, is what gave Jews a path to social inclusion and equal opportunity after some two millennia of exclusion. Jews esteem articulateness. For a long time they did so out of faith in the Enlightenment dream that reason would soon reign over human affairs—that the articulate, being most reasonable, could compete to best advantage on a level playing field in the brave new reasonable world.

•••

Many people have personal dictionaries, lists of words and phrases they use and understand in idiosyncratic ways, shaped by their unique experiences and quirks. These dictionaries are usually unwritten, though a friend of mine told me that she and her siblings once wrote one as a gift for their father on his seventy-fifth birthday. It was about fifteen pages long, she said, and contained several dozen personalized definitions of not only his pet words but also the grumpy connotations, guilt-trippy subtexts, unspoken addendums, and affectionate intimations behind his expressions. The gift made him weep—the tears prompted, I imagine, from the feeling of being so clearly seen, so intimately known by his loved ones.

No one but me could compile a dictionary of my adopted words—and I could add a dozen more to these three—because I don’t use them often. They operate in my inner life as sources of knowledge and attributes of my character. They’re not quirks of speech. Even my wife of twenty-nine years didn’t know most of these stories until she read a draft of this essay. I sometimes think of these words as my deep personal myths.

Roland Barthes famously argued that myth was “a type of speech,” not merely a genre of story. He defined it as speech that treats anything (objects, ideas, people, places, words) as rooted in the natural order when in fact it reflects a very specific and contingent ethos or value system. Nations, communities, and social classes share experiences that make certain concepts appear ineluctably true, timeless, or transcendent. Loving wine, for instance, becomes a token of being truly French, loving ideas for their own sake a mark of being German, and trusting inarticulate people more than articulate ones an acid test of Americanness. Personal myths are much the same as communal ones, only subtler and more virulent in their effect on the psyche.

Since the election of Donald Trump, I’ve been struck again and again by the fact that the leader of my country is now a man so antipathetic to language that he might as well be my mythical enemy. Everyone can see that the communal myths that helped elect him are noxious and retrograde, even his supporters. What interests me more are the personal myths that roil and curdle and fester inside the man. These you can’t see but I imagine them to be grotesque counterpoles to mine.

Trump is a prodigy of belligerent self-absorption who hides behind a protective wall of muddled, degraded, and degrading language. Most of the words he relishes are monosyllabic fetishes (“win,” “sad,” “huge,” “weak”), and he deploys these more like punches than thoughts. I doubt many of them hark back to complicated childhood stories. Nevertheless, without getting too psychoanalytical about it, they probably all have sharp early associations with shaming by some combination of teachers, coaches, and Fred, his blunt and brutal father. One can easily imagine this rolling dumpster being set aflame with remarks to the effect that, “Whadda you smilin’ at? You didn’t win!”; “That’s a sad report card!”; or “Why such a weak swing? Choke up!”

We will obviously never know the whole truth about Trump’s myth of grievance against proper and precise language, though we can all agree it’s now a serious matter indeed. It’s one thing for an average person to heedlessly mangle and ravage words, quite another for the most visible and influential man in the world to do so.

Masha Gessen, in her wonderful “Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture” this year, carefully explained just how thorough his assault on clarity and truth is. She examined a random interview transcript and pointed out that approximately one in ten words was wholly drained of meaning. “Trump’s word-piles fill public space with static,” she wrote. “This is like having the air we breathe replaced with carbon monoxide. It is deadly. This space that he is polluting is the space of our shared reality.”

Our shared reality. That is what a myth purports to define but instead pollutes, sickens, and destroys when it is this malignant.

I’ll be candid about my own corner of this shared reality. My adopted-word myths admittedly contain fear, loathing, envy, and even aggression toward people who can’t or won’t speak well. Zadie Smith put the matter succinctly in a recent piece on the question of who owns black pain: “Our antipathies are simultaneously a record of our desires, our sublimated wishes, our deepest envies.” Yes, all those dull-witted kids who could catch, throw, and bat better than me, win more votes for student council, and get dates with the cheerleaders—they had things I wanted. Personal myths are defenses as well as weapons. At their worst, they’re a form of lamination keeping our ideas clean and utterly unreactive.

The learning moment then must be when the lamination tears. At some point, we must all hope, that will occur in Trumplandia. Some anomalous freethinkers in his ragtag army of gloating elite-bashers, pricked to attention by the jagged edges of, say, “collusion,” “rapist,” “hacking,” “laundering,” “proliferation,” “denial,” “fraud,” “fact,” “treason” or some other word that miraculously survives the wreckage, will pluck up the courage to admit their real resentments. Only then will the mythical curtain start to rend and make the driveling man behind it visible again.

•••

JONATHAN KALB is Professor of Theater at Hunter College, CUNY. He has published five books on theater and his essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation, Salmagundi, and many other publications. His blog, “Something the Dust Said,” can be found at www.jonathankalb.com.

Going to Ground

By Sarah Einstein

Like a good citizen, I call my senators at least once a week these days, but their aides are brusque. They tell me that Alexander and Corker support the President’s education agenda/healthcare reform/immigration order or whatever I’m outraged about on that day. In the first few weeks, they’d thank me for my call. Now they simply say, “Your objection is noted,” and hang up as quickly as they can. Once, as if caught off guard, one said, “Are you sure you live in Tennessee?”

I carry my passport with me everywhere these days.

I’ve begun to sort that which is precious and from that which is not. I make a small pile of the things I’d pack in the night, a larger one of the stuff I would leave. Everyone is insisting we’re just one Reichstag Fire away from fascism. On the news, I watch a steady stream of black people murdered by the state for their blackness, and I think it’s more likely that we’ve already had the Anschluss.

When I travel, I wear an inherited diamond I feel silly wearing at home. I remember being told when I was younger that a Jewish woman should always have enough jewelry on her body to bribe her way over a border. At the time it seemed quaint. Now it seems key. For the moment, the diamond ring’s still on my finger. I wonder if there will come a day I’ll need to sew it into the hem of my coat.

Over coffee, my friend Meredith talks about joining the resistance in a way that suggests we’re headed for a war she thinks we can win. I talk about going to ground, about building false walls for hiding people waiting for fake passports and safe transport. We scare ourselves and then laugh at ourselves, but even after the laughing we are still scared.

Meredith wasn’t always Meredith, and there is a passel of bills in our state legislature designed to make it impossible for her to be Meredith now. I tell her I will hide her in my hidden rooms, if it comes to that. She says she won’t be hidden, but she might move to Atlanta.

My coffee these days is chamomile tea. I’m jittery enough as it is.

If we flee, we will go to my husband’s family in Austria. The irony of this is not lost on me; there are Nazis in the family albums. They assure us that we’ll be safe there, should it come to that, and I believe them. They’ve clearly learned lessons that we have not.

My husband has stopped talking about becoming an American citizen and started talking about being an anchor relative.

My friend Jessica is spending all her vacation time in Israel this year, establishing the Right of Return. I’ve stopped questioning the politics of this; refugees go where they can.

This Hanukah, I will give my niece and nephews passports if they don’t already have them. If they do, I will give them whatever they ask for. I’ve lifted my moratorium on war toys. Maybe they should know how to handle a gun.

My closest disabled friends and I swap lists of medications and start to horde the things one or some of us need against the day we lose access to them. We read up on actual expiration versus labeled expiration dates. We refill prescriptions before we need to, just in case.

I have six boxes of Plan B in my closet, even though I’m long past child-bearing years. On campus, I spread rumors about a shadowy network of old women who will help younger women with travel and money for abortions if they can’t get the healthcare they need in their home towns. I call all my old woman friends and build the network. I keep their names and numbers in handwritten lists and hide them away.

I refuse to let my husband put a “Stop Trump” bumper sticker on our car. “That’s just foolish,” I say. I let him keep the Cthulu fish. For now.

A young woman cries in my office, afraid that if she comes out to her parents they will disown her; she’s still dependent on them. I tell her that she doesn’t have to come out to them now, or ever, if she doesn’t feel safe doing so. She looks shocked. It breaks my heart to have been the first to suggest the safety of the closet to her; I wonder what she is coming out of, if it had never occurred to her to remain in.

I’ve stopped going to protests and started going to meetings for which there are no flyers or Facebook event notices. To find them, you have to know someone who already has. We talk there of things I won’t write here. At first, we turned off our phones. Now, we leave them at home.

And yet still, like a good citizen, I call my senators at least once a week. Their aides are brusque. In the first few weeks, they’d thank me for my call. Now they hang up as quickly as they can. I haven’t yet given up on the dream of America, but I’m making contingency plans.

•••

SARAH EINSTEIN teaches Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Her essays and short stories have appeared in The Sun, Ninth Letter, Still, and others journals, and been awarded a Pushcart and a Best of the Net. She is the author of Mot: A Memoir (Univerity of Georgia Press, 2015) and Remnants of Passion (Shebooks, 2014).

The Men Who Won the Presidency

By Laura Fuller

Gentlemen of the city, what surprises you?

That there is suffering here, or that I know it?

—Annie Dillard

I’m from Iowa, but I lived in New York because I was in graduate school. I didn’t love my day job, but I loved and respected my boss. The company rented space in an office building near Penn Station, ten or fifteen floors accessible only by elevator.

After work one summer evening, I got on the elevator at the third floor, even though it was quite full. A group of nearly a dozen men from another business offered jovially to step aside for a lady. The oldest man closely resembled KFC’s Colonel. The majority were middle-aged men who looked ahead from under their shiny, tanned foreheads. With them rode a small handful of young men, maybe college or even high school student interns. Maybe it was Bring Your Kid to Work Day. Watch and learn, sons.

All of the men were white. All wore work-casual attire.

There was a feeling of levity in the air of this tightly closed space. Maybe it was Friday. I seem to remember something about golf.

When I stepped onto the elevator, they laughed, miming exaggerated gallantry and pretending to be my escorts to the ground level, rather than a crowd of strange men in a small space. I laughed along, even as the man standing behind me took the joke to some planet where it felt fun and funny for him to put his hands on my shoulders. He gave me a very real, very unwanted massage as a joke in the series of Jokes About Men as Protective Escorts and Not Predators. The punch line here was something like Relax— you’re safe here.

I kept laughing as I wriggled free, but I did not turn around.

The doors opened on the second floor, and jocularity spilled forth onto one of my coworkers, who waited for the elevator with his bike. My wide eyes registered his surprise. He seemed confused: What great fun was happening, and how did it involve me? He didn’t join us.

The doors closed again, and I began to realize what had happened, that I wanted to tell the man behind me that it’s wrong to give a woman a backrub when she hasn’t asked for one. But before I could speak, the men had flooded past me, off the elevator and out onto the sidewalk.

I stood a stupefied moment, then walked swiftly toward the door to catch them. But they were already gone—across the street or dispersed in all directions. They looked like everyone else on the sidewalks.

I walked downtown without a destination, and my horror grew: everyone in the elevator saw what happened, and no one stopped it. I couldn’t report the guy if I didn’t know who he was. Anyway, it was my fault. It couldn’t have been wrong if I’d laughed with him. Maybe I had asked for a backrub.

In the days that followed, I told a coworker who told my boss—a man. After reviewing the security tape, my boss took me to breakfast and asked me, in all seriousness, whether I’d feel better if the man who gave me a backrub in an elevator lost his job.

I talked it over with a friend who was my superior in the workplace. She couldn’t believe I would even consider taking this guy’s job. This stuff is dumb, she conceded, but it happens, and I should put it behind me. He probably had a wife and kids. Don’t ruin his life.

I let him go unpunished.

•••

A few months later, my partner and I traveled to the Midwest for the wedding of one of his old friends. It was fall, and I wore a fabulous midnight blue dress with a ruffle and puffy sleeves. I wore some equally fabulous hose—pearly and translucent with thin, black, vertical stripes.

After some dancing, we headed to the bar for a refill. My partner chatted with the pastor who’d married the couple. While I awaited my drink, I overheard the pastor congratulating my date on my “naughty-girl stockings.”

I wished that my partner had told him off, but instead he moved me away from the bar before I could douse this man of God with his own drink. I was deeply embarrassed. I wanted to speak up to the pastor or his wife, but my date stopped me, and his face was pained with that decision. This man was a minister, and I was the bride’s distant friend’s plus-one. What would people think? There was no need to make a scene.

When I later found the pastor on Facebook, I drafted and deleted message after message. I wanted to tell him, “I know what you said about me. I know what you say when you are not speaking to a congregation. I know how you really are.”

I wanted to tell the newly married couple about him, but my partner and close friends advised against it. I would cheapen the newlyweds’ vows, sully their wedding memories, and help myself not at all. I stayed quiet.

•••

Before the elevator and the wedding reception, I went to a clinic on the Upper West Side. I’d been in the neighborhood numerous times for work or to visit the American Folk Art Museum, and it had never occurred to me, not once, that I might be in danger there. Drivers, pedestrians, tourists, businesspeople, hot dog vendors, and wealthy New Yorkers everywhere—too many witnesses.

Buzzed in through the clinic’s locked door, I followed the nurse to the exam room with artless walls and rude fluorescent light. She pointed to a table covered with a white paper sheet and said that I could either remove all of my clothing from the waist down, or remove just my shoes and underwear and pull up my skirt. Either way, I was to cover my legs with a paper blanket and sit down. The doctor would be with me shortly.

I tucked my underwear into my purse and sat on the table with my skirt puffed at my elbows.

I turned when I heard the door open. A short man wearing navy blue scrubs entered the room, followed by a nurse. The doctor had dishwater hair, blue eyes. He shook my hand—I noticed his bandaged thumb—and we exchanged smiles. He confirmed my name and that I’d come to the clinic for IUD insertion.

The doctor asked how I was doing, and I told him I was a little nervous.

I expected to hear, There’s nothing to be afraid of. Instead, he said, “Who are you having sex with?”

He asked how long I’d been with my boyfriend, and I made up a figure. “About four months?”

His voice was hard. “Are you sure?”

“About which part?”

“Well, you know why I’m asking, don’t you.”

I didn’t. “Because this is a long-term solution?”

“Well, yeah. And four months isn’t very long.” His face suggested that he shouldn’t need to explain this.

He asked, “Do you know what happens if you get an STD with one of these things?” Before I could answer, he said, “You’re screwed.”

I nodded.

“You’re screwed.”

I looked down at my hands clasped in my lap, thumbs twiddling, then gripped the sides of the table. I was half naked and covered with a big paper towel. I rubbed my feet together. The paper crinkled.

He went on: “I mean, you catch gonorrhea or chlamydia and you’re infertile. You’re completely screwed. So I’ll ask you again: Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” and my voice was annoyingly timid. I cleared my throat, “I’ve known him a long time, like, from before we were dating … and even before that, I wouldn’t, I’ve never been … in a non-monogamous, I just, I’m not worried about that.”

The doctor turned away from me as I spoke. I was still stammering when he cut me off, “Okay, if you have any reason—any reason—to believe your monogamy has been compromised, that you’ve been exposed to an STD, you come in here immediately. Do you understand me?”

I was taller than him from where I sat on the table, but I felt as if I were looking up at him.

“I’m going to do this for you anyway,” he conceded. “I’m going to do it because you’re affluent.”

A pause.

“You’re affluent, and you look smart. You don’t look like some sixteen-year-old on the street who just wants an IUD because she’s bored of taking the Pill.” He mocked this hypothetical girl and meant to compliment me for being unlike her, for having insurance.

He sat down on a wheeled stool and gestured for me to put my feet up, but he was still talking to me. I spread my legs from the knees down, not wanting to expose myself while he seemed, for some reason, angry. I sat propped up on my hands, with my knees stuck together but my feet apart, heels in stirrups.

He put on latex gloves. The nurse handed him a blue kit full of scissors and other shiny, sharp tools. He pointed to a small black lamp next to him, positioned it to shine light between my legs, and said, “We had a woman used to work in here, black as this lamp, five-foot-nine, thin, just beautiful. I mean this woman was put on this earth to make babies because it would make us all a more beautiful race—heh-heh—but you know what? Her reproductive organs are worthless. Like sacks of pus inside her body. You know why?”

I answered the question to prove I had read the brochure: “Because she had an IUD and it got infected?”

“Yep. Sacks of pus, just worthless.” He shook his head to reiterate the tragedy of the beautiful, infertile woman, then noticed that I was still upright. His face conveyed annoyance.

“All right now, lay back.” He tapped my knees and instructed me to let them fall to the sides and relax.

“Scoot forward. Yeah—to the edge of the table. Now we’re doing the Mirena, right? Not the copper kind?”

I said yes. I could only see the top of his head.

“Good,” he said, “The other kind sucks.” He laughed like we shared the joke. “But you know who loves it? Hispanics, the Mexican-American women. They come in here asking for it by name.” He said women who speak Spanish prefer the copper IUDs, which, I’d read, were perfectly effective and lasted ten years to Mirena’s five, because they were a “knock-off brand.” He trailed off into a chuckle and I felt compelled to do the same, seeking safety in the muscle memory of a doctor’s orders routine, even though this did not feel familiar.

I turned my head to the right to see the nurse, herself Latina, arranging tools on the counter, facing the wall. I failed to stand up to the doctor seated between my knees.

“Okay, you’re going to feel a cold mist. That’s an antiseptic,” he warned, and his voice was suddenly gentle. “And then a bit of a pinch and pressure. That’s a local anesthetic. It’ll make the rest a lot more comfortable.”

While he warned me, I worked to believe that I’d been misreading him. Really, he must mean well. He was a doctor.

The antiseptic spray was cold.

He asked me where I was from, and when I said Iowa he threw his head back in laughter. “Oh! So you’re out here chasing your dreams, are you? Did you follow your dreams to New York City?”

There was a sudden pressure from inside of me, and a pinprick. “That’s the anesthetic,” he said.

Rather than defending my home state, I added that I lived abroad last year. I wanted to impress him with Dubai. (A dull push from inside my abdomen. Odd pressures, something moving inside me.)

When prompted, I coughed, and he slipped something into me, fast.

“But Dubai sucks, doesn’t it?”

I heard myself say that I would not like to live there again, a true statement that, in this light and this air, sounded like betrayal. I said I was glad to come home, that it felt better to live where food grows naturally. He approved of my explanation: “You’re funny.” I hadn’t made a joke.

He said Dubai seemed like a worse version of Las Vegas to him. “I’ve known a lot of people who have moved to Vegas, and you know what they always do?”

He waited, forcing me to ask him, “No, what?”

“They come crawling back.”

He shoved his stool backwards from the table, smiling triumphant. “Would you believe that’s it?” He removed his gloves. I sat up immediately.

The doctor boasted, “Now what was that, like three minutes?”

I blinked.

“I had an attending physician in med school who took twenty minutes to put in an IUD, and it hurt, you know?”

Blink.

“Yeah, but that didn’t hurt, right?”

Silence.

“Right. You wanna know the secret? You numb ’em up. It’s that local anesthetic. You numb up the cervix and you can—” He saw horror spread across my face. “I can do whatever I want.”

He went on to tell me warning signs to look out for after the procedure. “But right now?” he said. “It’s beautiful.” He laughed like he’d won a game.

He shook my hand again, and I said slowly and clearly, “Thank you.” I looked in his eyes. I meant it.

•••

Some days later, I printed paperwork from the state of New York to report this doctor. But I didn’t send it. Instead, I felt tremendous guilt and shame, internalized all fault for the things he’d said to me, thought briefly about killing myself, and found a therapist.

He can do whatever he wants.

•••

I am a smart woman with a good life. I have a good job and kind friends, a supportive partner and a safe home. I am in good health. I enjoy privileges I did nothing to earn.

Nonetheless, my life would be better if I had not been assaulted in my workplace, abused while seeking medical care, or reduced to a sexual object by a man who teaches morality.

My neighborhood in Brooklyn was full of people of many races and social classes. There were small children in strollers. High schoolers stood self-consciously in circles. Drunken men hung around outside the liquor store. There were many languages in the air. Cops walked the beat. From my bed I heard loud parties and midnight basketball games. I even heard a gunshot once. I was surrounded by things I’d been taught to distrust and fear. Nothing bad ever happened to me there.

The only men who have abused me are men I was taught to trust without question. They are men who know no consequences, men whose inner goodness is implied by their career choices, their age, their affluence, their skin color.

Time and again, these are the men who have caused me to think that perhaps I was not good or smart or worth my own life. Although I was allowed to speak up about their missteps, and people may have even listened to me if I’d done so, social pressure made me think better of making a fuss.

If the businessman’s employer or the church or the New York State Office of Professional Medical Conduct had issued some reprimand for these men, traditional wisdom told me, I would undo their lives of otherwise perfect service: These men do not deserve a second chance; they deserve a never-ending first chance.

My silence came from the supposition that these men were as good as it gets. If these men were not our businessmen, our doctors, our pastors, we might just have to do without commerce, without care, without God.

I now understand my decision to over-pretend at normalcy, to thank the doctor, to keep quiet: It seems this doctor has been elected president. So has the pastor. So has the businessman.

Years ago, Donald Trump said into a microphone that he cannot resist kissing women he thinks are beautiful, and that he can do this without the women’s permission because he is famous. He can “grab them by the pussy.” He can do anything he wants.

When asked about these statements in a debate, Trump shrugged off all criticism. “Don’t tell me about words,” he said.

Americans hold dear a sweet trope about childhood: When you grow up, you can be anything you want. You can be a farmer or an actor or a teacher. You can be a doctor. You can be a pastor. You can be a businessman. You can be the president. It’s hopeful.

Trump heard this promise and thought he understood, but he needs someone to tell him about words. When he was promised you can be anything you want, it seems young Donald heard you can do anything you want.

•••

This essay used to be confident and indignant. It used to declare, if you want to be the president, you must do service for the people you wish to govern and treat them with respect. It is best not to do things that amount to sexual assault and brag about these activities. If you do that—let me tell you about these words—you cannot be the president.

I was wrong. This man is the president. Each day we awake to the new horrors his reign has brought, and we punch as if blindfolded. More crises will come, but I do not know just what these will be.

I do know that to speak of men’s abuses of power is more important today than it was before the election.

I know that my silence about such abuses means harm to those whose identities render them mute to the ears of those in power. Even when I am not the direct beneficiary of my own actions, I am responsible for the world around me. We share everything.

I know my own family, people who would never identify as racists or sexists, voted for Trump nevertheless. I try to hold up the fact of Trump’s election and get a good look at it. I know it’s gravely important that we work to understand. For unknown reasons, this is most difficult in the mornings.

•••

I’ve made the strange decision to throw myself at gardening. I planted bulbs in my rented front yard despite the fear that many would be dug up by squirrels or eaten by rabbits before they could bloom in the spring. I set paperwhites in the windows all around my house, inspired by their ability to bloom without soil, to bloom especially when I needed them most, as snow flew outside and the whole world seemed dead. In the darkest days of winter, I bought a houseplant that is a carnivore. This plant nurtures itself by eating its pests. I found its hunger beautiful, and I hung it in my kitchen.

•••

Despite bruised hope and disillusionment, the end of this essay remains:

My great-great-grandmother sent a song down through the generations. In a mock-operatic voice, the women of my family have used this song to goad our brothers and husbands: “Let the women do the work, do the work, and the men lie around, around, around.”

Yes, let’s.

•••

LAURA FULLER is an Iowan and a pie enthusiast. She lives in Wisconsin, where she teaches English and writes essays. Her work has appeared in Misadventures and various other publications and has been featured in performance at Lincoln Center. She holds an M.F.A. in nonfiction writing from The New School in New York.

Transference

By J. J. Mulligan

My daughter has begun to do this thing where she tucks both of her little thumbs inward and then clenches her four fingers around the thumbs into tight fists held in front of her, all while tensing the muscles seemingly in her entire body. She doesn’t breathe for a few seconds as her face grows from a porcelain white to pork pink and finally to bullfighter-cape red. A few veins stick out in various places and she shakes slightly from the effort, as if her thirty-two inch body were lifting some invisible too-heavy weight. Then she abruptly stops, unclenches her hands and releases everything she had previously tensed. The red leaves her face and she goes about whatever she was doing before.

She did this the first few times in the same afternoon. We asked her what was wrong, why she did that—as if she could respond—and then finally we told her, “No! Don’t do that!” She understands surprisingly much for a one-year-old, but she kept doing the clenching and tensing no matter how many times we admonished her in Spanish first, then English although she understands it less. My wife began to cry and I was at a loss for words to console her. We called the pediatrician, not sure what was happening with our daughter. The pediatrician asked us a few questions: Did she have a far-off look in her eyes after the “episode”? Did the actions seem involuntary? No and no, we said. Another string of questions led the pediatrician to rule out seizures and thus he saw no need for us to take her to the emergency room. Because we had the one-year visit scheduled already in two days, the pediatrician told us not to worry—he would look at it then.

Those two days, of course, were agonizing. Any new parent that hears the word seizure in reference to their child, even if it’s to say that they don’t suffer from seizures, is incapable of ignoring possible symptoms. We looked for a far-off look in our daughter’s eyes at every turn and analyzed every movement to make sure it was voluntary.

Two long days later we were in the pediatrician’s office, with our daughter receiving the necessary vaccines, her height and weight being checked, blood drawn to check iron levels and so on—all the standard one-year visit formalities. At some point, between vaccines, our daughter tucked her thumbs inward, clenched her fists as tightly as she could, and tensed her entire body. She turned red and visibly shook from the effort, this time looking more as if she were ferociously constipated than if she were lifting an invisible weight. The pediatrician pulled the needle back and asked us if this was what we had called about. Yes, we said, this is exactly what she’s been doing that has us so worried. That, the pediatrician responded, is your daughter’s way of expressing her frustration or anger at something. Because she can’t speak yet, she has to show or let out her frustration in other ways. It’s perfectly normal, he concluded, and in fact, from the age of one up until eighteen or twenty months, she will have moments of intense rage, with outbursts of tears and screaming that could last several minutes. We should ignore these moments and not try everything in our power to console her—the outbursts will pass with time.

My wife left the appointment satisfied with the pediatrician’s explanation—seizures left her mind—and ready to ignore our daughter’s future fist clenching scenes and moments of rage when they should start to appear. I, on the other hand, was distraught; I knew that the pediatrician didn’t have the full story and neither did my wife.

During my days, I represent immigrant youth from Central America who can’t afford an attorney and are being deported—many of them will be slaughtered by gangs in their home countries if they’re returned. What my wife and the pediatrician had not taken into account was my daughter’s time alone with me following those days when the world seems to have you in its teeth and won’t soften the bite. The times when I would come home from work destroyed from my interactions with the Department of Homeland Security and she would cry deep and uncontrollably into my face while I tried to put her to sleep. Or a fifteen-year-old Salvadorian girl would share the rapes she had suffered on her journey to the United States, and then my daughter wouldn’t eat the food I had prepared for her that night. Or a young woman, an undocumented college graduate, would beg me to find some form of immigration relief that she could possibly qualify for so that she can live out just a slice of the American Dream she was told existed for everyone, and there would be nothing I could do for her, and then my daughter would thrash around while I was changing her diaper and everything on the changing table would be a mess, dripping to the floor. All of these moments would intertwine inextricably with the 2016 presidential race, the ominous cloud hanging over everything and all of us.

In those moments, where my thoughts would seem profoundly dark although the sun had just set and rays of light still broke through the Brooklyn townhouses visible from my daughter’s bedroom, I would clench my teeth and tense my whole body, not breathe for a few seconds and if there had been a mirror nearby, I likely would’ve seen my face turning red as well. I would shake slightly from the invisible but actual weight and if I was holding my daughter in my arms, I would hold her a bit tighter and sometimes even jump up and down a few times, begging her through gritted teeth to stop crying and go to sleep, eat her food, or be still while I changed her diaper. The throbbing at my temples would become less dull and unrelated frustrations would blend together. My daughter had undoubtedly picked up her fist-clenching, body-tensing behavior from those moments—I know it and no explanation from the pediatrician can change this. The frustrations of my days representing immigrant youth in an unfair system, interspersed with the twenty-four-hour news cycle on the general decline of American policy and politics—including a man that wants to deport everyone, all of the young men and women who have become more than clients to me—are bleeding into my nights with a rapidly developing baby, who soaks up every emotion and stimuli her father gives her. These are the cracks on the hardened shell of a man who keeps everything in.

•••

In one of my rare escapes from the house after work, I met up with a friend at a bar not far from the Nostrand stop I get off at the other day. As with any conversation for the last six months, we talk about the presidential race and it feels as if we are summarizing an episode of Jerry Springer more than the intricacies of the highest office. I try to share some of the things I see and hear at work, but as often happens, not much comes out. I say the government is unfair and that President Obama, a man I love, is complicated when it comes to immigrants and immigration. Complicated indeed, replies my friend. He brings up the basics: the two million deportations carried out under President Obama that have torn apart families versus the Executive Orders signed by him to protect young immigrants and the undocumented parents of US citizens.

We change the subject. This friend of mine has a more hands-on job than mine: he works at a butcher shop in Park Slope. I prefer to hear about his job, since he’s always creating new sausage recipes and so on. He mentions a Banh Mi flavored sausage he is tinkering with.

After we clink glasses on our second beer, he tells me something he’s never told me before about his job, and it sticks with me. He tells me that he has no problem advising each person that enters the shop which cut of meat is the freshest that day, which would make a great dinner and the best way to cook the meat; that he derives pleasure from imagining the customers enjoying their meat products; that he even enjoys slicing the meats and arranging them on display. But, in order to do all of this, he said it is vital that he cannot think about the lambs being slaughtered.

I thought about this a lot on the walk home. Every immigrant youth that has come into my office has the same question, the question that has forced itself into every legal intake I’ve recently done, every application I’ve completed, every court appearance, as if none of these painful and tortured migrant lives really matter in the end. It is the question everyone working with immigrants—and maybe all of us in general—cannot escape: What if he wins the presidency?

Eleven million people will be deported, he says. No Muslims will enter the country and Mexico will pay for a wall to keep everyone out of the U.S.

My friend’s comment came into my mind again tonight on the way home from work.

Now it’s one a.m.

I have sat at this couch since eight p.m. watching a map of the United States of America slowly and incomprehensibly turn more red than blue. I listened half-heartedly to analysis and prophecy—teetering between falsities and doomsday—finally turning the television off when the end was all but assured. I didn’t wait for the final call or hear either candidate speak; I held a slim hope that I was already asleep and the morning would reveal the actual reality. My eyes have been closing for some time and there is no one awake to talk with me. This could all not be happening.

Asleep or awake, I get off the couch. I pour myself a glass of water and go into my daughter’s room, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dark, to the new world. Once they have, I look into her crib and see her lying on her back, arms and legs in a peaceful outstretched X with her chest slowly rising and falling in the middle. I reach into the crib and pick her up. She murmurs slightly and moves a bit as I put her on my shoulder and carry her to our bed. My wife is sleeping just as peacefully—she has an early day tomorrow and was convinced enough by the confident and uniform predictions that tonight held no surprises. She watched the first states being called, shaking her head when I tried to explain what little I understand of electoral college. Then she went to bed and I thought I would follow soon after. My wife, the immigrant. America has just slit her wrists.

Looking at my wife and holding our daughter in my arms, I become more aware, somehow more at ease than at any moment in the last year—as if all of it has been a daze of too many deadlines and deportations played to the soundtrack of bigotry and racism. I know what is happening now: the dull fear, the this-will-never-happen, is reality. I am awake. I feel my daughter in my arms and shiver at the thought that my days had been transferred to her in some way, that her bright eyes and developing mind are soured by emotions I have let overrun me. How do you help others without destroying yourself, your family? How do you keep a belligerent world from seeping into your daughter’s bedroom? My fatherhood has been enveloped by a dark blanket which I just now—ironically—feel that I am shaking off. This is the moment we have most feared coming true. And I find that we are ready for it.

I lay our daughter next to my wife and crawl into bed next to them. My daughter has kept on sleeping just as peacefully as before, like her mother. I roll onto my left shoulder so that they fill my view. It doesn’t seem so dark now; I can make out all of their features. I think to myself that every day will be okay if this is how it ends. I breathe deeply and instead of tensing muscles and clenching teeth—symptoms of the anger and frustration I’d felt so much in the last year—I discover love and comfort where it has always been. The world away from our mattress matters as much as an itch on a toe as you fall asleep: you leave the doorstep of sweet dreams if you scratch it. These women next to me are my lifeline. I see this as if a blanket has been lifted.

My eyes are too heavy now but I steal one last glance at them, then I quietly fall asleep. Tomorrow the world will be different, but this and us will not. We were part of a tussle; now comes the war. Tomorrow the fight erupts: the butcher is coming for every lamb.

•••

J. J. MULLIGAN is a non-profit immigration attorney representing immigrant youth who cannot afford an attorney in New York City. He is a new father, former college basketball player, and a diehard San Francisco Giants fan. His writings and translations have appeared in his mother’s native Chile and in various publications here in the U.S.