Category: nonfiction

Iowa Blues, and Greens | Summer Hammond

the cornfields. 

McCausland, Iowa. Population 300. 

Row upon row of green, shimmery stalks, leaves turning liquid in the breeze. 

The cornfields are my sea. 

Mom says, wistful, “I wanted land, gardens. I wanted my kids to run barefoot, and climb trees.” 

She didn’t want a double-wide mobile home trailer, even if it is the yellow of lemon pie.  

She wanted an old farmhouse with lace curtains drifting and billowing, parting to reveal glimpses of the sun, a wild orange, melting into our sea. 

Every September, we pile into the RV, and drive across the Mississippi, all the way to Bishop Hill, Illinois. Jordbruksdagarna, Agricultural Days, with singing and dancing and sorghum making, woven brooms and needle in the haystack, kettle corn popping, butterflied pork chops sizzling, and homemade stew ladled into Styrofoam cups from a steaming, giant black pot. It’s here, in the 19^th century Swedish community, still preserved, that Mom has found her fairy tale. 

A two-story farmhouse converted into a shop. As tradition dictates, we ascend the charming creaking stairs to our rooms. The two bedrooms across from each other she’s picked out for Sister and I. Wood floors, braided rugs, girlish homestead beds dressed in hand-stitched Swedish weathervane quilts. We do not see the price tags. We see our house, our rooms. What might have been. 

Mom’s face gets soft and dreamy. We all sink down on a bed. It’s the way she squeezes us to her. It’s the way she tells us she loves us. Can we buy it? Can we buy it right now? I want to purchase, whatever the cost, not this house but this moment with her. I could live here forever.  

Like any sea, the cornfields have power. They can swallow you whole. You can hide inside them. You can disappear. 

All summer, I swim, running the rows in bare feet, wind-milling my arms, the hot, dry earth mounding between my toes. I lay on my back and float, on a long daydream, the Iowa kind, woven of sky and cornsilk. 

The way the tassels whisper to me. 

They are my seashell. 

When I listen to them, I close my eyes, try to hear the whole world. 

gravel pit road.

Our lemon pie double-wide sits on a plot of land, down a long dirt lane, off Gravel Pit Road. 

Once it was called Quarry Road. Then the town voted to change it to Gravel Pit. 

Dad calls to protest the name change. 

I am eight years old. 

I am not allowed to have crushes. Mom broke the little gold lock on my little diary, red, the color of the Kool-Aid I am also forbidden. She read about my crush on Bryan Baker. The bad boy of 3^rd grade. He pulled me under the coats when we lined up for the bus at the end of the day. He smooshed my lips to his. I didn’t write that. I wrote that I liked him. I drew a picture of me and him, stick figures with curly hair, holding hands, surrounded by hearts.  

Mom shook the diary in my face, her eyes ablaze, twitching. I don’t remember what she said. The words replaced by the broken lock in my face, jangling, jangling, jangling. 

I develop an uncontrollable crush on dump trucks. The wild roar, the truck bed that clang-clangs when empty, bumping over potholes towards the quarry – the gravel pit. The slow creaking rise of the bed to the sky, the sparkle and clatter of rocks raining out. I swoon over their rusty funky feral machine beauty. 

Mom buys me dolls. When she was little, she says, her dolls were her salvation. 

My dolls lay in the cradle, staring at the ceiling with blank eyes. 

I play with a beloved assortment of miniature dump trucks. I devote the day to building enormous towers of dirt. I am focused and passionate. My dream is to one day own a GIANT dump truck. Tonka. It’s too expensive. And yet, what heaping loads of gorgeous dirt and gravel a Tonka truck would carry! 

Mom watches me with wonder. “When will you like dollies?” She asks. It’s nearly a plea. 

Churning in my gut, a visceral aversion. 

At the Kingdom Hall, where we worship as Jehovah’s Witnesses, new mothers pass their babies around like the unleavened bread and wine. They are sacred. We (the women and girls) are all expected to partake. 

I never want to hold them, these sniveling and shriveled tyrants – kings and captors. I want to run from them. 

The first time I remember fearing my mother. 

My sister and I emerge from the mud puddle that collects in our driveway after a hard rain. Iowa pothole puddles, luxurious, coffee colored, gleaming, and irresistible. Sister and I dipped our toes in, then lost control. Now our matching pink terry cloth rompers are saturated, dripping with mud. Sister looks me over. Her face grows stark white. You can see, vividly, her freckles, interspersed with dried mud. A constellation. “We are in trouble,” she promises. “It’s going to be bad.” Her voice grave, her eyes round as she grips my hand. 

I don’t believe her. I don’t believe her fear. 

Mom’s rage blows our hair back. 

Like cartoon figures. 

My sister’s freckles float off, then explode, die around us. 

Like stars. 

schmitz farm.

A stately two-story cream-colored farmhouse, majestic red barn, great silver silos rising up, shining splendid. 

The Schmitz’ are the royal family of Gravel Pit Road. We buy our milk from them. 

Mom and I walk, holding hands, swinging our empty milk jugs. The gravel crunch-crunches beneath our shoes. 

In an outbuilding with a concrete floor and green peeling paint, we fill our jugs from a big stainless steel tank. A German shepherd sleeps nearby. Her pointy face frightens me. I tip-toe past her, lay my hand flat against the tank. I close my eyes, breathe. The warm belly of a goddess. 

Frothy creamy milk gushes from a spigot. 

Fredrick Schmitz, Sr., struts in hickory striped overalls, the kind worn by train engineers, steel toe work boots on his feet. A green John Deere ball cap stuck on his white-blond hair. He tucks his thumbs into his suspenders, belly ballooned out. His eyes, snake slits in his florid face. By God, this is my farm. He spits. He curses. He yells. At cows, neighbors, and sometimes school children, who visit the farm on field trips. He drives his green and yellow tractor chariot, taking his sweet time, hogging most of the road. You can see him smirk in that big tractor mirror.  

Fredrick Schmitz, Jr. The son. The prince. Owns a collection of dirt bikes, mopeds, ATC’s and ATV’s. 

He shoots guns, sets off firecrackers – and Mom’s temper. 

Perched atop a combine harvester, he hacks, leans over, spits on Sister and me when we’re digging out the mail from our dented, silver mailbox. We have the biggest mailbox of anyone in the trailer park. That makes us rich. 

Sister claws a loogie from her beautiful long curls.  

Heather Schmitz is the princess. 

Two years ahead of me in school but – if she’d passed Kindergarten – would be three. 

Heather has short, shiny platinum hair, cut to her square jaw. Snake eyes under blunt bangs. Football player shoulders. 

She shoves me down hard into the rocks under the jungle gym. 

She and her friends attack, swarm, grabbing my friendship pins from my sneakers, scattering those precious beads. 

I have a lot of friendship pins, but not a lot of friends. Sister made them for me. She selected each bead carefully. My favorite, the pale pink, like the ghosts of the extravagant peonies Mom grows in our front yard. 

The beads. The beads. 

I sort through the rocks to find them. The beads they didn’t want. 

rural route #1.

Our long dirt lane off Gravel Pit Road has a name. 

It is the #1 Rural Route in all of America!

I am a child. That’s how I think of it. 

A neighborhood of trailers. 

Ours is the only double-wide, the only one the color of lemon pie. 

Across from us, in the weeds, a broken down blue single sags. 

Sometimes, when I ride by on my bike, I hear Lonna Tubbs screaming, throwing dishes. Either at her kids, Earl and Tina. Or her husband, Hans. 

Her screams, like talons tearing out her guts. 

Hans spends hours sitting in his truck drinking beer, listening to Polka. In the winter, Lonna chases Dad with a $20 bill because he’s got a snow plow, and he plows Rural Route #1. The city plows always forget our lane. 

Stern, she shakes the money at him when he refuses, then tucks it in his coat pocket, and skedaddles. I’m grateful to her. She recognizes Dad’s hard work and realizes that, without him, we’d all be stuck inside a fortress of snow. 

Still, I can’t dislodge her screams from my head.   

Annie Byrd lives on the other side of us. She is a widow. I know this with deep certainty because Mom is the one who, in a blizzard, stuck on her coat, hat, and boots and pushed against the wind and blinding snow to check on Annie Byrd’s husband after Annie called, hysterical. 

Mom had to tiptoe into their bedroom.

Mom had to lean in over Annie Byrd’s husband, laying there in bed. 

Mom had to be the one to tell her. 

No breath. 

Now Annie Byrd mostly keeps to herself. But she’s adopted the trailer kids. We are, she says, her “heart” children. Instead of throwing away her bouquets, composed of peonies, roses, her most lush and luxurious flower gems, she scatters them in the lane, so we can come get them. 

I pull my rusty red wagon, bobbing over the potholes, and juddering along the rocks. Sister and I fill the wagon with roses. Around us, the other Rural Route #1 kids mill, earnestly arranging their own artful bouquets. I imagine that Annie Byrd watches us from her window while she washes the dishes, her soul filling full up with warm love. 

When we get off the school bus, Annie Byrd calls to us from her doorway, waving us over. She gives us homemade caramel apples to take home. The caramel has oozed and dripped, silky shiny, onto the white parchment paper. She’s garnished each stick with a ribbon, tied in a perfect, tiny bow. 

The specialness of this – almost too much to bear. 

the murphys.     

The Murphys live in a white single. Justin’s building a nice screened-in porch. 

When he’s not drunk. 

Jackie, Willy, Sister and I wait for the school bus at the end of the lane, huddled like a little herd of cows, stomping our feet, keeping each other warm on cold mornings. 

Jackie and I have an on-again-off-again relationship. 

Mostly off. 

When we play, the undercurrent is jaggedy. Even when we’re sneaking RC Cola in the outhouse, giggling. This alliance over forbidden food, and games laced with eroticism, carries an ominous bomb-like tick. 

More often than not, we end up in a savage dirt war, wrestling on the ground, balling clumps of each other’s hair in our hands. 

Sometimes, Jackie, Willy, Sister, and I all play hide ‘n go seek when the full moon hangs low, tickling the tops of the pine trees. 

One time, after an hour searching for Jackie, we can’t find her and give up. We call for her, around and around the yard. 

We walk up and down the lane, calling and calling. 

She never shows. 

Scared, we push open the front door of her trailer, ready to yell for help.

And there she sits. 

Chomping a bologna sandwich at the kitchen table! 

She grins up at us, devilish, beneath a luxurious milk mustache. 

This nearly beats the time we round the corner of the house only to find Jackie, squatting by our back porch, a glistening moon-lit puddle spreading fast beneath her feet. 

Sister freaks. Get out! Get out of our yard! 

Both Jackie and Willy do this, relieve themselves in the neighbor’s yards. 

Those Murphy kids, they’re troubled. 

Mom says. 

One night, Justin’s driving home drunk. 

He spins out-of-control on Gravel Pit Road by the Riley Farm. His car bursts into flames. He’s passed out, dead drunk. 

Quiet and shy Marv Riley, corn farmer, runs from his barn, heaves Justin from the fire. 

Justin will be in surgery over the next few days. Doctors will not be able to salvage much of his face. 

The next morning, getting ready for school, Mom pulls Sister and I aside. The Murphy kids won’t be in school today. Your Dad and I called the principal to let him know what happened. If you hear the kids gossip, shut it down. Both those kids are going through enough. 

Her eyes churn. 

The kind of righteous indignation, and mercy, that blooms 

from knowing that kind of pain. 

riley farm.

My best friends are cats. 

Trees.

Books.  

And a lively troop of imaginary friends: Nancy, Brittany, and Roberta. 

Nancy is a romantic sort who sips from honeysuckle blossoms, barefoot beside me in the cool, dewy grass. 

Brittany wears glasses, reads with me. She moved away, but comes back to visit when I’m sad and need someone to talk to. 

Roberta wears her hair up, sophisticated, and sings opera. 

I swing inside my Pig-Pen. 

The Pig-Pen is a fenced-in play area. Mom says, when they first put me in, and closed the gate, I ignored the swings, the sandbox, the toys. 

All I could see was the closed gate.

I ran to the fence, wailing. I grasped the fence, yanked, tried and tried to pull that fence down, stomping my feet. 

I love hearing the story of the Pig-Pen. 

My revolt.  

Now I’m big and can latch and unlatch the gate. I have a swing, a tire swing, a trapeze, and a teeter-totter. Dad made them all for me in his workshop. He is my own personal magician. All these things he’s made, give me wings. 

Late one night, my toes pointed to the stars, I’m swinging. And I’m singing my heart out. 

A passionate ballad, an ode to weeping willows. 

My favorite tree. 

They can be sad and still be beautiful. 

Still loved. 

After a while, I realize. I have an audience. He’s leaned up against the fence, chewing on a piece of straw, quietly listening. 

I stop swinging, my sneakers dragging through the dirt. 

I was raking out the barn, he says. I heard you singing. 

Ryan Riley. 

I’ve never had a best friend. 

Together, we swim the Cornfield Sea. We play hide n’ seek on ATC’s and zoom through the cold on his snowmobile, scarves whipping out behind us. We wade the Wapsipinicon, pants rolled up, while he regales me with gorgeous, outlandish stories about the child-eating Witch of the Wapsi. 

Finally, with him, my new bike looks the way I want it. Mud-encrusted! 

We have mulberry wars and end up purple for days. 

He plays kickball with me rowdy, and looks at me gently.

Once, after a full day together, rolling snowballs to build the world’s biggest sparkly snow fort, I trudge back home for supper. My boots get stuck in the mud of the mown down cornfield. I can’t move. I panic. It’s growing darker, and colder. I scream for help. Out of the darkness, Ryan appears, racing toward me. He loops his arms around my waist. He tugs and pulls, and finally, we tumble backwards together, falling in a heap. My feet hang in the air, socks half off. 

My boots, still stuck in the mud. 

I can’t stop laughing. 

I’m going to fall apart, laughing. 

Ryan’s my best friend. 

His arms around me real. 

Not imaginary. 

farm bureau. 

Dewitt, Iowa. 

We’re Jehovah’s Witnesses. 

We faithfully attend Kingdom Hall, five meetings a week. 

Dad found The Truth while training for the jungles of Vietnam. Before the draft, his bunkmate was studying with Jehovah’s Witnesses. He offered Dad a book published by The Watchtower Society. A blue book called The Truth That Leads to Eternal Life. Included in the 1975 Guinness Book of World Records list of highest printings. 

The Truth. 

In war, men turn to women or religion, Grandma warned Mom when Dad received his draft.

When we want to know if someone is Jehovah’s Witness, we ask, “Are they in The Truth?” 

Our congregation meets on the top floor of the brick Farm Bureau building in downtown Dewitt. 

We climb the narrow stairs past the darkened offices. Up there, the floor is old and scratchy. We sit in fold out aluminum chairs that squeak when you move a fraction. 

The faucet in the bathroom drips. The toilet overflows. 

But we have a real piano. 

We’re Jehovah’s Witnesses! We speak out in fearlessness! Ours is the God of true prophecy! What He foretells – comes to be! 

I sing at the top of my lungs because this Kingdom Melody is my favorite. Mom says, when I was a toddler, I sang it, unabashedly, top of the lungs, in public restrooms while washing my hands. 

Mom says she didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or proud, when the other ladies stared. 

 Kingdom Hall and door-to-door preaching are the only time I wear dresses. 

Once, a house-holder slammed the door in my face so hard, my frilly pink dress flew right up over my head. 

I was five. 

Preaching, missionary work. This will be my life. 

I’d better start liking dresses. 

Sister is throwing up again, her skin blotchy, eyes glazed. 

She says fragrances bother her. Not flowers. Not cooking. 

Perfume and nail polish. She has to come home from school early. 

And now she’s coughing up a lung because Brother Michaels has piled on the aftershave.  

I sit on Mom’s lap. I sometimes kick her shins with my Mary Jane’s, tickle her nose with my fuzzy hair. 

I used to share Dad’s Bible. Now, I have my very own crinkly-paged Bible.

Mom says giving up Christmas was the hardest part. 

Growing up, Christmas was the only peaceful time in her house. The one day her Dad stayed sober. Smiled. Remembered her name. 

I learn at Kingdom Hall that I may never have to die. Armageddon is right around the corner. Faithful Witnesses will survive into a restored earthly paradise. I’m so glad I can stay on earth with my Cornfield Sea. 

 Trees, swings, books, stories, and dump trucks! 

Hope for a New Earth. 

That’s my favorite part of being Jehovah’s Witness. 

Along with refusing birthday cake, and sitting during the Pledge of Allegiance. 

lemon pie trailer. 

Nosebleeds, migraines, infections. 

Sister’s been falling over backwards, eyes rolled up. She was admitted to the hospital, checked for a brain tumor.

Mom’s sprouted blisters all over her chin. A beard of blisters! And no period. Menopause, age thirty-five. 

Dad’s jaundiced, eye whites turned yellow. He’s plagued by a strange, unrelenting cough. 

I got so sick, I missed nine weeks of school. Nine weeks. 

I missed multiplication, fractions, and telling time. 

I will never catch up. Not in my whole life will I ever catch up. 

The culprit is The Monster, seeping out of the particle board. 

Your home is supposed to keep you safe, especially when it’s double wide and yellow like a lemon pie. 

After watching a news show about formaldehyde in trailer homes, Mom and Dad had the house checked. 

The levels of formaldehyde – lethal. 

It’s a miracle you all survived! The doctor credits the health foods and vitamins that Mom feeds us instead of Kool-Aid.  

Sister and I move out, sleep in the camper at night. 

Dad’s filing a lawsuit against the mobile home manufacturers.  

I have a rash on my butt. Scabby blisters that break open, freckling my shorts with blood. 

There’s nothing in the world now. 

Not one thing. 

That makes me normal.  

great river road. 

LeClaire, Iowa. Home of “Buffalo Bill” Cody. 

Refugees from a poison house. 

We leave Rural Route #1. 

We leave Gravel Pit Road. 

We leave the Cornfield Sea. 

And my one best friend – Ryan. 

We move into the house on the hill. The one that overlooks the highway. 

Below that, the train tracks.  

Below that, the Mississippi. 

River, train, highway, hill, house. 

Two of my cats are hit on the highway. Tigger was such a big, majestic cat. Such a lovely, sweet boy. Big paws, never claws. Licorice flaunted the long, regal nose of a duke. 

I’m inconsolable. I hate this place. Hate it, hate it. 

Dad makes me another swing. This time with silky rope, striped like a candy cane. He climbs the big Oak, fastens the rope to a limb. He tests the swing first. 

He flies, toes out, cowboy hat tipped back, face to the sun. 

He looks like a little boy. 

Dad. 

My heart grows tender. He believes, always believes, things will get better. 

Before you know it. 

I’m thirteen, with a period 

making stains like little red lakes on the wooden stool in shop class. 

When Mom gets mad, she shape shifts. Anger possesses her, turns her into a wolf. She lunges, backs us into a corner, froths at the mouth, snarls, raises her hand. 

 But she never hits. 

I’ve never been hit. 

I think her real power is in stopping. 

In making you wince and flinch 

and fear that one day, she might. 

I don’t have an attitude. I don’t talk back. I don’t push her. I always give in. 

And I make up with her fast as I can. 

Sister is so sick, she drops out of school. 

She stays home, cleans the whole house. She irons, vacuums, dusts. On Mondays, when Mom’s grocery shopping, she cooks dinner. She likes to get fancy, experiment. She makes Greek Pastitsio and Russian piroshki’s. 

She cleans up after me as I run out to play. She watches me from the window, hate building skyscrapers behind her eyes. Mommy’s little girl. 

She lets the curtain fall between us. 

Our illness is diagnosed, has a name. 

More than one.

Environmental Illness. Multiple Chemical Sensitivities. Sick Building Syndrome. 

Crazy. Hypochondriac. Attention-seeking. 

Those are the other names some doctors give us – and some of the brothers and sisters at Kingdom Hall. 

The school system sends tutors to pregnant girls and druggies. 

But they won’t send Sister a tutor. 

Dad files another lawsuit, this time, against the school. 

He coaches Sister on the testimony she’ll have to give in court. He makes her sit down at the kitchen table and write a letter to Terry Branstad, Governor of Iowa. 

Sister cries to me that this is his fight, not hers. He’s forcing the fight on her. 

We take trips. 

We travel to clinics. 

In Lacrosse, Wisconsin, a giant waspy needle injects us with chemicals, right down our arm. One sears like hellfire, blazing down a vein, ripping a scream straight from my chest. 

Formaldehyde. 

The doctor prescribes us antigens. 

Every day before school, backpack on, I stand by the fridge and open my mouth like a baby bird. Mom uses a dropper to deposit antigens under my tongue. 

In Dallas, Texas, a cardiologist believes in the Environmentally Ill.  

In secret, under the umbrella of his cardiology practice, he treats us. 

Those who cannot breathe, cannot leave the house, because the world sickens them. 

In the back room, the very back, dark like backstage in a theater, removed from the bright medical degrees on the wall, the treadmill, and the ECG – 

the cardiologist administers bee sting venom therapy. 

Beforehand, I sign a waiver. I scan it and realize – I might die. 

What if there is no hope? 

no promise, no everlasting trees and Cornfield Sea 

no Paradise on earth? 

Afterward, in the car, zooming down a Dallas freeway, I’m seized by a panic attack, so violent it nearly runs us off the road. Dad reaches into the back-seat, grabs my hair, and pulls so hard he nearly yanks me to the front. Calm down or you’ll kill us all! 

Antigens don’t work. 

Neither does bee venom.  

Dad wears a gas mask to Kingdom Hall. Otherwise, the scents make him too sick. 

Mom calls Grandma, cries. This illness is taking over our lives, Ma. If it’s not one of us, it’s the other. I spend half my life now taking care of sick people.  

Now when I swing, instead of the Cornfield Sea, I point my toes to the river. The Mississippi. 

I sing to the barges. 

I sing to the riverboats. 

I sing to the bald eagles. 

i-80 fred schwengel memorial bridge. 

 I sing to the bridge.  

 The bridge! 

When I swing, I see it, connecting LeClaire, Iowa, to Rapids City, Illinois.  

The 18-wheelers crossing all day, like toy trucks, shimmery, a mirage.  

The Fred Schwengel Memorial I-80 bridge opened in October 1966. 

We cross, a carful of laughing girls, on our way to Geneseo, Illinois. Sidewalk Sales. A full day of shopping. 

Mom, Grandma, Sister and I, and Mom’s best friend, Joannie, from Kingdom Hall. 

I love Joannie, ardently. 

The glorious sunset of her hair. Her round apple cheeks. Her unhinged laughter, coloring her face the same shade as her hair. 

Most of all, how she looks at me. 

One time, she brushed my hair. She always wanted a daughter. 

She looks at me like – she’d give anything. 

I never wanted it to end, her hands in my hair. 

Joannie has more Bible Studies than anyone else at Kingdom Hall. 

People-pleaser, but angry inside. Mom says. Joannie’s the Adult Child of an Alcoholic, like me. 

Mom and Joannie laugh so much, gripping their coffee cups, white-knuckled. A wild symphony of laughter. They can’t speak. Tears squeeze from their eyes. From the cracks in their laughter, something terrible might emerge. 

We cross the I-80 Bridge. Mom and Joannie, in the front, red-faced, snorting. 

I peer over the edge, at the river below, imagine us toppling. Imagine death. The engulfing, the blackness. The erasure of knowing. 

Stop. This is how the panic builds. 

Dad helped build this bridge. Before he dropped out to marry Mom, he was an engineering student at The University of Iowa. 

I do wish he’d made the guard rails higher. 

grandma’s cabin.  

Princeton, Iowa, on the Mississippi. 

Grandma stands on the porch, her bright blonde hair swooped into the ponytail of a teenage girl. College boys see her from behind and flirt. It happens constantly. 

Now, she leans across the railing and waves to the bargeman. He calls to her across the river through a megaphone. HI, MILLEE! 

The whole town must hear. 

Bargemen on the mighty Mississippi know my grandmother by name. 

She is famous. 

Her ex-boyfriend, Erwin, lives across the street. He runs a fish shop from his house. He built Grandma’s house for her. It’s rickety, and the furnace leaks, but it’s livable. She calls it her cabin on the river. 

Erwin’s married to another woman now. 

Still, he gives Grandma roses, every Valentine’s Day. 

At the end of the same road lives her ex-husband. 

The Old Man.

He’s famous, too. Everyone knows Willard Mahmens. 

Except his granddaughters.   

Grandma’s leopard print blouse is always unbuttoned by two or three buttons. She leans in. She plays with the buttons, bats her lashes. Her lipstick is red. Her earrings sparkle up a storm. I’m endlessly intrigued by her. 

I love her so much I could die! 

She’s worth every moment of even the worst pain of being alive. 

Grandma. 

We have tea parties. She teaches me how to draw high heels and cleavage.  

When Sister and I visit, we walk downtown to fetch Grandma’s mail or buy popsicles from Boll’s General Store. 

Sometimes, we see him. 

He stumbles from Kernan’s Bar or Bridge’s Tavern. 

When we cross paths, he leers at us. Grizzled. Bleary-eyed. Wobbling. 

He just flirted with his granddaughters and he has no idea! 

Sister laughs. She grabs my arm. I laugh, too. 

The two of us, together. 

Laugh and laugh and laugh. 

The both of us, until broken. 

About the Author:

Explication Of My Guilt | Jessica Pulver

I want to write about my guilt, so first I will say what happened. On the afternoon of February 19, 2011 in our white farmhouse in New Hampshire, I pushed our son Leo out of my body and onto the blue rug in front of the wood stove. The labor had dragged past forty hours. I’d sucked on supplemental oxygen to keep my strength up, and left the birthing tub to walk naked circles around the house to jostle my body along. Kathryn, my midwife, had pried her fingers up inside me to nudge Leo’s head this way, that way. Leo was descending – I had seen his dark hair in a mirror between my legs – then pulled back in again. Kathryn and her assistant had tried different positions, on the floor with my legs up. Every time they moved me it felt excruciating. Then, suddenly, Kathryn saw meconium — babies’ first poop which comes out before birth if they are in distress. If Leo took a gasp while still in the uterus and aspirated meconium into his lungs, it would lead to respiratory dysfunction. Kathryn reached and dialed 911. A minute passed, four minutes, I was breathing, we were waiting, not knowing for what. Just as paramedics filed into our living room, Leo dropped from my body with one tidal heave. He lay there gray, his eyes closed. He didn’t cry, he didn’t move. 

Other details survive. The smell of blood, of pads soaked in witch hazel. My husband Eric’s face, blank. The tug of the umbilical cord as they lifted Leo up, forgetting we were still attached. A glimpse of my rabbit, trembling in the corner of his cage, as they angled my stretcher through the narrow kitchen. The ambulance bumping on the frost heaves along the dark road to the local hospital. Wide glass doors sliding open. Nurses counting, clipboards, everyone rushing, no one saying what was happening. The sudden burn of IV pitocin when they realized my placenta was still inside me; the disappearing forearm of the woman who fetched it out of me when it was obvious pitocin was useless through my shock. A wail of agony. Being wheeled beside Leo: “You can touch your baby now.” Locking onto his dark eyes – for an instant we were familiar strangers, brought face to face from foreign worlds, and then they took him away again. Some time later, peanut butter cookies with Hershey’s Kiss centers my friend had baked, eating them and eating them, ravenously, insanely, not understanding how I could be in the car beside Eric as we followed Leo’s ambulance on its way to the NICU at Maine Medical Center. Rain on the windshield, Eric silently crying. Still knowing nothing.

Overwhelmingly, what I remember from that day is a distinct confusion, a lens that both sharpened my sensory experience and scrambled my cognitive experience. I witnessed events unfolding without any tether to a storyline. My voice arrived uninitiated. People I knew – loved – were like strangers acting parts. 

Guilt was the first way my mind offered up to make sense of the situation. In no way did I choose guilt; in fact, as a therapist, I knew the pitfalls of guilt from seeing them play out over years of work with my clients. Guilt uses trauma as a substrate – it is opportunistic and predatory. Guilt can be blinding, like an addiction. Guilt can be isolating and unspeakable, a recipe for profound loneliness. Guilt can be grueling and wear a person down to the bones. Guilt can be bossy, it can lead someone to try controlling everything. It can be vigilant, can steal sleep and rest and peace. It can also be beguiling, resisting resistance, a chameleon in the realm of rational conversation. All this I knew well and yet I was defenseless when it came to my own trauma and the way guilt grew from it.

Early in the morning of Leo’s second day, as I sat in the NICU rocking chair and held him in my arms for the first time, breathing and feeding tubes attached, and sang him Edelweiss, guilt arrived without question. It lodged in my throat like a clump of dirt I couldn’t rinse down. It staked a claim on me that was as incontrovertible as the fact of my new motherhood. It said: you are responsible for this baby, and since you are responsible, his birth is your fault. You were reckless to plan a homebirth, candles, birthing tub; it was all foolish romance. You should have known your baby better, what he needed; you were hasty, began to push too soon. You should have taken fuller breaths on the living room floor to send the oxygen to him. You were naive to the stakes; even after they saw meconium and dialed 911, you believed he would be fine. You should have worried more.

Leo has Cerebral Palsy and it matters every day. He is in fifth grade now, and he has a hard time from the moment he wakes up. Extracting his limbs from under his quilt, walking to the bathroom to pee. He stumps across the floor, hobbled by spasticity, trying to balance on his bent left leg and right big toe. The entire right side of his body is more affected than the left, and the tightness pulls his right heel up so it doesn’t ever fully touch the floor. In the mornings he’s the stiffest; as the day wears on, his heel descends a bit. He leans on the doorknob. He leans on the sink and smears toothpaste across his PJs. He leans on the flimsy towel rack, forever overloaded by our family of five, and it collapses again. When he goes down with it, he slams his head on the tub, hard. But he doesn’t cry, he is used to falling down. He forms his stiff lips to call out, “I’m okay!” He even takes a deep breath first to project his weak voice so we can hear him from the kitchen where we are making coffee, bagels, a fire, and stick our heads out to the hall when we hear the thump upstairs. 

Thumps like those are the drumbeat of my guilt that has aged over a decade. In them, I hear reverberations of fears and shame. Like an echo chamber: Leo might not walk. Leo might not talk. Leo might not have a friend, a career. Leo might not be able to kiss the person he falls in love with. Leo might not be happy, might be in pain. And his pain is my pain because it is my fault. 

There is nothing special about guilt; it is common as a weed. From the beginning, when I talked with Eric about the birth, I could hear myself blame myself harshly. I cringed when I felt like guilt had become old and stale and almost self-indulgent in a masochistic way. Eric had his version too. On a date a few years ago, we were trying to relax by paying to soak in a hot tub. We got talking about Leo again, and Eric told me how he held himself accountable for allowing the labor to stagnate for so long and not insisting we go to the hospital. 

“All I said was, ‘How long are we going to keep doing this, guys?’” he said to me, and I could see the tears in his eyes through the steam.

Kathryn, my hapless midwife, stayed with me for the first few days after Leo was born, bringing me pillows and salves for my hemorrhoids, helping me clean the breast pump parts. Maybe she would have done so regardless, but it seemed like guilt was prompting her to linger. Then she took a few months off from midwifery to reflect on whether she could continue. My grandparents came to visit Leo when he was four months old and failing to thrive, unable to coordinate his mouth muscles to draw in enough breastmilk. Even they spoke ruefully at our dining room table of wishing they had tried harder to convince us not to have a home birth. 

Sometimes guilt gets turned around and the blame points outward at someone else. My mother and my mother-in-law do not have a lot in common, but they both gave cold shoulders to Kathryn when they saw her ministering to me in those early days.  It made me uncomfortable to see this. I felt fiercely defensive of her and said repeatedly that she had done her best for me. I was shocked, when I began to read Cerebral Palsy websites, how many parents sued their doctors for malpractice in their children’s deliveries. It’s true I spent a long time poring over the details of the labor, and the medical records from the weeks before. Some of the explanations were flimsy because there really was no way to know what exactly had gone wrong, but some were because Kathryn tended to be an inattentive notetaker and was often flaky about her agenda at appointments. It would have been easy to hold this against her but I concluded instead that I should have been a better judge of character or taken a more active role. I steered far away from blaming Kathryn because I needed to keep the blame for myself.

What does it mean, this haunting? Pain is at the heart of what I want to say about guilt. Because despite the fact guilt caused me to suffer at various times in all the ways I recognized in my clients’ lives, the pain it kept me from was worse: I did not have to face the idea that CP was not my fault. What kind of terrifying, arbitrary world would that imply? How would I know how to live if anything bad could happen to me, if I wasn’t exceptional, if I had no power? Guilt was working for me, soothing me in a haze of lies, so I didn’t have to surrender my entire worldview to a meaningless existence. So for a long time, I relied on guilt to fuel my denial. Guilt snugs up close to regret, as if reality were something we chose, as if it were something we could have controlled, as if it were something that shouldn’t have happened, wasn’t supposed to happen, as if it were something bad, as if it were a mistake. And a mistake has no meaning when it comes to Leo.

First, yes there was trauma, but also as there often is, great strength. Leo and I managed together to get him born in the nick of time, before the paramedics loaded me onto the stretcher and brought me in the ambulance down the long bumpy road to the hospital, a ride during which he would have surely died inside me. Eric has called it miraculous more than once. So we have Leo in the world, and who would he be apart from CP?  I love him immeasurably, and I mean I love all of him. I love his crooked lope across the baseball field. I love the way he starts laughing uncontrollably before he can finish telling a joke, and the laughter makes him drool. 

Also, CP slows us down, brings us together, gives us perspective, patience, and resilience. I am proud of the strength of our family, Leo’s siblings, our marriage. And last, there is the nature of life, which is that it’s complicated. Who can know what would have happened, if this, if that? How responsible can we ever be? 

I have learned it’s okay to hate CP sometimes and wish like hell that Leo didn’t have it, and still to find meaning, and even identity, even beauty in his disability. I have learned I can tell someone that Leo has CP because I had a homebirth, and in that sense I claim responsibility, but stop short of culpability. I have learned it’s important to try hard to make a good decision for Leo, but that trying too hard to get things right can lead to a place of arrogance or fantasy where it’s possible to live with only good outcomes. And that this way of life may feel safe but is constraining, is missing something. Pain. Discovery. Slowly, the contradictions of my world have settled into background mystery. I can’t really say how this happened. Time? And dipping back into the morass of memory, coming up sticky and swollen. By crying. By counseling. By writing in journals, walking with friends, screaming at the ocean. By waking up and loving Leo every morning.

These days, guilt still shows up in the form of doubt and an unending incantation of questions. Maybe we should stay upstairs with him every morning in case he falls. Should we bolt more handles to our walls? Maybe he should wear a helmet. We struggle to keep the routine of stretching him on the massage table before school, to loosen him up just a little. We grapple with possible surgeries – will they do more harm than good? Leo is eleven now; how should we involve him in the decisions? We visit specialist after specialist who dispenses contradictory advice. And how much difference does wearing his braces really make? But I like to think that guilt shows up somewhat guiltily now. It knows better than to come masquerading as something authoritative and scary. I have quelled it, if not vanquished it. I know that asking these questions is part of parenting Leo well, and that is work I am committed to excelling at.

Now, when hard parts of CP pop up, I have learned to say: this is not guilt, this is grief. Grief for his falls in the bathroom. Grief for when he can’t ride a scooter with the neighbors, ski with his cousins. Grief for when he cries out for me, brave as he is, when the neurologist injects him with Botox to take the edge off the muscle spasms. Grief for the toll that parenting Leo has taken on our marriage and the hurts we have endured in order to stay together. Grief lives on. It is hard, and heavy, and long. Sometimes it nudges guilt back alive, to distract from the pain. But the pain is the truth and the truth is brilliant. It’s not that I made a huge mistake by having a home birth and we all had to suffer the dreadful consequences. It’s that I made a choice that winter, and then we abided the rest of our incomprehensible lives.

At dinner, after a couple sentences about band practice antics, Leo gives up telling about his day because talking makes him tired and takes too long, and he has to focus on chewing so he can put in enough calories. Spasticity involuntarily contracts his muscles so he is constantly dumping energy. Just sitting in his chair at the end of the day is an effort. Still, he is amazing. Instead of talking, he smiles at me across the table, and his smile is like none other. A big part of me believes he would not have that smile if not for CP.

About the Author:

Failure | Lauren Davenport

I work in a school full of ghosts and traitors. It is a failing school. It has the second lowest passing rate in the city–not a statistic the school cares to flaunt. The phrase, “This is my seventh principal,” is a badge of pride around here. The first person who said this to me said it with an extra curl in her lip because she knew that I’d joined this school at the behest of Principal Number Seven, my dear friend. Principal Number Seven believed (and still believes) that this school and the people in it can be salvaged. The place is littered with crinkled empty bags of Doritos, smashed Arizona cans, buzzing fluorescent lights, faulty door handles, and fragile hearts. Peel back the layers of chipped paint on the walls and watch the colors spiral down to the tiled floor. Perhaps Periwinkle Blue will save the place. Each coat of paint represents a promise, each layer calling on the indefatigable American desire for a happy ending or a fresh start. 

This place has a particular odor. Sure, all high schools are smelly places. Hormones and sweaty armpits, the stench of onions and bleach. Teenagers smell. Adults smell. Poverty reeks. But the smell here, on the Lower East Side, is something stronger still. It’s the odor that connects us all. It cuts through race, through class, and rests not just on the epidermis–the smell lodges itself in the soul. Imagine the smell like a universal perfume. L’eau de Failure. It smells like the water left from flowers after they’ve sat in a vase for a week. It smells like something that may have once been beautiful, but is now decaying. It is a cheap perfume. No amount can mask what is underneath. 

#HallDutyBlows

I do my best to clear the hallways. I tell the ghosts who are trying to cut class to go where they are supposed to go. But here comes one who has never stepped inside a class. He’s almost twenty. He’s told the staff that he’s transferring. He’s been saying that for months. At twenty-one, he’ll be released from roaming the halls and instead he’ll roam the streets. 

“Where are you supposed to be?” 

“Art.” 

“You’re cutting ART? I don’t get it. You are so artistic.” He truly is. I blink and picture this kid selling Tarot Readings to Upper East Side stay-at-home moms. 

“I am. But I don’t like drawing. I mean, the teacher, she helped me a lot but I just don’t like that kind of art.” 

“You prefer the stairwell for its artistic value.” 

“Exactly, Miss.” He gives me a hug. 

He’s at least twice my height but such a child. He is radiant. His brown eyes are so wide. His white teeth explode from his goofy smile. I worry that someone will want his gold chain. Or that the police will catch him if he jumps a turnstile or does something typically adolescent and foolish. He does the “nay-nay,” the latest dance, and rounds the corner. I ask a few other kids to go to class. They respect me enough to at least go to another floor and let me save face. I could write them up in our anecdotal database if I wanted to convince myself that the writing would have meaning. 

I smell weed from the stairwell. I open the swinging doors at the east exit to see if I can find the dealer. The ghosts are gone. What lingers is a wisp of smoke strong enough to make me lose my footing.

The ghosts take many forms. Some are names on my roster, marked absent day after day. These ghosts appear a few times a year to collect their free metro cards, or because the truancy officer showed up or a home visit was made, but they are apparitions. They float in, they float out. If I blink, I’m not sure they are real. 

Others appear more frequently but are so angry, hungry, tired, sick or depressed that their full forms are hard to see. They are might-have-beens before they ever had a chance to be. I see their families in their eyes. The broken promises of that horrible phrase “a better life”–a phrase scribbled on poorly written formulaic essays that I teach them to write in order to pass the state exams. I see their parents who once floated down these same halls discovering themselves, fighting to have a chance to just be and often losing. “My moms get ratchety when the teachers call home. They hate that shit. They don’t give a fuck. They don’t want to hear nothin’.” 

I love these ghosts. When I point out that the hallways are not actually where they should be, they laugh, shrug their shoulders and respond, “you right, Miss, you right.” I form cautious relationships with them because these ghosts hurt the people who love them. 

One ghost let me believe I was helping him. His progress was astounding until the day of the state exam he stayed home for. He hasn’t returned. I called home to say that it was ok that he skipped the test. He’ll be nineteen soon. He wants to join the army. 

Another ghost left after one too many suspensions. He’s out there somewhere and from time-to-time I think I see him on the corner when I’m walking to the subway. 

Then there’s the ghost who writes brilliantly when he isn’t shoving students into lead pipes in order to steal their weed. He says flatly that his actions are part of the hustle, the game, and he has to do “what he’s gotta do to stay up.” Common phraseology around here. After each suspension he comes back determined to stay on target. He’s on time. His hand is in the air ready with insightful questions and comments and if I let myself dream, I see him going to college and succeeding there. Three days later, he’s high with blood shot eyes, stuffing Jolly Ranchers into his mouth, putting his head down on the desk, drooling. 

There’s another who talks to me about Kant and Locke but won’t come to class because he says it makes him too anxious. There are the ones who are taking too many meds prescribed by so-called doctors. There are the ones who self-medicate. There are the ones who post too much on social media. The ones who can’t put their phones away. The ones who can’t stop talking. The ones who coat themselves in lip gloss during class. They are typical teenagers but they don’t have money or support to get them out of the holes they fall in. So when they fall, and they fall, they stay stuck. After a while, they don’t want to come out even when I extend my hand. There are the ghosts who hide in the library. The ghosts who go to counseling instead of class. There’s the ghost who has a cousin who abuses her. There are ghosts here that I can’t even see. 

#SparklyRainbowUnicornLove 

I’m an upbeat person. I smile a lot. I laugh. I’m earnest. Optimistic. Idealistic. I’m giddy when I learn a new teaching trick, or help a student discover something. I love teaching. I love observing the way teenagers see the world. The way they all hate and love their moms. The way they hate and love themselves. I love trying to keep up with them.

“Hey you guys,” I’ll say. “I got zo’ed for my pack of gum today.”

“You can’t say it like that Miss.” 

They love it when I try to speak their language. I score major points when I explain that Macbeth IS the original O.G., the Godfather of all the gangstas, the MAN. I lose points when I use the word telephone, when I say we should “videotape” their discussion. I love listening to them translate the academic into the street. I tell them I think they are much, much smarter than I am because they are apart of so many subcultures. They understand, on some level, how symbolic an education they are being offered. 

I am the Literacy Coach for the school. I teach four classes to the lowest performing kids in the school. I write the school newsletter, I help the school develop the curriculum, I run the weekly professional training seminars with the school’s lead teacher, and like everyone else, I put out umpteen unforeseen fires every single day. 

When I began working at the school last summer, I set up a Teacher Resource Room. I cleared out a space that had belonged to a beloved social work program for which there was no longer funding. I hauled out dusty books, swept away mice crap, chucked discarded shoes and shirts, recycled loads of old papers. I set up computers and networked a printer, filled a bookshelf with professional books on educational strategies and research for teachers to read and borrow. I sent out emails soliciting ideas, interests, suggestions. One person emailed to request that I please remove her from the email list. Another asked if the coffee would be free. 

I knew that transitioning from one school to another would take time, but my reception wasn’t just cool, it was frigid. 

#Call311 

3-1-1 is the catch all phone number for information and reporting in New York. In the world of ghosts and traitors, it’s an anonymous punch-in-the-gut. When I transferred to the school, I’d come from a place where teachers supported one another. No matter what. When one of the Tiffanys (I had three Tiffanys in my classroom one year, each notorious) was out of control, I’d take a piece of paper, write 3-1-1 on it, staple it, and send her to another teacher’s room. The teacher would hold Tiffany until class was over. We traded unruly kids constantly. It avoided the paperwork and most of the time, it helped the kid cool down.

A few months into the academic year at my current school, I learned about a different use for 3-1-1. One morning, my son was too sick to go to Pre-K and my babysitter couldn’t get him until lunchtime, so I had no choice but to bring him to work. The ghosts swooned over him. They fed him Skittles and juice. They kept him warm, they played along as he waved his toy taxi cab or drew circles with his green crayon. My son laughed and enjoyed seeing Mommy as a teacher. He told an unruly student to sit down and out of sheer amusement, the student obeyed. But the next morning, I was called into the assistant principal’s office because of an anonymous 3-1-1 call. A fellow teacher coerced a student into placing the call. She’d taught her what to say. I was told to just stay home if I couldn’t find a babysitter. I went to talk about it with the lead teacher. 

“They don’t like you. You are friends with the Principal. You haven’t proven yourself. You’re an outsider.” 

“I’m a teacher. We’re on the same side.” 

“Not to them.” 

#AtLeastShowUp

Hall duty again. A group of kids stand outside room 255. “Where’s your teacher?” I ask. “He’s missing, Miss.” I open the door. The room is empty. I check the library. He’s not there. I run downstairs, upstairs but the man is nowhere to be seen. Finally, I knock on the door of the assistant principal’s office. I don’t want to get the guy in trouble, but I’m starting to worry that he went out for coffee and isn’t coming back. 

I learn that teachers watch other teachers to make sure no one is late to work. Someone watches to ensure that each educator is teaching the exact same number of instructional minutes as every other educator. A teacher is watching to make sure that the assigned professional duties are distributed according to Union Regulations. Union Regulations. Union Regulations. Union Regulations. The traitors chant this phrase like a biblical verse. It is their truth. Their righteousness. Their Savior. The Union died on the cross for the administrators’ sins. Someone is watching. Someone is watching. Someone is watching. I need a cup of coffee. I ask my friend and co-teacher if she wants to come with me. 

“Let’s use the back exit through the other school,” she says. “Because someone might be watching.” 

Principal Number Seven tells me not to be discouraged. She insists I stay true to myself. She plasters the school with posters of inspirational quotes from Maya Angelou and Nelson Mandela. She puts potpourri in her bathroom and fills her office with plants. She can make anything grow. She has superpowers. She is the greatest listener on earth. She hears every voice. I will not be discouraged. 

#OutSick

I have to cover for another teacher who is out sick. A ghost comes in floating very high and before I can say anything, she knocks over a set of bookshelves.

“I just smoked the fattest blunt, yo.” She opens a window. “This is cooling off my soul.”

I ask her to sit down. She laughs at me. She grabs a bottle of water and begins to spill the water up the center aisle of the classroom. She stops at the computer cart. I warn her that if she can’t pull herself together, I’ll have to call security.

“Suck my dick,” she says. “I don’t give a fuck.” 

A fellow student begins to play the popular “I don’t give a fuck,” song from her computer. Several students join in. I quash it. But the girl won’t leave. I have no choice. I call security. No one comes. I call again. Now there are two girls twerking in the front of the room. I thank the other ghosts for staying on task. The assistant principal comes in. The girl still won’t leave. Another teacher comes in. The girl ghost floats above us all. 

She says, “Can you help me find the fuck I don’t give?” She cackles. She has become a ghost-witch. A mash-up. 

The security guard arrives out of breath and perturbed. She shrugs her shoulders and says, “If that girl won’t leave for any of you, what do you think I am supposed to do?”

The ghost smiles. “She can’t touch me. None of you can touch me.” 

She sings her fuckless song. Time passes. The other ghosts pretend to work. This is their latest viral video. It washes over them. They seem to experience every event as though it is on repeat, through a transparent sheet masking any authenticity. 

The ghost girl walks to the door and says, “Right bitches, I’m out.” She leaves. 

The security guard tells me later that the ghost girl will likely receive a glass of milk and some cookies from Principal Number Seven. Principal Number Seven will tell me that in some ways the security officer is right. Too many suspensions will ensure that the school doors close forever. A failing school is under endless scrutiny. We must improve attendance, test scores, graduation rates. We have to have just the right number of suspensions and the right kind.

#EvaluateThisJargon 

We are supposed to supply rigorous academic content. Find complex, authentic texts to use. Apply flexible instruction. Support accountable talk. Ensure that the students know their daily learning targets. Recommend a growth mindset. Encourage the students. Mentor the students. Maintain high expectations. Scaffold student learning. Hold students accountable for their learning. Motivate students. Assess students. Provide students with rubrics. Leave students room for answering but not waste too many instructional minutes. Provide student-centered activities and avoid teacher-directed content. Deliver content through a gradual release of responsibility. We are not to teach to the test. We are evaluated by the test scores. We need word walls. We need recent examples of authentic learning that reflect higher order thinking. 

Evaluators come in and out of the classrooms to make sure we are doing our jobs. They snap pictures and shake their heads. Where are our call logs to prove that we are contacting parents? Can they see recent evidence of data-driven decisions? Why didn’t we differentiate this assignment to meet the needs of each learner? We are not good enough. We aren’t good enough. We aren’t good enough. They distribute memos. They issue proclamations. They giveth, they taketh away. 

In successful schools, administrators are learning partners. The most common phrase is “what do you need and how can I help you?” In this school, everyone needs someone to blame. The Superintendent points to the Principal who points to the teacher who points to the student. It’s a culture of failure. It’s cyclical. It’s insipid, malignant and possibly fatal. 

I ask a boy ghost to please move tables so that he can focus and get his work done. He refuses to do so. I try humor, guilt-trips, silence, peer pressure. He will not budge. 

It’s Wednesday. Time for our weekly full-staff professional training. I ask the teachers to move their seats so that they are sitting in departments. They refuse. I try humor, guilt trips, silence, peer pressure. They refuse to budge. One of the teacher calls across to her peer shouting, “what time is this over?‘” Another says, “how long do we have to be here?” Traitors. I feel ashamed to be a card-carrying union lady. I am developing TMJ. My migraines are getting worse. I start avoiding the Resource Room I created. It is windowless and stuffy in there and the stink will swallow me whole. 

#Filter 

Bulletin boards are due by 3 PM. Principal Number Three had them all painted lime green. She decorated the building as if it were her house. The lime has a great deal of yellow in it. Combined with the fluorescent lighting, it’s like an instagram shot with a filter. I watch a student slug another student who trips just under the poster reading “Recipe for Success.” For an instant I feel that I might vomit. The moment passes. I wonder if I have enough typed student work to cover the green. 

#I’mJustLikeThem 

I joined this school because I thought I could help. Everyone here seemed to be trying to escape from something and I was trying to escape from something myself. My marriage was floundering. 

A few years ago, my family moved to the West Coast in a futile attempt to escape my husband’s crippling depression. My two small children were on top of one another in our tiny space in Brooklyn. We were deep in debt. We thought we’d save money in Seattle. My husband needed a new job. Fresh air. More space. We thought that we could fix what was broken. We were tired of ten dollar orange juice and neighbors who bought into our housing complex in order to have guest houses or who bought from abroad and left them empty. We

were tired of watching our friends leave to be replaced by entitled, self-important assholes who hated noise. WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU MOVING TO BROOKLYN IF YOU HATE NOISE? We were ready to leave. 

But New York is its own kind of prison and recidivism is often self-induced. The escape plan didn’t work out. I missed the seasons. I missed the noise. I missed my friends. My husband was still depressed. I hated the grey. I hated large spaces. I missed our cramped little home. The holes in my life felt larger, darker. After three years, I came home with my two kids. My husband would look for work in New York. In the meantime, he would take care of himself. He would get some help. We would see what to do about our marriage. I spoke to Principal Number Seven. I toured the school with its lime green bulletin boards. I walked the hallways with the ghosts floating about. I shook hands with the traitors not seeing through their cracked smiles. 

I envisioned a team of teachers working together to turn the school around. I imagined the inspired students able somehow to overlook their hunger, their rage, their neglectful parents in order to learn about hypotenuse triangles and homeostasis. And I’ve always wanted to teach on the Lower East Side. The center of the American Dream, the place where there were once seventeen yiddish newspapers. Where tenements and skyscrapers shook hands. The place where entrepreneurs and dreamers carved sculptures from desire and desperation. Where the resourceful could dig themselves out sans shovel. I could dig myself out. I could start over. 

#T’wasARoughNight

Two ghosts stand up to leave my class. We’re discussing Macbeth. His ambition is his downfall. A student is annoyed that Macbeth is trying to “punk out” and not kill Duncan. I remind them that in the world of the play, fair is foul, and foul is fair. The world of this play is topsy turvy. It is twisted, ugly and full of lies. In the world of this play, things are not what they seem. 

“Why are you guys leaving? This is a class, you can’t just walk out.” 

“Sorry Miss, we have business.” Fair is foul. Foul is fair. 

Sometimes I think the place should be closed down. Get rid of all the traitors. Let the music teacher whose favorite song is the innuendo find something better to do with his life. Let the videographer go back to making movies. Let the science teacher with the unsatisfactory rating quit while he is ahead. Take a match to the place and start again. Let the charter school take over. They send their people over to measure the rooms anyway. They have their blueprints and their fancy flyers. They are ready to go. Let them have it. I’ll find another job. I’m not too worried about that. But I’m not sure I can just roll over and play dead. I know I can’t fix the school, but I’m not sure I can let it go either. Yet, I’m equally unsure of how long I can stay before becoming a ghost myself. 

#FailureIsContagiousButIsItUntreatable? 

I love these ghosts. Will the charter school love them? I take them back time after time, misstep after misstep. 

“I’m good today, Miss. Look at my eyes if you don’t believe me.”

I believe that these ghosts need a place to roam. 

“Miss, I’m going to pass this marking period. I’m on my A-game.”

I stink too, now, and the culture of failure is a part of me. When my very best earns an F, it gets harder and harder to want to try for an A. Somedays, I feel that I don’t want to try at all. I don’t see the point. This is a lesson my students have known their entire lives, but that I am just learning. The traitors in my school learned it long ago. With each passing principal they realized that nothing that they did would ever be good enough, and in time they believed that to be true of themselves as well. And so it became true. It is true. The ghosts are angry and so they hurt the traitors. The traitors are angry so they hurt me because I am powerless and these are street rules. Survival is all there is to hope for. We wander around half-living, half-doing, half-caring. We are all traitors. We are all afraid of our odor.

My son crawls into my bed almost every night to talk to me about monsters or vampires or some other invisible fear. My daughter cries when she learns I am the Tooth Fairy. My husband is not next to me in bed. Our lives are filled with illusions, half-truths, disappointments, failures. There are so many moments gone, so many candles blown out, so many wishes wished. Before I know it, I will be gone. I want to start over again. 

My husband is hundreds of miles away. He is getting treatment. He climbs mountains on weekends and sends me #SoHigh selfies. He is beginning to see how horrible it was for me in a grey city where he would stay in bed leaving me to the dishes, the kids, the bills. I am learning to treasure the moments when he feels like himself. I am trying not to dwell over the lost moments when he does not. I am not thinking about the person he used to be. I am trying to love the person he is. We are slowly finding one another again. I think.

I head to school each day and wonder which ghosts I will see, which traitors will be standing nearby, waiting to hurt me. I wonder if the copy machines will work. It’s Spring in New York but I no longer know what this means because it is snowing. Fair is foul and foul is fair. There are budding tulips, there is sunlight, and the smell of spring masks the failures I hide. A fresh coat of paint covers up a student’s graffiti spree. The new paint makes me wonder if just maybe, I’ll get that American ending. The ghosts greet me with questions, fist bumps, hugs, tears. I sip my coffee. Bulletin boards are due next Tuesday at 3.

About the Author:

Connect : Disconnect | Suzi Banks Baum

I want to tell you what it felt like to grow up in a girl’s body with no touchable lexicon that made sense, that used words and references that reflected me as a person with a body and not as a conundrum cloaked in medical jargon or as a pure home for the Holy Spirit or as a temple of doom. I want to tell you how my sexual coming of age allowed me to explore the outer reaches of my good girl life, and how my body called me to burst out of those bounds and make my own way.

It will be years before I know about love and that my body has its own knowing that is singular to me. But long before love, before this holy knowing, I had an intense desire for connection and a fervent craving to experience what I grew up believing was entirely off limits. I was compelled into the un-worded territory of intimacy at a time when there was little to guide me and no one with whom to talk about it.

And so I begin:

I’m on my back, on an examination table at the public health clinic in Escanaba, a small town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I’ve stuck my heels in cold metal stirrups for my first pelvic exam. This visit to the clinic is supposed to be anonymous. I had set up this appointment from a pay phone, taken Mom’s car, told no one, especially not my mother. I’m naked under a cotton sheet on a winter afternoon.  I’ve been having unprotected sex for six months. No guy I’ve encountered wants to be inconvenienced by a rubber. They promise to pull out before they come. 

I have too little information about this place inside of me that everyone has words about. I cannot see this mysterious place within me, lamentably bloody at times, thrilling at others, a carnival between my thighs, the place songs I listen to on my transistor radio call heaven.

I have been raised with the threat that if I allow intercourse inside this place before I am married, I will go straight to hell. I am expected to live a chaste and decent life, obedient to God and my church and my country and my parents. But it is 1975 and all of these entities have either failed me or faltered horribly. I feel condemned and wrong in all the ways I am becoming myself.

There are people with assigned roles having to do with this hidden place inside my body, doctors, and a future husband to whom I will of course promise to be obedient. This part of my body is tied to a calendar which even the moon has something to do with. This part of my body feels oracular and full of sensations I want to read as messages—this body part is not a bottle, not a vial, but a container of something of which I want to be in charge. My body asks me to be obedient to it.

I don’t know the real words of sex yet. I hear people get called a cunt or a twat. It is a put-down to be called frigid, but also to have hot pants. Vagina is not a word I say. It will take me 20 years to say labia or vulva without grimacing. Down there gives the general direction of sex but includes other things. I want specificity. My time of the month is also called a curse, and I sort of agree with that. My best friend Amanda and I avoid all things vagina, but when we finally talk about it, neither of us knows how to pronounce the word. The way she says, “VAH-gin-ahh,” it sounds like a musical term. What do I know? My mother says crotch, but that describes where the seams of my jeans come together. 

For the purposes of this writing, I will refer to what happens in this place in my body as fucking. When I am 17, I do not make love, which people say because it conjures flowery romance which is what I do not experience. Having sex, like having anything—a cold or a car or even a baby—is not the right verb. I didn’t call it fucking then, but I will use that word now. When I am 17, I know that guys come. Jizz comes out when that happens. It squirts onto my belly or my thighs and hopefully not inside my vagina. Breasts seem important, but mostly the action is focused on this part of my body I cannot see. 

In the six months since I started going all the way, my body, which is neither celebrated nor spoken about, has become a generator of heat and attraction that calls into question everything I have been taught. 

I have no idea where I am going in my life except for out of this small town. Maybe I will go to college. In Escanaba, the wood framed houses have few windows. They stand situated to take the brunt of the harsh winter winds off the lake and endure the parching heat of summer. Up until now, my body has felt part of this landscape, capable of walking to school on early winter mornings in a short dress and pea coat, knee socks and fur-lined boots. Yes, my eyelashes freeze stiff, and my thighs sting red, but I thaw out during first period Econ.

I am not going to get married because no one here wants to marry me. Sex has proven there is more to life than waiting to do that with only one person. Neither my mother nor my church guides me with any sort of plan or suggestion, and my body has a strong desire of its own. My body wants to get me out of this town.

So here in this health clinic, I am looking for The Pill. That is a choice I have made.

But to get to the moment when my body and I first made a choice together, perhaps, I have to be on a metal-framed bunk in Old Shady Nook, the ancient clapboard two-story house at the edge of the birch woods at the camp where I work in the summer between junior and senior year of high school. The dining room aides sleep on bunk beds in small rooms. We tie our hair back with matching colored scarves which I collect and hang off the mirror in my room. The building is full of bats, which makes us all very jumpy at night. 

On this particular afternoon, I lay awkwardly on someone else’s lower bunk with a very cute boy from the maintenance crew during rest time. Miles is a year older than me. We paired up in the tidal swirl of magnetic attraction that shapes the social group of dining room aides and maintenance guys.  I have no recollection of the conversation we must have had while we took a walk around camp one evening when I admitted my virginity to him. 

I have never had a boyfriend. I don’t know how to do this part that comes before. I press my lips with shiny gloss before Miles sneaks in. I wear a halter top and cut-off army pants and one of those scarves. 

The weight of my virginity, which I have been led to believe is the sacred thing I will one day give to the man I love, tips on this precipice. At this moment, perhaps conveniently, I believe my virginity is something I can live without. And besides, who will know? More important to me in this moment is Miles, who is not supposed to be here. He shows no sign of fear, just a quiet steadiness as he pulls down the zipper of my shorts.

“It will hurt a little,” he whispers.

Losing my virginity right now, at this particular moment, has gained momentum. I couldn’t pull up my zipper if I tried. The mysterious heat inside my body is ignited by the combustion I feel between us. To stop feels undoable.

I wonder what he thinks as his dick grows hot and hard against my thigh. He slips his finger 

between the folds of my labia, asking if I am wet. This confuses me.

He spreads my legs apart and they don’t move so readily in this direction. He doesn’t whisper encouragingly. I let him push his dick into my vagina. 

I shrink back. This is a turning point, no return from this moment so swiftly arrived at, there, inside of me. There is nothing affectionate in his manner, nothing personal in his touch.

What I don’t see then I have never seen, how another enters this place inside of me.

While I have a high tolerance for pain, 46 years later I feel that first penetration, the sharpness still echoes in my sinews.

But now I am 17.  This is the moment I have longed for, maybe not this exact moment, but something of being chosen by a boy. Miles moves over me like a person on a mission. I am startled by how close he is, his bowl-cut hair. His maybe-beard grinds against my face. 

There is a shimmer once his dick is inside this place in my body, where I feel something entirely new. And this shimmer which feels jubilant–something deeply, quietly, personally, singly, mine-all-mine joyful–occurs at almost the same time that I feel utterly ashamed for letting this happen. I feel the collapse of all the promises and commandments I have ever spoken. But there is uplift too. I wonder for a second if this has something to do with love. The sin of this thing we have done and the exciting fun of it crash around inside me.

Miles does nothing to protect himself or me. Neither do I. This is another assigned role, a responsibility for the thing that could happen inside my body. Since it is my body, it feels like it is my job.

He comes with a grunt muffled in the pillow next to my ear. I wonder if I am supposed to do something else.

He slips out and lifts off me. My halter top coils under my chin, my shorts ring my ankles. As Miles straightens his sleeveless basketball jersey, his eyes meet mine with a sort of smile. I don’t know him well enough to guess his meaning. He zips his jeans. With a shake of his thick bangs, he leaves Old Shady Nook out the back door without saying a word.

I feel vivid and violated, even though I agreed to this. 

And then an equation assembles within me like a theorem in geometry class: When a boy and a girl intersect for sex, the girl will register many feelings, including pain. No such feelings, including love, shall ever be mentioned. 

I tug on a sweatshirt. My cheeks are red and raw from his beard. Embarrassed, I hustle back to work along with the other dining room aides. We are clear-headed, church-going girls hired by this camp to serve the campers and staff, and clean up in the dining room. I become a leader of this pack, all of us wearing those dumb scarves. I am good at serving.

As I walk among these girls, something new dawns in me because of Miles. My theorem expands: When a boy and a girl intersect for sex, a boyfriend is made. 

But Miles doesn’t act like a boyfriend at all. Miles does not want to be my boyfriend even though I believe that what we did on the bunk bed made that so.

We meet secretly at rest time in the apple orchard to talk. He is particular about my body, how I should sit on a picnic bench so my thighs do not spread out on the seat. How to not prop my arm up with my elbow locked. I coyly set my chin on my shoulder. He says this makes my arm look fat.

These things I never, ever forget. My young, soft, long-limbed body. How I walk around men. How much I want to be seen. Touched. 

Miles opens the gate. The rules about how I am supposed to behave conflict with that shimmery sensation that feels like mine. The rest of that summer, I flirt, but I don’t go all the way with any other guy. 

Before then, I didn’t know how to be with boys. My cousin, who is the oldest boy in a set of cousins we spend lots of time with, is one year older than me. Since his family moved to Ford River, we big kids play Rummy 500 and London Aire with our grandma. Over sparkly cat’s eye glasses tethered to her neck with a jeweled chain, she instructs us on how to deal and hold our cards. According to her, card-playing builds respectable social skills. 

My cousin teaches me to drive on county roads lined with cedar and birch that run straight to the horizon in his friend Darren’s Corvair. In winter, he teaches me to skate on hockey blades. He skates up behind me to nestle my hips so our ankles touch. I feel the way his blades strike the surface of the ice. He is a good teacher. My cousin is super cute and funny. My crush on him makes a hot feeling rise in my chest when we go to their house. I get dizzy. We have so much fun laughing together and playing with all the little kids.

During my junior year, he teaches me how to make out. We sneak into his bedroom evenings when we are charged with babysitting the combined crowd of our siblings. While the television blasts in the living room downstairs, the kids cartwheel off the couch. Behind his locked bedroom door, I learn things that cannot be done on ice skates. 

But my cousin cannot be my boyfriend.

I have a pang to know boys. They move through the world with apparent ease. Girls bake biscuits in home economics and take dictation in typing class while boys learn to weld, or fix cars in auto shop, or set type in print shop. 

Boys at church are busy. They get to be acolytes in special robes. They light the candles set in the candelabras that the Altar Guild ladies polished to a high sheen. I watch them carry the long candle snuffer which they use to blink out the flames at the end of the service. They run the control panel for the radio broadcast of our Sunday 10:45 a.m. service. Girls help with the children’s choir or take care of babies in the nursery during the service. I sing in the adult choir when I am in high school, which means I sit under the stained-glass gaze of Jesus in my black rayon twill choir robe that weighs a silky heaviness on my thighs. 

I study that panel of colorful glass opposite the choir loft which depicts Jesus just after his resurrection. He stands in bare feet on the rock-strewn ground in front of the cave where he was buried on Good Friday. His hand rests on the boulder which had been moved away by angels or some undocumented force. He is calm and collected. In a few minutes, Mary Magdalene will discover him. But she is not pictured in stained glass. 

Under the stares of the lock-jawed Lutherans in the congregation I feel bored, static, unchosen, and unruly.

Boys in theater classes are more available. They listen to different music—Steely Dan, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, jug bands. Some of them do sports. But we need each other to put on musicals and dramas. I sew costumes, learn stage makeup, and paint muslin-covered flats. We play charades in acting class, but the books and movie references are things I have never heard of, like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test or Trout Fishing in America. We give each other back massages during rehearsals. I practice-kiss with smoky-mouthed actor guys by the water fountain outside the auditorium. 

High school expands my world exponentially. But like scenery in a show-stopping musical, the walls of my familiar life of family and church are whisked away, and a baffling wider landscape appears. I don’t know who to talk to about this. My best friends are as confused as I am.

Here, there is no gradual way to acclimate to boys, a slow on-ramp to liking someone who likes me back. I watch couples form and do romantic things in the hallways between classes. I feel the weightiness of my girl’s life—the social pressure to look a particular way, family pressure to behave a certain way, expectations at church to be a certain kind of person. This place in my body feels magnetic and repulsive, indecipherable. On the outside I am pimply, and hot, and gullible.

I need a beginner version of a boyfriend like I need lessons for driving on ice-slick roads. But fucking catapults me past all that. Fucking grows me up quickly, outstrips my ability to make good decisions. My body throbs with inevitability. But how can I reconcile the power I feel rising in me with the expectations of a morally upright life? Where in this expanding equation am I?

I do not have boyfriends in high school. I am never once invited to a dance or hold a sweaty palm of a quiet, smart jock like Donny, the doe-eyed boy I’d kissed behind the ice shanty in sixth grade. No one pays one bit of interest to me unless they need my notes from English or to help them learn their lines for a play.

I feel untouchable. No twirling my fingers in the phone cord, leaning on the kitchen counter talking to a boy far past bedtime. No love notes passed in Algebra class. No making out in the shadowed ends of the hallways at school. I doodle boy’s names in the margins of my chemistry notebook, but I don’t wear anyone’s letter jacket. No one picks me up in their car. One time, because of a mistake at a service club meeting, a chubby football player with a big old car gets stuck taking me to a school function. It is sort of a date. He says he’ll pick me up. At the appointed time, he honks his horn in front of our apartment but my mother forbids me to go downstairs, saying either he comes up to meet her or I don’t go out. He honks a few times and then hits his accelerator and roars off.

What I do with Miles in Old Shady Nook happens a hundred miles north of Escanaba, so no one but Amanda knows. From the beginning of our senior year, I am the loyal senior class president, making announcements about class business on the PA system from the principal’s office before the 3:45 dismissal bell. No one seems to notice that I am buzzed. Amanda and I get out of school at 2:30 since we are on the early schedule. We smoke part of a joint walking home, then eat a packet of graham crackers slathered with peanut butter at my house. We glug down cold milk, then walk back to school so I can make the announcements. Then we go to play rehearsal. 

Boys in our high school are not at all interested in either of us. We hang out with older guys after community theater productions or at cast parties. The parties are always at someone’s house where there are bedrooms with doors that close or couches in dark rooms where fucking older guys is brisk and daring. I wear dresses, so easy to hike up. We are groupies of a popular blues band in town. They play at Civic Center dances. We do wild things with the band, Amanda and I and our other friend Tru. Sex becomes currency. A fuck here. A fuck there.

I do not attend a single homecoming dance though I plan the floats, help build them, and order the corsages and boutonnieres for the homecoming court. I pin their flowers on, straighten their bowties. I beam at the girls shivering bare-armed in elegant dresses and crowns, the guys in suits and sashes out on the edge of the football field. They smile radiantly, past me and up into the football stands filled with their adoring fans, these glamorous chosen ones of my high school.

I go to prom with Simon, one of my best friends, who is gay. We’ve known each other since fifth grade. We don’t want to miss our senior prom, dry ice fog pouring from under that stairway to heaven we’d built. We both wear white. He drives his sister’s powder blue Mustang, and we fuck in the bucket seat. We figure everyone else was doing it, so why shouldn’t we? 

It takes some gymnastic arranging, but since we are friends, we talk in full sentences to each other. We are parked right in front of the house of the party we are going to out on Portage Point. The porch light fixture illuminates the interior of his small car. I think this is his first time with a girl. We have fun.

At Escanaba Area Public High School, girls who wear heavy black eyeliner and tops that show cleavage, who smoke in the bathrooms and go all the way with boys in cars out in the F-section parking lot are called sluts, or easy, or cheap. They are also called greaser girls because they are often attached to the boys in auto shop. 

I am not a slut.  But the sex I have with older guys never leads to what I thought sex was supposed to lead to–being someone’s girlfriend, the someone you talk to over a single order of hot fudge cake you share in a banquette at Big Boy restaurant on Ludington Street. Someone who dares to walk up the backstairs to our apartment to meet my mom. 

My geometry/sex theorem requires an amendment: When a boy and a girl meet for sex, they will not necessarily form a unit. In the case of me, no pairing shall result from this intersection.

Amanda worries about me, how wild I am. I have gone from nothing to everything. She is ticked with me too because I fuck guys who don’t care about me. Her anger does not slow me down. I think she is as wild as me. What I don’t see, I truly don’t know.

Amanda’s glamorous older brother comes back from Los Angeles to Escanaba for a few months. He wears his jeans differently than anyone I’ve met in town. He has a way of getting me into bed that is both funny and exciting. After we fuck, he fills my lap with books and my head with visions of life beyond our small hometown. He talks about movies that have never played at the Delft or the Michigan theaters on Ludington Street. He teaches me to smoke hash. 

Reggae songs by Bob Marley and the Wailers teach me and Amanda how to dance differently. We think the wildness we have found is different from what everyone in our high school does at beer parties out in the woods. We believe we get away doing the dangerous, stupid things we do with guys, drinking Sloe Gin Fizzes at bars even though we are under-aged, slipping into beds with people we barely know. We go to church with our families on Sunday mornings. We are members of the National Honor Society. 

Fucking ignites a freedom in me, a part untethered to my mother and my sisters. I am solely in charge of sex most of the time. I could not care less that I don’t fit the skinny, blonde, straight-haired cheerleader type that is the beauty standard at Escanaba Area Public High School. I know now that the secret power of sex does not make me smart, but I crave the sweet sensation of being desired in the hot wrestle of fucking.

In the winter of senior year, I face what scares the shit out of me. This is, as my mother threatened when she first had a sense that I might be doing things I shouldn’t, “a problem I have brought down on my own head.”  While I don’t conform to type, I am smart enough to know I play with more than fire with all this fucking. 

In 1976, abortion is legal in Michigan, but I have no clue where I would go to get one, or who I could talk to about that. I am ignorant about how to purchase rubbers or what to do with them. A few girls get pregnant in senior year. They wear smock tops until they “go away” for a while. I want to take birth control pills. It is the best way I figure to protect myself. At home, sex is never, ever discussed. There are no other options. The filmstrip from Kotex sanitary pads in Junior High taught me about menstruation, but that is the limit of explanation about the changes my body is going through. 

I discover a copy of Women: Our Bodies, Our Selves on a shelf in the living room, put there by my mother, I guess. She doesn’t mention its presence. I read it cover to cover. The book becomes my arbiter of worldly knowledge. The photograph of a young woman folded onto her knees in a pool of blood, dead from a self-administered abortion with a wire coat hanger in black and white sears into my brain.

I figure The Pill is my only choice if I want to keep fucking. I make an appointment at the free health clinic out by the community college. It is on that table under the sheet with his fingers examining my vagina, that the doctor asks if my mother knows I am there. He is her doctor, too.

I tell him no. He discovers a cyst on my right fallopian tube that he says has to be surgically removed. So while I make the choice to go to the clinic, it is Dr. Nyquist who breaks the news to my mom where I am, what I came there to get, and that I need surgery. I hunch deep in my parka in his office while he is on the phone with her. I am sure she is polite with him on the phone, but I have no recollection of what happens when I get home.

My sexual adventures stall while I don a modest ankle-length robin’s egg-blue corduroy robe and have surgery at St. Francis Hospital. I don’t understand exactly what this surgery is about, if it will affect my ability to have babies, or what else might result. The long cut across what the doctor calls my “bikini line” surprises me. I have a large mound of bandages under my robe.

A few guys come to the hospital to visit. One brings me green grapes. He sits at the foot of my bed in a suede bomber jacket. He is a graduate from a university downstate. He writes short stories in a cabin out in Wells. He plays with my toes while my mother fumes in the hallway. He speaks in a low voice, wants to know what is the deal with my hospital stay? We talk about books until my mom kicks him out. 

Maybe you’re reading this and words like promiscuous or loose or whore run through your head. Such a nice girl I was. Such a nice girl who discovered the thoroughfare of her vagina and once that gate opened, did not stop looking to exchange her currency anywhere.

Really. Everyone wanted into my body.

Guys who barely knew my name, who did not know where I lived. Did not know my family. Or guys who did, who looked like they might be a steady thing, but fucking never, ever led me to anything steady. It only led to more fucking.

Maybe sex did not happen like that for you. Maybe you had a sweet gentle entry into touch with a person who cared and wanted the best for you. Maybe you planned the whole thing and didn’t get raped on a beach by a maybe boyfriend. Maybe all those hickeys on your neck were the story of a heavy make-out session where the guy stopped, who actually said no, this is not what I want to have happen here. Maybe you never had bruises on your pelvic bones where that jock you’d helped with his lines for Spoon River Anthology humped you so hard, both of you in zipped-up jeans on the floor of someone else’s wood paneled basement rec room, that you could not undress in front of your sisters for a month, that song by the Raspberries blasts while you let him feel you up, “Please go all the way…” 

Maybe you are my neighbor Diane, who, when a new boy named Paulie moved in one street and a block over, you matched up with him like dominoes. They are still a couple 50 years later. They married during college and the rest is their life of jobs and houses and kids, joy and tragedy, snowmobiles, and sailboats.

I tossed my choice like a lifeline across a chasm of despair to have physical connection, the need to join in, in, inside my body. But I would not exchange my life for Diane’s or anyone else’s. That early wildness does not ruin me in the ways I’d been threatened it would. I move forward in my small town, on fire by the power of fucking, and hungry to get out.

About the Author:

Backwards and Blind | Helyn Trickey Bradley

Grief has made me a morning person. It shakes me awake at three a.m and whispers with a hoarse voice into my ear. 

I’ve begun rowing with my grief. Tipping its pale face to the slow sunrise. This is not a metaphor. In April, I joined a local rowing club. I made my gawky start in the smallest boat imaginable in the calm morning waters of Oregon’s Willamette River.

It’s odd how much the geese in the early dawn mimic the high keening of my heart, or how the splashing of a sea lion rolling around near me in the inky waters, its whiskery face catching the morning light and a silver fish with equal ease, can bring me back from the brink of despair.

I’m grieving the slow loss of my mother from Parkinson’s disease. The affliction has shriveled her body and withered her brain. Because of COVID-19 restrictions, I was barred from seeing my mother in her memory care facility for more than a year. I talked her through crying jags and confusion and paranoia on the phone, while she wondered aloud why no family ever visited her. I told her why every day. She kept forgetting.

Now that I can see her in person again and hug her slight shoulders, I’m both relieved and grief-stricken. She’s declined so much in the year we were physically apart that I felt my chest tighten the first time I saw her again. She is a birthday balloon, three days after the party. 

“I’m so angry,” Mom says when I finally can visit her in her room. “My ideas keep falling out of me.” She looks helplessly at the floor. “And I can’t get out of this damn chair.” Mom pushes weakly on the cool metal of her wheelchair, but she can’t move her body an inch. 

Balancing in the boat on the Willamette, I feel the tension between trying to stay upright and adding strength to my stroke. Don’t tell my rowing instructor, but I’m on the water for the peace and the grace, and don’t care much about form. But she does, so I pretend. My instructor calls to me through a blue megaphone in an adjacent boat to slow my stroke, to wait half a beat in the release position before rolling my head and then body and then legs forward in one liquid motion. I perform this action clumsily and it nearly has me gulping river water. “Feather your oars!” she calls. This instruction will save me from a dunk in the cold water. 

“I’m so scared,” my mother says to me one evening when I arrive at The Springs Memory Care to tuck her into bed for the night. She’s been having night terrors and I hope my presence at bedtime might help.

“What are you scared of Mama?”

She looks dehydrated, so I hand her a glass of water, but her arms shake violently, and her hands can barely stand the weight of the glass. I hold the back of her head steady as I tip the  glass to her mouth. She takes a sip and peers into my eyes like a newborn.

“I’m frightened of what’s going to happen to me next,” she says. I nod and we say a prayer together, the same short sing-song prayer that she taught me to recite at bedtime as a little girl and that I say now with my own daughter every night: “Now we lay us down to sleep and pray the Lord our souls to keep. …” Mom and I hold hands all the way through.

My body needs to be out on the river in the weak light of early morning. I need to see the sun come up again and again, to be reminded that darkness does not last forever. All I want is to be out on the river, moving forward. 

Except rowers move backwards. 

Honestly, it never occurred to me that I would be sitting backwards and flinging myself and my impossibly light boat behind me with each pull. I think I was imagining kayaking when I signed up. I never thought about how weird it might feel to fly fast and light and backwards! But backwards I go, and I feel like a fledgling who has caught a lucky draft, adds an easy tipping of its wing, and is soaring.  

I’m also rowing blind. I can’t wear my glasses easily; they fog up with each breath I take. So, I row through this holy, early world as Monet must’ve wandered his gardens at Giverny: a blurry landscape made that much more astonishing without the finer details. It’s dreamlike and cold until I get going so hard and fast that I wish I could peel off that extra shirt I put on this morning without capsizing my boat. But I can’t. I don’t have the dexterity or confidence yet. So, I slow my row and glide backwards through the still, black water and see the blurred lights in the homes that line the shore flicker on, one by one, like lightning bugs.

“Be brave and be strong,” my mother told me a few weeks ago when I could finally see her face to face. I knelt on the carpet beside her wheelchair, my face mask brushing up against her cheek. She knew who I was, recognized my eyes even with a mask covering my nose and mouth. I felt her weak fingers twine their way in between mine. Where will I ever find enough bravery and strength to live through losing her?

The Willamette is chilly this morning. Ribbons of steam rising like ghosts off the glassy surface. I am in a quad. Four strangers in a boat. It’s my first time as stroke seat, the position that sets the pace of the boat and establishes a rhythm. The four of us sit rigid, our oars feathered on top of the water. We don’t even remember each other’s names, we’re so new to one another.

“Watch each other’s shoulders!” Coach yells. “When the rower in front of you is peeling their shoulders back, yours should be in perfect sync.” I feel the boat wobble as someone behind me tightens their shoe grip. I might as well be on a Saltine cracker, I think to myself.

The stern pair, me and a woman whose eyes have been wide with fear all morning, starts rowing. Arms first, then back, then legs. Catch! A smooth motion. But we’re not in sync, so the boat teeters so far to the right that someone yelps in fear before we steady ourselves and try again. I try to establish a rhythm, but the inertia of the rowers behind me is disorienting, and I find myself galloping hard across the water. “Slow down, stroke seat!” someone yells at me from behind, and my cheeks flame, but no one can see my embarrassment except the coach motoring along beside us. Later, in the dock house after we have together lifted the quad over our heads and placed it gently in its cradle, I will apologize to my fellow rowers for going so fast, for giving in to the rushing momentum, for not numbing my brain out with the mantra: arms, body, legs, catch! Arms, body, legs, catch!  

“There are only two kinds of rowers,” our coach will tell us. “The kind who have been in the water and the kind who will be in the water soon.” So, you see, there is no getting around it. No matter what, the cold, dark is going to swallow me up. The only question: Will I resurface?

I ask Dad if he wants me to make the call to hospice. We are standing outside the entrance to Mom’s facility. His fists are jammed in his dress pant pockets, rattling change.

“What happens if your mother has a heart attack or something?” he asks. “We’d still rush her to the hospital, right? For something so serious.”

I shake my head. “No. We’d call her hospice nurse, and they would make Mom as comfortable as possible, but they wouldn’t try to save her life anymore.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, that’s how it works. No more visits to the ER. We just do everything we can to make her comfortable through whatever happens.”

Dad looks away at something in the middle distance. “But we can always cancel hospice if we don’t like it, right?”

I hesitate. “Why would we, Dad?” I feel the sudden weight of my own lungs as I take a breath. “She’s never going to get better no matter what we do. We’re only prolonging her death.”

Dad’s eyes are glassy windows in an old house. “Boy, I never thought it would come to this.”

Hospice is a boat made for four. My brother, mother, father, and I barely balance in its hollow belly. Mom sets the pace. The rest of us watch her rail-thin shoulders to know when to lean in and when to rest. But we’ve never done this before, been so eye-to-eye with the imminent death of one of us. How do you turn off the urge to rush in and save a life when it’s all we’ve been doing for so long?

When it happens, the hospice meeting is surprisingly pleasant. Our social worker, Rachel, has nice eye contact and a sweet voice muffled only a little by the pink mask covering the lower half of her face. I believe Rachel is pretty because her eyes crinkle nicely around their edges.

  My brother, father, mother, and I are cozy together, sitting in Mom’s gently lit room with a large picture window overlooking a garden budding with small, green pumpkins and the beginnings of apples on a tree. The four of us together feels so familiar we could erase twenty years and still be here, talking about the new neighbors, how the traffic is worsening, or how the Edwards’ German shepherd Max has been overturning trash cans up and down the street again. It’s always been the four of us, slowly rowing through our days together. Even the presence of my mother’s new metal wheelchair with its levers and springs and fancy tilt-a-wheel capabilities doesn’t jolt us out of our well-worn comfort with each other; even the quiet presence of a hospice nurse and a social worker doesn’t break this odd spell.

I take my mother’s familiar hands in mine and tell her we’re having this meeting to make sure she’s cared for in hospice. We hold our breath. We have no way of knowing how Mom will react to the word hospice, whether she will throw up her hands and give up. We watch her shoulders for some indication of the way forward.

“Good,” she says. “I was wondering when this tea party was going to get started.”

Afterwards, the conversation turns to the weather, and Rachel tells us that during the unseasonable hot spell several weeks before, where temperatures in Oregon rose as high as 113 degrees, Rachel laid wet bed sheets on her lawn for the squirrels who scrambled down from the trees to lie flat on the cool sheets and lick them. I think to myself, yes, this is the kind of person I want helping my mother, the kind who will lay cool sheets out for squirrels. I’m still thinking this when Rachel takes me aside in the hallway and asks whether we’ve thought of final arrangements for Mom.

“Do you know what her wishes are?”

A lump in my throat. I’ve swallowed a fish. I shake my head.

Rachel presses a card into my hand. “When you’re ready, I can help you make arrangements. I know a good crematorium if you want to go that way. Don’t delay, though. This gets really hard if you wait too long.”

Mom’s night terrors are getting worse. Often, she believes she has been abducted by a murderer who has hogtied her and is now going after the rest of her family before returning to kill her. She says she can feel the rope burns on her wrists from trying to get out of the hold. Sometimes she believes she is being raped. Mom screams so loudly and for so long that her suitemate cannot sleep and is relocated to a couch in the lobby for the night. My brother, a doctor, works with Mom’s neurologist to try different drug cocktails in hopes of mitigating the terrifying hallucinations that often accompany Parkinson’s related dementia. We’re hoping to level out her fear because she still has some good days. But the meds are failing. Andrew tells me we are running out of options.

“What are we going to do?”

My brother screws his mouth up, and his eyes slide to the right. I’ve seen him make that face a thousand times. Finally, he throws up his hands. “Snow her with morphine? Not ideal. It’ll zonk her out completely.”

I show up at bedtime to tuck Mom in. Tonight, she’s wearing the blue china pattern cotton pajamas I bought her last fall. They match her eyes. She searches my face, trying to place me. “Wimma,” she says using my childhood nickname. Beneath the covers, her hands tremble so violently that they resemble twin racing hearts. I cover her hands with mine, and her involuntary shaking travels up my arm.

A mother duck and four ducklings paddle out alongside me in a line. I’m on the Willamette in a single scull and grateful for the solitude. An early morning light gilds the tops of the leafy trees standing quiet at the shoreline. I love the glide of my boat, the ease of pulling myself through the water, the surprise at the animal-like movement I can make in a boat by myself. I think this must be what it feels like to be a skimming bird or maybe a flashing fish underneath the waves. My eye catches a movement just feet above my head and to the left of my small boat. A bald eagle making large circles, its bright white head catching fire like a match in the light. I stop rowing and hold my breath, taking in the majesty of this bird, its control as its circles grow smaller and the eagle begins a descent. One more easy circle over the ducks before a controlled, blurry dive, a last-minute squawk and fluttering of wings and a duckling life lost. I open my mouth, but the killing is so fast and graceful I don’t have time to make a sound.

Later, as I pull my scull from the water and dry dock it in a sling, I catch sight of the mother duck. She’s crowded the three surviving ducklings under a corner of the dock and is shielding them with her body and one splayed wing.

“I can’t call the fucking crematorium, Andrew. I can’t make myself do it.”

“That’s okay,” my brother says over the phone. “Maybe it can wait.”

I’m walking circles in my front yard, pacing the dead yellow grass that didn’t survive the surprising heat of the summer.

“I can’t even call the social worker who put the wet sheets out for the squirrels,” I tell him.

“I can call,” he offers, but his voice is weary. My brother has spent the last year watching people die of COVID-19 in his ER, helpless to save mothers, fathers, even children gasping for air.

“No,” I say, pacing the yard. I’m trying to gather courage with each step. “I can do it. The social worker said we shouldn’t wait, that it just gets harder. How can it possibly get any harder?”

“Oh, I think it can get harder,” he says. His voice is far away. He’s driving in for another hospital shift, his seventh in a row.

“I prayed to God that He would take Mom, that He wouldn’t let her suffer anymore.” I make the confession so quietly I’m not sure my brother has heard what I said. “I want to take it back,” I cry. “I’m not ready for her to leave yet. I’ll never be ready.”

The phone crackles and I wonder if I’ve lost the connection. “It was a loving prayer,” he finally says. “And we’ll never be ready.”

The mornings on the Willamette River are cooler now. Overhead, rusty-throated geese fly south, sweeping the sky clean. Soon, it will be too cold for me to row. Soon, the threat of falling into the freezing black water will keep me tethered to shore. All winter I will dream of a warm day and the promise of a perfect stroke.

My grief says get in a boat. My grief says pull the oars through the cold water, using my legs to add power. My grief says fly over the water alongside the honking geese and be glad in the movement, any movement, even if it is backwards and blind.

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