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How I Fell In Love With Ranch Dressing

Tomas Ovalle / AP Images for Hidden Valley

When I was growing up, our refrigerator was stocked with a variety of condiments. From sriracha to sambal and lizano to tahini, the shelves were packed with options to accessorize any meal. We even had a corner devoted to mustards, each picked out on weekly trips to Brooklyn’s beloved Eagle Provisions (RIP) and each capable of tickling the tongue’s various flavor geographies (a favorite was a brand of German honey mustard, which possessed a soft smoothness coupled with a fiery after-taste).

One condiment we never stocked, though, was ranch dressing. Perhaps it was my father’s aversion to all things perceived bourgeois, perhaps he didn’t particularly like the taste of ranch (the only creamy condiment we habitually used was blue cheese dressing), or perhaps he never could quite figure out what exactly was ranch’s purpose — I didn’t fully appreciate the dressing until well after college, when I began to date my future wife, who grew up in western Pennsylvania, an epicenter of the dressing.

As I visited her friends and relatives in her hometown of Erie, PA, I came to appreciate the vitality of ranch on a daily basis. My wife used to sell pepperoni balls to raise money for her Girl Scout troop, and each frozen ball of bread and meat was accompanied by a tin of ranch. Restaurants are chosen based on the quality of their ranch dressing (each spot obviously has its own recipe); grocery stores carry a wide swath of options, ranging from the generic buttermilk-based, to ones flavored with cucumber, chipotle, and avocado. Ranch was inescapable, and with good reason: it’s delicious. Ranch has a beguiling and complex profile; not quite dominated by its spice blend, with enough fat and unctuousness to complement nearly every type of food. Ranch doesn’t just go well with salad — it stands up to fried foods and pizza, gives steamed and raw vegetables a flavorful boost, and complements a wide variety of proteins.

Ranch is as American as apple pie or barbecue (in Europe, the dressing is known as “the American dressing“). Created in the 1950s by a plumber from California, the dried spice mix (born of necessity as its creator, Steve Henson, concocted the blend while working construction in Anchorage, Alaska, lacking a consistent source of fresh vegetables and spices) and the subsequent application of buttermilk to make the dressing quickly attained cult status on the west coast, slowly moving eastward one application — from steakhouses to pizza and wings — at a time.

But for decades, ranch was still very much misunderstood, losing favor in the 1970s during a period in which the dressing was banned from diets because it was considered too fatty — our salads were always topped with the “healthier” option containing some form of vinaigrette. Yet there has been an uptick in recent years, which coincides with when I started to fall in love with the condiment. Ranch isn’t a condiment just for gluttonous hangovers or finicky eaters; as Henson likely envisioned when he began mixing, its range is limitless. Ranch has been the nation’s most popular salad dressing since 1990, and Hidden Valley, the Heinz of ranch, even began to market the condiment as “the new ketchup.”

Grub Street’s Chris Crowley documented how ranch has begun to influence not only the palette of mainstream America but also that of chefs, writing in 2016,

Now, ranch is front and center at some of the country’s favorite restaurants. Popular southern-food specialist Bobwhite Lunch Counter opts for ranch in its buffalo-chicken sandwich, while the sandwich artists at Court Street Grocers serve ranch-topped kale salad. Meanwhile, the trendy Mr. Donahue’s serves it with fried onions. At Chicago’s hugely popular neo-diner Au Cheval, ranch dresses a chopped salad with bacon and eggs. In St. Louis, there’s an all-things-ranch-dressing restaurant called twisted RAnCh.

And that popularity hasn’t abated, as restaurants have since begun to tinker with Henson’s recipe and push the bounds of what constitutes ranch. Take Charter Oak in Napa Valley, which now features a fermented soy dip: ““It’s very different from ranch in the way that it’s made. But it’s creamy and tangy, and it has salt and umami, and it definitely reminds people of ranch,” chef Katianna Hong told the New York Times.

When our son began to transition from formula to solid foods, ranch was one of the first condiments dipped on his tongue. He wasn’t a fan, immediately wiping out his mouth, but he’ll learn. It took me 22 years to finally appreciate the American dressing.

Facebook Isn’t the Same as “The Internet” Except When It Is

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, second from left, poses for a selfie with the crowd following wreath-laying rites at the Heroes Cemetery to mark National Heroes Day Monday, Aug. 27, 2018. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)

Davey Alba‘s BuzzFeed investigation into the ways Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s government uses Facebook to spread propaganda and destroy political opponents is a frightening look at what happens when a tool created by a bunch of developers in California becomes the go-to news source for a country 7,000 miles away.

Just how ubiquitous is Facebook in the Philippines?

In 2012, 29 million Filipinos used Facebook. Today, 69 million people — two-thirds of the population — are on Facebook. The remaining one-third does not have access to the internet. In other words, virtually every Filipino citizen with an internet connection has a Facebook account. For many in one of the most persistently poor nations in the world, Facebook is the only way to access the internet.

Which is pretty much how Facebook wants it. Maria Ressa, the CEO of the news website Rappler, told BuzzFeed News that during an April 2017 meeting with Facebook, she mentioned to Mark Zuckerberg that 97% of Filipinos who had access to the internet also had Facebook accounts (which was true at the time). Zuckerberg frowned, Ressa recalled. Then he asked: “What about the other 3%?”

Facebook’s Internet.org effort has floundered embarrassingly in more than half a dozen nations and territories. But in the Philippines, the social media capital of the world according to global media agency We Are Social, Facebook rushed into a culture that unquestioningly assimilated it.

“We were seduced, we were lured, we were hooked, and then, when we became captive audiences, we were manipulated to see what other people — people with vested interests and evil motives of power and domination — wanted us to see,” de Lima wrote to BuzzFeed News. “It was a slow takeover of our attention. We didn’t notice it until it was already too late.”

Neither did Facebook.

Read the story

The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Perfume

Illustration by Jacob Stead

Katy Kelleher | Longreads | September 2018 | 15 minutes (3,859 words)

If given the choice to smell like whale excrement or delicate white flowers, few people would chose the first option. Bile, feces, vomit, and animal oils sound as though they would smell repulsive. The words conjure up scent memories of that time your dog released his anal glands on the duvet, or that summer you worked by the wharf and the August air was thick with the miasma of oily herring heads. Jasmine, on the other hand, sounds like a love song, a Disneyfied dream. Try, right now, to imagine the smell of blooming jasmine. Your memory, ill-equipped to locate scents in its baroque filing system, might pull up something syrupy sweet or softly floral. Is that how you want your body to smell?

Too bad: if you choose door number two, you’ll walk away reeking of sharp vegetal tones tempered by a slightly earthy, foul scent. Jasmine absolute is an oily, semi-viscid, dark amber fluid that is denser and more concentrated than jasmine essential oil. Essential oils come from distilled, boiled, or pressed plant matter, while absolutes are traditionally made through a processed called enfleurage, which involves submerging the delicate blossoms or spices in fat before extracting their fragrance molecules into a tincture of ethyl alcohol. While it’s a common ingredient in a natural perfumer’s tool kit, jasmine absolute smells strange: complicated, beautiful, not entirely pleasurable. It reeks of indole (rhymes with “enroll”), an organic chemical compound also found in coal tar, human feces, and decomposing bodies.

If you choose door number one, you’ll be blessed with the kiss of ambergris, a highly desirable natural substance that smells sweet yet rather marine, like vanilla and unrefined sugar mixed with seawater. The scent reminds me a little of the smell of my dog’s paws — pink and light and animal. It smells like cashmere feels. Smelling ambergris is an innate pleasure, one that even an infant would recognize as enjoyable, like the first sip of sweet milk.

For more than a thousand years, humans have been adorning our bodies with animal products like ambergris and putrid-smelling plant derivatives like jasmine absolute. We apply off-putting materials to our bodies to enhance and mask our natural scents. Like dogs that roll in deer carcasses, humans seek to change our olfactory emissions by borrowing from other creatures. It’s not always about simply smelling good: We want to smell complex, so that others will be compelled to keep coming back, like bees to a flower, to sniff us again and again, to revel in our scents, and draw ever closer to our warm, damp parts.

According to natural perfumer Charna Ethier, ambergris can smell like “golden light” or a “flannel shirt that has been dried on a clothes line on a warm summer day.” Although there are several types of ambergris (including gray, gold, and white), Ethier is referring to her own personal sample, which she characterizes as “soft, fresh, and ozonic.” Ethier is the owner of Providence Perfume Company in Rhode Island, and inside her well-stocked cabinet of olfactory curiosities, she keeps a single bottle of the precious stuff. Next to her 100-year-old cade oil (a foul-smelling liquid made from juniper trees, purchased at an estate sale) and below her collection of floral absolutes and herbal essences, she has stashed a bit of ambergris tincture. The clear glass vial contains a mixture of ambergris and alcohol that includes just 5 percent whale matter. In its pure form, this substance is a waxy gray ball of animal secretion, a floating fat-berg that is “more expensive than gold.” Unlike jasmine absolute, which plays a role in many of her perfumes, real ambergris is simply too expensive to use in a commercial product. “It’s considered the miracle ingredient for perfumes,” she says. “It makes everything better.”

It’s not always simply about smelling good: We want to smell complex, so that others will be compelled to keep coming back, like bees to a flower, to sniff us again and again, to revel in our scents, and draw ever closer to our warm, damp parts.

Ethier doesn’t use any synthetics in her perfume, nor does she use animal products, though animal scents are a traditional ingredient in perfumery. Not only are these compounds expensive, but true mammalian products like musk, civet, and ambergris often come at a cruel cost. Whales have been murdered for their oily blubber and concealed stomach bile, civets are caged and prodded for their fear-induced anal gland secretions, and musk is harvested from the glands of slaughtered deer. Many people know that perfumers build their trade on the graves of millions of tiny white flowers, but fewer people realize they also bottle and sell the byproducts of animal pain and suffering. Perfumers who use synthetic materials are exempt, in a sense, as are those who use found or vintage materials. Ethier’s ambergris is “quite old” and reportedly  beach-found (“I hope it is,” she says). But even perfumes that use synthetic compounds or salvaged bile carry the whiff of death; the history of the industry is seeped in it, and that smell doesn’t wash out easily.

There’s a reason perfumers use these notes. They enhance the floral scents, undercutting lightness with a reminder of darkness. Animal products are the antiheroes in this drama — even when you hate them, you still, just a little, love them. That’s how siren songs work, and ambergris sings the loudest. Once, Ethier made a perfume using her most prized ingredients. She mixed 100-year-old sandalwood essence with ambergris tincture and frangipane and boronia absolutes, two flowers native to Central America and Tasmania, respectively. It was the first time she’d used ambergris, and this one-off perfume was so lovely that “it was like gold-washing something.” She remembers wistfully, “It was so beautiful.”

* * *

Smell is the most underrated and mysterious sense. In her 1908 autobiography, The World I Live In, Helen Keller called scent the “fallen angel.” “For some inexplicable reason, smell does not hold the high position it deserves amongst its sisters,” she wrote. Keller mapped her world by smell — she could smell a coming storm hours before it arrived and knew when lumber had been harvested from her favorite copse of trees by the sharp scent of pine. In contrast to touch, which she called “permanent and definite,” Keller experienced odors as “fugitive” sensations. Touch guided her; scent fed her. Without smell, Keller imagined her world would be lacking “light, color, and the Protean spark. The sensuous reality which interthreads and supports all the gropings of my imagination would be shattered.”

We don’t often think in terms of color and light when it comes to smell, perhaps because we have so few words for scent that we borrow from the lexicons of our other senses. Despite the fact that smell is our most ancient sense — our so-called “lizard brain” is also sometimes termed the rhinencephalon, literally the “nose brain” — it is also one that seems to elude language. “Smell is the mute sense, the one without words,” wrote Diane Ackerman in A Natural History of the Senses. “Lacking a vocabulary, we are left tongue-tied, groping for words in a sea of inarticulate pleasures and exaltation.” We’ve had eons to come up with words for the precise smell of fresh-turned earth or the exact scent of a blazing beach fire, and still the best we can do is earthy and smoky.

Perfumers have their own language, but their words have only recently begun to trickle down into popular culture through beauty magazines and blogs. Not only do perfumers and their superfans speak of absolutes, oils, and tinctures, but they can also rattle off compounds like coumarin and eugenol. A trained master perfumer (or “nose”) can pick out precise scents within a layered perfume. They don’t just call something foul — they can pick out the pungency of musk or the reek of tobacco, ingredients that are delicious in small doses but overwhelming when used out of balance.

In my quest to understand the appeal of seemingly repugnant ingredients, I spoke with doctors who study the nose, perfumers who feed the organ, and even a zookeeper who spends her days breathing in the pure, undiluted scent of civet discharge. While they had various theories as to why darkness seems to be an essential element of beauty, they all agreed on one thing: It’s all about context. In the right context, even the smell of death can be appealing. In the right context, vomit can be more desirable than gold. In the right context, with the right music playing in the background, you begin to root for the glamorous hit woman or the sardonic drug dealer.

They also agreed that sex is part of this equation, and it’s the easiest explanation to trot out. But perfumery is also about more than just smelling nice and attracting a mate. It’s about aesthetics, taste, and desire in a more general sense. We want to smell intoxicating, and truly intoxicating things are often a little bit nasty — they have an edge that cuts deeper than simple sensory pleasure. And despite how it may seem, encounters with the beautiful are rarely entirely enjoyable. If that were the case, Thomas Kinkade’s light-dappled cottages would be considered the height of fine art, and we would all walk around misted lightly with synthetic jasmine and fake orange blossom. Instead, we adore the luscious gore of Caravaggio’s canvases and dab our pulse points with concoctions containing the miasma of swamp rot, the cloying smell of feces, and the pungent, tonsil-kicking fetor of death. Beauty is sharp, it is intense, and it comes at a cost. Just as desire and repulsion walk through the same corridors of our minds, so too do beauty and destruction move hand in hand. Whenever you find something unbearably beautiful, look closer and you’ll see the familiar shadow of decay.

* * *

One of the first known perfumers in history was a woman named Tapputi-Belatekallim. According to clay cuneiform tablets dating back to 1200 BCE, Tapputi lived in ancient Babylon and likely worked for a king. The second part of her name, “Belatekallim,” indicates that she was head of her own household, in addition to holding a valued position at court. Thousands of years before the advent of the “SheEO,” Tapputi was leaning in and bossing around underlings. She was a master of her craft, and recognized as such by her peers. Much of what we know about her comes from secondary sources, but the process of distilling and refining ingredients to produce a fragrant balm — oil, flowers, water, and calamus, a reed-like plant similar to lemongrass — is described on surviving clay tablets. It’s miraculous how modern her scents seem — or rather, it’s surprising how little has changed. Tapputi used scent-extracting techniques like distillation, cold enfleurage, and tincture that natural perfumers still use today. She also mixed grain alcohol with her scents, creating perfumes that were brighter, lighter, and had more staying power than anything else available at the time. These scents may have played a religious role in ancient culture, but they may have simply been another way to prettify the body and please the senses.

Beauty is sharp, it is intense, and it comes at a cost.

Unfortunately, Tapputi’s story is a fragmented one — she’s possibly the first female chemist, and yet she’s been lost to history. There is much more evidence available about the perfumes of ancient Egypt, Persia, and Rome. In 2003, archeologists unearthed the world’s oldest known perfume factory in Cyprus. Archaeologists theorize that this mud-brick building and the perfumes it produced caused Greek worshippers to begin associating the island with Aphrodite, the goddess of sex and love. (Born from the magical remnants of the sky god’s testicles, which had been separated from his body and cast into the sea by Cronos, the Titan god of harvest, Aphrodite supposedly walked from the foaming waters of the sea and onto the beach at Paphos, an ancient settlement located on the southern coast of the island.) Analysis of the material found on-site revealed that these ancient perfumers were using plant-based ingredients like pine, coriander, bergamot, almond, and parsley, among others.

These perfumes all sound rather pleasant, don’t they? I can imagine dabbing almond oil mixed with a bit of bergamot on my wrists, catching a botanical draft of scent here and there as I move. It seems terribly obvious that people may want to smell like plants. Some of the earliest pieces of art represent flowers, leaves, and trees. Studies have shown that we crave symmetry on an unconscious level, and we’re drawn to color, so it makes perfect sense that flowers would hold our attention with their Fibonacci spirals and vivid hues. I can even understand why curiosity might compel someone walking along a beach to pick up a chunk of marine fat and sniff it. It’s a bit harder to understand the moment when medieval perfumers made the conceptual leap from smelling the glandular sacs of dead musk deer to dabbing it on their pulse points. Yet at some point, this must have happened, for starting after the Crusades, Europeans became obsessed with musk.


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Like many prized spices, fabrics, and luxury items, musk came to Europe from the Far East. Derived from the Sanskrit word for testicle, “musk” refers to the glandular products of small male Asian deer. These little sacs of animal juice were harvested from the bodies of slain deer and left to dry in the sun. In its raw form, musk smells like urine, pungent and sharp. But after being left to dry, musk develops a softer scent. The reek of ammonia fades, and it becomes mellow and leathery. It stops smelling like piss and begins to smell like fresh sweat, or the downy crown of a baby’s head. It gained a reputation as an aphrodisiac; according to some legends, Cleopatra used musk oils to seduce Mark Anthony into her bed. The size of musk molecules also contribute to its perfume popularity: Larger molecules oxidize slower, so musk’s comparatively large molecules last longer than other odors and allow it to extend the life of other scents. Its fixative property means musk is a base note in many perfumes, even ones that don’t smell overtly musky.

In 1979, musk deer were listed as an endangered species by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES), so it’s no longer legal to use natural musk in commercial perfumes. However, Tibetian musk deer are still killed for their glands, and a brisk trade in poaching has resulted in some illegal musk showing up online. Musk is also used in some traditional Chinese and Korean remedies, which helps the substance remain one of the most valuable animal products on earth. In his book The Fly in the Ointment, Joe Schwarcz, director of the McGill University Office for Science and Society, points out that musk is “more valuable than gold.”

Civet is a more unknown fragrance, though it also appears frequently in perfumes. Made from the glands of a mammal that shares the name of the scent, civet is similar in structure to musk on a molecular level but smells even more animalistic, according to people who have actually sniffed it. “They have a general odor about them that is very pungent,” says Jacqueline Menish, curator of behavioral husbandry at the Nashville Zoo. Civets are uncommon zoo creatures. They are neither felines nor rodents, though they’re commonly mistaken for both. Although few visit the zoo just to glimpse these odd little nocturnal creatures, the Nashville Zoo has several banded palm civets because the zoo director “just loves them.” (You may have heard of civet coffee, a product made by force-feeding Asian palm civets coffee beans, then harvesting them from their poop. Society, it seems, has come up with several odd ways to make money from civet asses.) When they are startled, frightened, or excited, civets “express” their anal glands, and the greasy liquid “shoots right out.” The scent hangs in the air for days. “I guess I could see if it was diluted it might not smell as offensive,” Menish concedes. “But it can be really bad if it hits you.”

Unlike musk, civet can be collected without killing the animal, but it’s not a cruelty-free process. Civets are kept in tiny cages and poked with sticks or frightened with loud noises until they react and spray out their valuable secretions. Commercial perfumers no longer use genuine civet in their fragrances, but James Peterson, a perfumer based in Brooklyn, owns a very small vial of civet tincture. “It smells terrible when you first smell it,” he says. “But I have some that is five years old, and it gets this fruity quality as it ages. In a tincture, it gets this rich scent that works wonderful with florals.” On a few occasions, Peterson has used genuine musk or civet to make “tiny amounts” of specialty perfumes, and the resulting blends have an “intensely erotic draw.” Customers report that these dark and dirty smells are potent aphrodisiacs. “When it’s below the level of consciousness, that’s when it works best,” he adds.

The reek of ammonia fades, and it becomes mellow and leathery. It stops smelling like piss and begins to smell like fresh sweat, or the downy crown of a baby’s head.

Like musk and civet, ambergris comes from an animal, but making it doesn’t necessarily involve murdering whales. Whales have historically been killed for their bodily products, including their oil, spermaceti, and their stomach contents, but it’s more likely now that ambergris is beach-found since it is only produced by an endangered species, sperm whales. The waxy substance forms in the hindgut of a sperm whale to protect their soft interiors from hard, spiky squid beaks. According to Christopher Kemp, author of Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris, ambergris begins as a mass of claw-shaped horns that irritate the whale’s digestive systems. As the mass gets pushed through the whale’s hindgut, it grows and slowly becomes “a tangled indigestible solid, saturated with feces, which begins to obstruct the rectum.” Once it passes into the ocean, it begins to slowly mellow out. The black, tar-like wad is bleached by the ocean until it becomes smooth, pale, and fragrant. It ranges in color from butter to charcoal. The most valuable ambergris is white, then silver, and finally moon-gray and waxy. It’s believed that only 1 percent of the world’s sperm whale population produces ambergris. It’s very rare, very bizarre, and very valuable.

The human appetite for ambergris dates back to ancient times. The Chinese believed it was dragon spit that had fallen into the ocean and hardened, and the ancient Greeks liked to add powdered ambergris to drinks for an extra kick. King Charles II of England liked to eat ambergris with eggs, which was apparently a fairly common practice among the aristocracy in England and the Netherlands. It shouldn’t be surprising that people engaged in some light coprophagia — smell and taste are so deeply linked, and while I can’t attest to the taste of ambergris, I can say that it smells beguiling. Given the chance, I would sprinkle some silvery whale powder on my eggs, just to see what it was like. (It’s certainly no stranger than eating gold-coated chicken wings — another practice seemingly designed to destroy value by passing the desired object through a series of rectums until it reaches the inevitable white bowl.)

In perfume, ambergris is often used to boost other scents. It plays a supporting role rather than a starring one, for although the smell is fascinating, it isn’t very strong. It has an unearthly fragrance. It smells like the sea, but also like sweet grasses and fresh rain. It’s amazing that something made in the bowels of the whale could smell so pure. If you found fresh ambergris, midnight black and sticky and stinking, perhaps you wouldn’t want to eat it. But with distance and dilution, ambergris is transformed from animal garbage to human ambrosia.

* * *

Schwarcz’s book offers one reason why we’re drawn to these scents, citing studies that suggest people with ovaries be more sensitive to musk, particularly around ovulation. He cautiously speculates that musk might resemble chemicals produced in humans to attract potential mates.

Over the phone, he is even more wary of speculating about a possible evolutionary explanation for our fragrance preferences. “The sense of smell has been studied thoroughly with surprisingly little results in terms of what we actually know. It’s such a complicated business,” he said. “We don’t know why musk is more attractive to some people than others. We don’t know why it smells differently when it’s diluted, but we know that it does.” When I asked whether we like musk because we’re programmed to enjoy the smells of bodies, he was quick to turn our talk toward the “issue of pheromones, which “may not actually even exist at all” in humans, despite our desire to attribute various observed phenomenon to the invisible messengers. According to Schwarcz, much of what the general population knows about pheromones only applies to certain nonhuman species. For instance, boar pheromones are well understood, easy to replicate, and used by farmers to increase the farrowing rate amongst their stock. Some of the perfumes that boast “real pheromones,” like Jovan Musk and Paris Hilton’s eponymously named scent, may contain pheromone molecules — ones that pigs would find very enticing.

But where science fails to offer a satisfactory explanation, artists can step in, providing an illuminating tool to help understanding our relationship to desire and aesthetics. For perfumer Anne McClain, co-owner of MCMC Fragrances in Brooklyn, it is the tension between foul and sweet that elevates a fragrance from consumer product into the realm of art. This is key when it comes to repugnant ingredients, from indolic florals to musky secretions. The indecent element becomes a secret of sorts, a gruesome piece of marginalia scribbled alongside the recipe, visible to only those in the know but appreciated by all. The foulness whispers below the prettiness, and combined, these various elements create a scent that smells paradoxically clean and dirty, light and dark.

“Indole is what makes the scent of jasmine interesting,” she says. “It makes you want to come back and smell it again — it has an addictive quality to it.” Unlike citrus scents, which are one-note and rather simplistic, florals have an element of decay, a whiff of putridity. McClain rightfully points out that this is part of what makes flowers themselves attractive to bees and other pollinators. Corpse flowers famously smell like dead bodies, but so do many other blossoms, just to a lesser extent.

Plus, humans are by nature “just a little bit gross,” McClain says. Like civets, musk deer, and whales, we shit, we secrete, we mate, and sometimes we vomit. But we also give birth and create beauty, and for McClain, it’s this life-giving ability that links blossoms and humans. “I think there is a depth to anything that is made of life and creates life. There’s something inherently sexual in that,” she says. “Even though something like civet will smell gross on its own, it adds an element of reality.” When layered properly with other olfactory delights, this can create an evocative smell, one that you want to return to, to interrogate with your nostrils the same way you might pore over a painting. Through layering pleasure on top of disgust, perfumers can create something that resembles life — exquisite, fleeting, and mysterious.

* * *

Katy Kelleher is a freelance writer and editor based in Maine whose work has appeared in Art New England, Boston magazine, The Paris Review, The Hairpin, Eater, Jezebel, and The New York Times Magazine. She’s also the author of the book Handcrafted Maine.

Editor: Michelle Weber
Factchecker: Matt Giles
Copyeditor: Jacob Z. Gross

Above It All: How the Court Got So Supreme

Robert Alexander / Getty

David A. Kaplan | The Most Dangerous Branch: Inside the Supreme Court’s Assault on the Constitution | Crown | September 2018 | 19 minutes (4,985 words)

Nine mornings after Antonin Scalia died at Cíbolo Creek, the justices resumed work without their beloved, blustery colleague. The rich traditions of the Court continued unabated. After the justices all shook hands in the small robing room across the hallway from the back of the courtroom, they lined up to await the gavel of the marshal. The assembled throng grew silent, then arose. “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” the marshal chanted at the stroke of 10, as always. The eight justices emerged from behind the tall crimson velvet drapes and somberly took their upholstered swivel chairs on the bench. “All persons having business before the Honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting,” the marshal continued. “God save the United States and this Honorable Court!”

It’s an opening worthy of “Hail to the Chief,” the introductory anthem for the leader of another branch of the federal government. It’s all carefully choreographed. The justices don’t merely walk in, and they’re not already seated when Court begins. From different curtains, they materialize in unison, in three groups based on where they sit. As institutional stagecraft goes, the Court puts on quite a show. Read more…

Vanishing Twins

Compassionate Eye Foundation / Andrew Olney / OJO Images Ltd

Leah Dieterich | Vanishing Twins | Soft Skull | September 2018 | 21 minutes (4,145 words)

One-eighth of all natural pregnancies begin as twins, the book said, but early in pregnancy, one twin becomes less viable and is compressed against the wall of the uterus or absorbed by the other twin.

Of course, I thought. I lost my twin.

This was after I’d read all the other books. The books about sexuality. The books about marriage. The books about love. None of them comforted me like this book did.

The story followed a pair of identical twins who were struggling to grow up without growing apart. My husband and I were struggling with that too.

I read it in one day, in every room of the house, on my stomach, on my back, on my bed, in the yard. I didn’t worry about the ants scaling my thigh, or the black widows living under the outdoor furniture.

One-eighth. I tell people this statistic when I tell them I’m writing about my search for the twin I never had. The number makes me seem less crazy.

“Suspicion is a philosophy of hope,” Adam Phillips says in Monogamy. “It makes us believe that there is something to know and something worth knowing. It makes us believe there is something rather than nothing.” He’s referring to the suspicion that one’s partner is having an affair, but the same holds true for the existence of my twin.

I’ve always preferred being in the company of one other person to being in a group. I’d thought this meant I was antisocial, but maybe it’s a desire to return to the relationship I had with another person in the womb. That pre-person—my little mirror ball of cells.

 

Maybe my twin would have danced ballet too. I stopped when I was eighteen. Maybe my twin would have kept going.

Because of ballet, I spent a lot of time looking at my reflection. In class, we crowded each other to dance in front of the skinny mirror, the single panel in the wall of mirrors that inexplicably elongated the images of our bodies. The teacher tried to spread us out but it was no use. Our only other option was to lose enough weight to look skinny in any mirror, and we tried that too.

Twelve years later, I sit in the dark behind a two-way mirror with my ad agency colleagues, watching a focus group eat hamburgers and talk about how they taste. It feels deceitful to watch people when they think they are alone with their reflection.

We like to believe that a mirror shows our truest self, but it rarely does. If you’re right up against it, with your nose touching the glass, you don’t see anything at all.

That was the way I pressed myself to Eric. And Elena. And Ethan. I was too close and could not focus.

In all the articles, twins separated at birth always seem to share incredible similarities and quirks, no matter how differently they were raised. They hold their beer cans with just their thumb and index finger; they have moles on the left side of their rib cages. Neither of them likes ketchup.

I thought if I met someone with disgustingly fast-growing cuticles who liked the smell of burned toast more than anything in the world, it would prove I’d been missing my mate.

If my twin was identical, it would have been a girl, but if it was fraternal, it could have been a boy or a girl. All this is to say I didn’t know what I was looking for.

 

Giselle got a boyfriend at the donut shop where she worked and quickly experienced all of her sexual firsts without me. This threw off the comforting symmetry that had always made our friendship seem predestined. Suddenly I felt as if I were a foot shorter than she was. At sixteen, her parents allowed her to finish high school via correspondence courses so she could spend more of her day at the dance studio. She was gone. Jumped off the seesaw while I was still on it, letting me drop with tailbone-breaking speed to the dirt below.

Ever since we met in third grade, no one at school had uttered our first names separately. They were always linked with an and. Now there was an empty space next to that and, a vacancy. Sometimes the weather in that space was mild, just the breeze of her being whisked away. Other times it rained for days.

I needed to sandbag it.

But instead of filling this void, I chose to build a structure around it. I got up at 6:30 a.m., was at school by 7:25, drank a Diet Coke, ate a Granny Smith apple for lunch, and finished my homework during study hall before driving myself to the city for ballet. This schedule was a scaffolding around my terror of being alone.

 

Was it her I wanted? Him? The acts themselves? It was difficult to pinpoint the object of my jealousy. It was easier to imitate, so I got myself a boyfriend—a popular boy I snagged by fooling around with his friend to prove I was sexually available. It was an odd way to show my interest in him, but he was a teenager, and it worked. Anyway, I was just spackling the hole Giselle had left.

My boyfriend was a soccer player who wasn’t interested in ballet or any arts, but it didn’t matter. At the time, our mutual interest of sexual exploration was enough. He became part of my schedule too. We’d fool around from two to four o’clock in one of our bedrooms while our parents were at work. After that, I’d drive thirty minutes to my ballet school, stopping midway at a Dunkin’ Donuts near the regional airport to get an iced coffee, adding skim milk and three packets of Equal. This low-cal, high-caffeine cocktail typically sufficed to keep me awake during the drive. Ballet class ran from five thirty to seven, and after that we’d rehearse for whatever performance we were working on until about eight thirty. I suppose I ate dinner when I got home, but I don’t recall. In my memory, that part of the day drops o like a cliff.

Prior to the boyfriend, before I started spending my after-school hours giving long and poorly executed blow jobs and getting urinary tract infections from sex, I would eat snacks. Having a boyfriend took the place of those snacks. I no longer needed them.

We like to believe that a mirror shows our truest self, but it rarely does. If you’re right up against it, with your nose touching the glass, you don’t see anything at all.

And I got thinner. Da was all my Russian ballet teacher said as she poked my side, indicating she was pleased with my weight loss. We were always praised when we became less and less of ourselves.

The desire to dwindle was strong. It felt religious, cleansing, a penance for some sin I couldn’t pinpoint. At the same time, I felt like a contest winner. But I knew I couldn’t have done it alone. As I held the ballet barre, legs working furiously below the serene upper body, my teacher’s bony finger acknowledging my concavity, I attributed my success to having a sexual partner, a playmate who made it easier to not nourish myself.

 

In the 1950s, my ballet teacher had been the prima ballerina of the Kirov Ballet. She was the Lilac Fairy in The Sleeping Beauty, as well as Odette/Odile in Swan Lake, but her signature role was The Dying Swan. It is a self-contained piece, a four-minute solo accompanied by piano and cello, depicting the last uttering movements of a dying swan. There is a flickery film of her dancing this piece on YouTube.

We often did The Dying Swan at the end of class. She tried to teach us how to die, but we were too young and too American. We were never doing it right. Nyet! she’d scream, and clap her hands for the pianist to stop. She’d shout corrections in French, our only shared language, and I’d translate for my classmates. And when language failed she was physical. She pulled on our arms and slapped our butts. When I think of her now, drawing her gnarled finger up the side of my ribs, she reminds me of the witch in “Hansel and Gretel,” wanting to eat me, though she rarely ate anything.

 

Vanishing Twin Syndrome. That’s what the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology calls it when a fetus in a multiple pregnancy dies in utero and is partially or completely reabsorbed by the surviving fetus.

This phenomenon has likely existed forever, but it wasn’t until the late 1970s, when ultrasounds became sophisticated enough to detect twins as early as five weeks, that doctors began having the unnerving experience of viewing twin embryos one month, only to find a singleton the next.

The term vanishing twin was coined in 1980, the year I was born.

In Lawrence Wright’s book Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are I read this: If the less viable twin is not consumed, it “exists in a kind of limbo, compressed by the other to a flattened, parchment-like state known as fetus papyraceus.”

Papyrus, like paper.

“Somewhere in the vicinity of twelve to fifteen percent of us—and that’s a minimum estimate—are walking around thinking we’re singletons, when in fact we’re only the big half.” That’s Wright quoting a geneticist, so of course I believe it. I believe in percentages, in pieces of pie. But I don’t like his choice of words: the big half.

I don’t want to be the big half. It sounds oafish and ugly.

And while it can’t be denied that the big half is the winner, the one who makes it out, it also means that losing someone is a consequence of growth.

 

Deadline.com: “VH1 Orders Competition Series for Identical Twins.” This headline appears in my browser. It is morning, and I’m in my office at the advertising agency. My friend Alex, who works in entertainment, has sent me this link because she knows I’m writing about my suspicion that I’ve lost a twin. Lately, everyone has been sending me these kinds of links, telling me about movies to watch and books to read, tagging me in the comments sections of news articles. It seems they’re all interested in twins now that they have someone to share their discoveries with.

I am alone in what used to be my shared office. On the other side of the room, the blinds are drawn and the desk is empty. I no longer have a partner, so there is no one to see that I’m reading this press release instead of working.

“VH1 is putting the bond between identical twins to the test with Twinning (working title), a 10-episode, hour-long competition reality series set to premiere next summer. The project, created and produced by Lighthearted Entertainment (Dating Naked), will feature 12 sets of twins going through challenges that will test their twin connection. (Reports of the incredible strength of the bond between identical twins include cases of siblings dating the same people, finishing each other’s sentences and feeling each other’s physical pain.) Through the challenges, sets of twins will be eliminated until one pair is named the twinners and walk away with the grand prize of $222,222.22.”

While I appreciate the cuteness of twinners, I’m annoyed by the grammar mistake. It should be “until one pair is named the twinner and walks away with the grand prize.”

A pair, while two people, is singular. This is the grammar I feel in my heart.

The fact that it’s called vanishing twin instead of vanished twin seems to indicate that the disappearance is perpetual, not completed, possibly not completable.

When one twin comes out and the other doesn’t, it’s over, in a certain sense. But grammatically, the vanishing twin is continually fading from existence. This makes it harder to mourn, because the disappearance never really ends.

Another friend tells me about a man she once worked with who had a pain in his ribs that wouldn’t go away. It turned out he had a cyst that needed to be removed. When they did the surgery, they found that the cyst was a teratoma—composed of bits of hair, teeth, and fetal bones—the remnant of a vanished twin. “He had his twin removed,” she said, and to underscore the reality of this unbelievable thing: “He took the day off work to have his twin removed.”

A pair, while two people, is singular. This is the grammar I feel in my heart.

I asked if she could put me in touch with him. I wanted to see if he’d ever wondered about having a twin or fantasized about it. Was the cyst a shock or did it somehow make sense? Did he ask to see what they’d removed? Did he have a scar?

“I don’t think he likes talking about it,” she said. “I probably shouldn’t have told you.”

 

“You have to meet Eric,” a ballet friend from high school told me over the phone. “You would love each other.” She was living in Colorado for the summer with her brother. Eric was their roommate.

“You’re exactly the same,” she said. “Artistic, smart, driven.” I was flattered. “You’re also both obsessed with your diets,” she said. I wasn’t sure if this was a compliment.

She built him up in such a way that I couldn’t imagine he’d be real. She told me he’d taught himself to write code during his last semester of college, even though he wasn’t a computer science major. She showed me his picture and said he’d done some modeling. He’d raced road bikes too, Tour de France–style. “He’s also the nicest person you’ll ever meet,” she said. It was too much. I didn’t believe one person could contain all these things.

A week after school ended, I flew to Denver, instead of home to Connecticut.

 

Would I know when I saw him? Would we finish each other’s sentences? Have moles in the same places?

Inside the apartment, the afternoon light was fading. We heard a key in the lock, and when the door opened, there was Eric, with his tan forearms and champagne-colored hair. Even the blue of his eyes was somehow golden.

He had my posture—straight-backed, as though he were being pulled by the crown of his head, skyward.

My friend and her brother got off the couch to hug him, and I stood up too. He extended his hand to shake mine, and the hem of his T-shirt sleeve hung away from his body near the tricep. I wanted to stick my finger between the fabric and the skin to see if I could do so without touching either.

 

There was still snow on the ground in Rocky Mountain National Park even though it was May, but we hiked in our sneakers because that was all we’d brought. Halfway up the mountain, I thought it would be fun to throw a snowball at my friend’s brother, whom I’d had a crush on in high school. I gathered a handful of snow, packed it into my palm, turned around, and threw it with all my might.

The snowball had barely left my fingertips when it hit Eric squarely in the face. He had been right behind me and had managed to turn his head at the last minute. His cheek was red and icy.

“That’s quite an arm you’ve got on you,” he said.

“I . . . don’t have great aim,” I said. “And I’m a lefty, so there was never a baseball glove that fit me in school, so . . .”

“I’m a lefty too,” he said.

The others were a few paces behind us. We kept hiking and when we got to the top, we all stood shoulder to shoulder looking down into the valley. I wanted to look at Eric’s face and was glad I had a reason to.

“Lemme see,” I said. He turned his face so I could see the red mark, but he kept his eyes on me.

 

We drank around the fire. Eric and I shotgunned beers, a trick I’d learned during my year in the Midwest. We both knew all the words to “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” and we rapped them with awkward bravado. When it got later and colder, our friends brushed their teeth and retired to the tent, while Eric and I went to his car to listen to music. He played me things I hadn’t heard: At the Drive-In, Digable Planets. We talked about our families, and while there were differences—his father was a teacher and mine a doctor; his mother went back to work (nights at a restaurant) when he was two and mine stayed home with us—there was one striking similarity: Both our parents had been married for twenty-five years. Most of our friends’ parents were divorced.

I don’t know how long we sat in the car. I was too infatuated to be tired. I wanted to touch his hand. I wanted to kiss him. But the armrest between us felt insurmountable. Eric said we should go to bed, so we quietly opened and shut his car doors. He found my hand in the darkness to lead me. His hand was warm and soft and firm and I felt a surge of relief. Hands, like kisses, could be bad, and ruin the chemistry. This is the perfect hand, I thought as we walked through the moonless night to the outhouse.

The trickle of my pee cut through the soundless air. I pulled my pants up, knowing Eric was waiting for me. The crotch of my underwear was cold. Wet with excitement.

We only had one tent for the four of us, and Eric and I lay beside our friends, who were either sleeping or pretending to. We began kissing and we did not stop, despite the siblings beside us.

We should have turned away and tried to sleep, but a magnetic energy held our bodies together as one body.

 

We spent the rest of the trip together. The siblings went about their business. My friend had to register for summer classes, and her brother was looking for a summer job. Eric was looking for a job too. Though he’d only graduated college a week ago, he couldn’t afford not to work, now that he didn’t have student loan money to cover his expenses. Luckily, it was the beginning of the first internet boom and anyone who could make a website could get a job.

One morning, Eric and I were alone in the apartment. After breakfast, he put on a collared shirt and I helped him tie his tie and wished him luck as he went off to an interview. It felt embarrassingly retro, as if I were a housewife sending my husband off to his job. But it was novel too, and I was grateful for a new role to play, now that I no longer had ballerina.

 

I was always looking for other lefties, watching people’s hands when they signed credit card slips at restaurants, threw balls, or cut with scissors. No one else in my family was left-handed, and neither were any of my friends, although this is not that surprising, since only ten percent of the population is left-handed.

“Both kinds of twins, fraternal and identical, have a higher rate of left-handedness,” Lawrence Wright says, “and some scientists . . . have suggested that left-handed singletons may be survivors of a vanished-twin pair.”

A card arrived in the mail from Eric. I opened it in my childhood bedroom and had to slow my eyes down to take in each part of the long rectangle. There was his tiny, almost illegible handwriting, and a collection of drawings he’d done in black ink and filled in with wide architectural markers. One drawing was of the Modular Man, a gestural outline of a man’s body created by the architect Le Corbusier, for scale in designs, and another was the Golden Spiral—a spiral drawn inside a rectangle whose length and height are proportionate to each other at a 3:2 ratio, the golden ratio. The math was sexy, because I didn’t fully grasp it, but also because it was rendered in muted golds and mauves, colors I was surprised a man had chosen.

I’d already sent him a card as well. Mine had a grid of squares I’d painted in watercolor. All but two were gray. We were the two matching red squares, I was trying to say. Everything else seemed drab by comparison.

Once you find someone to finish your sentences, do you stop finishing them for yourself?

The next month, Eric came to see me at my parents’ house in Connecticut, where I was living for the summer. Any reservations my mother had had when I told her I’d fallen in love with someone on my one-week trip to Colorado disappeared when she met him. “He never stops smiling,” she said.

Eric hadn’t been to many museums. He’d been to national parks; he’d been to Indian reservations. During the week we spent together in Colorado, he told me about the tiny loom his dad bought him as a kid, and the beadwork he’d done on it. He pointed to a sculpture in the corner of the apartment that he’d made in architecture school—a red sawhorse with a suspension bridge made of piano wire hanging below it.

Eric had never considered majoring in art even though he loved drawing and painting. Like mine, his parents had directed him toward something you can make money at.

We’d lain on the futon in his living room after the first time we’d had sex, while the siblings graciously slept in the bedroom. I told him that in eighth grade, I’d considered becoming a performance artist instead of a dancer, after seeing a piece by Janine Antoni on a museum field trip. I recalled my twelve-year-old self watching a video of her performance, which involved using her head to paint the entire floor of the gallery with black hair dye. There was a video screen at the entrance to the gallery where she’d done the performance and a velvet rope across the doorway to prevent people from walking on the piece. I leaned into the room, my waist on the rope, trying to take it all in. The white walls, the large black strokes covering the wood floor. I would have liked to touch them, to trace my finger along their semicircular arcs, to get down on my knees and bend my head to the floor, to feel how it might have felt to do the performance, hair heavy and dripping, butt in the air, dragging the bucket of hair dye alongside me.

I took Eric to New York City because he’d never been, and suggested we go to the Guggenheim, knowing he’d studied the Frank Lloyd Wright building in architecture school. We didn’t know anything about the exhibition that was going on, only that it featured the work of a video artist from the ’70s and ’80s called Nam June Paik. We walked up and up through the museum, curving ever so slightly to the left, spiraling skyward.

We’d seen paintings and photos in art history classes, and some sculpture too, but this kind of art was new to us. Large sculptures made of old TVs buzzed with an aurora of colors, lava lamp cubes with no stories.

“Thank you for bringing me here,” Eric said. “I came to see the building. I hadn’t even considered there would be something inside it.”

Years later, he told me that this was the moment he decided to become an artist.

 

He sat on the edge of my bed, the one I’d slept in since I was five years old, and I went to him, putting my hands on his knees and parting them, to fit my body into the V they created.

“I love you,” I said.

We’d only known each other a month. But this I love you was in my mouth, and if I was going to speak, it was the only thing that was going to come out.

“I love you too,” he said.

 

The ligature œ has a special sound, the “open-mid-front-rounded vowel,” which is something between an uh and an er. In French, you need it to make words like sœur and cœur. Sister and heart. It is taught to schoolchildren as o et e collés—o and e glued together.

I identify with this ligature. I see it and think that’s me, though I realize this is strange. Why not my initials? The monogram that graced my grade-school L.L.Bean backpack?

In French class I had cast myself as Odile, the doppelgänger. The O looking for her E.

I had found him.

 

It’s like we’re the same person. We finish each other’s sentences. This is what we’ve been taught to desire and expect of love. But there’s a question underneath that’s never addressed: once you find someone to finish your sentences, do you stop finishing them for yourself?

***

Excerpted from Vanishing Twins: A Marriage, copyright © 2018 by Leah Dieterich. Reprinted by permission of Soft Skull Press.

Losers’ Lunch

Illustrations by Paul Lacolley

Ben Rothenberg | Racquet and Longreads | August 2018 | 31 minutes (7,863 words)

This story is produced in partnership with Racquet magazine and appears in issue no. 7.

Losers are a fixture of my workday as a sportswriter.

Talking to a person coming off court who was just dealt a crushing defeat, and offering some vague, platitudinous comfort to assuage their raw battle wound, is a necessary task in the job. On rarer occasions, I’ve talked to those who have just suffered a defeat so harrowing and derailing that it has them visibly doubting the viability of their career. But for most losers, even in down moments, there’s the credibility and dignity of having just performed for an appreciative crowd of some size in a respected, aspirational pursuit like professional sports.

There’s nothing remotely aspirational, though, about the Applebee’s restaurant I found myself in during day 6 of the 2017 US Open. And sitting across a table bearing mozzarella sticks and glasses of tap water, these were not my normal losers.

Rainer Piirimets, a three-year veteran of the tennis tour from Estonia, was knocked out of the US Open the day before, exiting Arthur Ashe Stadium in the early afternoon. His partner, a fellow Estonian who has been on tour for 10 years, sat beside him.

Piirimets left the stadium not through the tunnel to the locker room, but out a side gate. His wrists bore no sweatbands, only handcuffs.

The request for this interview was not made, as most I do, through the tournament media desk, but rather through a Facebook message. Piirimets eagerly accepted. Meeting at Applebee’s was his suggestion, but he wasn’t hungry—just eager to set the story straight after spending 10 hours in police custody the day before.

“We’re not criminals,” Piirimets said, a phrase he and his friend would use as a refrain over the next two hours.

Piirimets had sure been treated like a criminal the day before. While watching the third-round match between Petra Kvitova and Caroline Garcia, he was spotted in his seat in the upper deck (Section 331) by tournament security officials and escorted out. He was then arrested in a small room just off the concourse by police, who then perp-walked him out of the stadium. The cops steered him through a dense crowd of staring, perplexed tennis fans and ducked him into a waiting police car outside the tournament gates.

Piirimets, a competitive high jumper in his youth, was then put in a jail cell at the 110th Precinct in Queens, which he shared with, he said, an agitated, profane homeless man. After several hours in the lockup, he was brought to a court for arraignment before a judge. He was then released and given a summons to appear in court again seven weeks later. He doesn’t plan on attending.

His friend, who I’ll call Pete, was equally animated about the treatment Piirimets had received.

“To keep him for 10 hours in prison, for doing what?” said Pete. “He made a little mistake, no big deal.”

His crime was trespassing. Piirimets had also been kicked out of the US Open the year before, and during that first ouster he was given paperwork acknowledging that he was to be banned from the tournament grounds for 20 years. He said he didn’t think that threat was serious, and that he didn’t think he was bound by the forms because he didn’t sign the line at the bottom. Nor did he understand that trespassing was a crime that could get him arrested in the United States. After all, he said, he’s been kicked out of lots of tournaments, all over the world, and nothing like this has ever happened before. Because why would it? He’s not a criminal, he said, flummoxed.

What Piirimets is, he admitted, is a member of a rogue, impish species in the tennis ecosystem: a courtsider. But with their hunters getting more and more adept, courtsiders—arguably justifiably so—have become an endangered species. Only the most stubborn of their breed persist. Even though sports betting is becoming legalized in the United States, they will still be persona non grata at this year’s US Open, which they will attempt to attend again.

Though only the second courtsider ever arrested at a Grand Slam event, Piirimets was the eighth caught in the first five days of the 2017 US Open, according to the USTA—which prides itself on “vigorously combatting” courtsiding and was quite excited to alert the media to his arrest. Twenty courtsiders—17 men and three women (none American)—had been caught during the 2016 tournament, hailing from as far away as Sri Lanka, each thinking they had the skills to beat the system. All were given notice of a 20-year ban from the tournament. Read more…

To Be Clean

Illustration by Xenia Latii

Natassja Schiel | Longreads | August 2018 | 24 minutes (6,673 words)

I closed the sheer maroon curtain of the private dance nook and needled my eight-inch stilettos through the G-string I’d kicked off minutes earlier to Prince’s “Darling Nikki.” On the single chair, where I usually hovered nude over men, I sat and counted the money I’d made. Only $9. It wasn’t a money-making night. I couldn’t stop thinking about what my younger sister, Melissa, had told me earlier. I was sad, and no one wants to give money to a sad stripper. Even if she fakes happiness, the customers seem able to sniff out insincerity, and it repels them. In six weeks, I’d be moving 3,000 miles away. From Portland to New York. How could I leave my sister behind? What about Melissa?

After wiggling back into my minidress, I stood, forced a smile, and strutted back into the club. I was there to make money, so I had to find a way to become genuinely cheerful. But my motivation deflated after only a few steps. I’ll just go to the bar — watch the girl on stage — and find my bearings. Nelly Furtado’s “Maneater” was playing, and only one girl danced to that song. Mya.

Mya swung upside down, topless, on the monkey bars that lined the top of the stage. Her breasts, not even A cups, were perfect. I admired her dark amber nipples as she swayed in the air. Her wavy black hair hung like a lion’s mane. Sparkling red lip gloss framed her smile. Every seat was filled and a few stragglers even stood off to the side, delighted by her.

Mya appeared carefree. I needed to be like that.

When I had been on stage, there were only two men. A few others had come up and given me pity tips.

“You want a drink?” a man with a deep voice asked me. The question jolted me out of my head. I looked at the speaker peripherally. He was in his early 30s, young — unlikely to spend real money. Occasionally younger men came into the clubs in Portland to hit on the strippers. As if the dancers were not trying to make a living, but trying to find someone to date.

We loathed these customers.

“Sure,” I said and smirked.

“Let’s do a shot. Do you like that whipped cream vodka stuff?”

I shrugged. I didn’t, but it was Mya’s favorite, and that alone made it appealing. The times Mya and I had taken shots, we’d leaned into one another, our cool skin touching. She always smelled like peaches and wore shimmering outfits with glittery jewelry. “Bling it and they will come” was her stripper motto. I’d had a crush on her for two years.

Many nights, while it was slow — common in 2010, deep into the recession — we’d sit together at the bar. We’d both loved dancing at first, and we were both ready to move on with no other job to move on to.

“If you could do anything,” I’d asked her, “what would you do?”

“I wanted to be a vet when I was growing up, but it feels so far out of my reach.” She looked down at the bar instead of at me.

“I bet you could start small. Maybe a vet’s assistant?”

She thought it over. “I know I would still need education of some kind. I feel like I’m too old for that now.”

I laughed. “You’re one year older than me, right? Twenty-six?”

She nodded.

“I’m taking community college classes — my sister, too,” I said. “You aren’t too old. I’ll help you. I’m good at this kind of thing.”

She grinned, the corners of her eyes crinkling. She grabbed my arm and leaned in to kiss my cheek, then pressed her face to mine, staying there for several seconds before moving away.

I learned we both had orange cats that had male names but were girls (hers: Bobby; mine: Raja). That she loved David Bowie and Prince. That like me, she was first-generation American. However, she was proud to be Mexican American. That was not like me — I rejected my Russian and German lineage. I adored Mya so much that despite how badly I needed money, I’d hoped for these nights, huddled up with her at the bar. My feelings for her intimidated me. And even though we’d sometimes make out after hours, I couldn’t bring myself to do more.  

The customer handed me my shot. “I’m Rob, by the way,” he said. This will do it, I thought, this will drown out my sister. We clinked glasses before downing the syrupy-sweet liquor in one swallow. My stomach warmed and I became light-headed. The rush of the first drink on an empty stomach. My shoulders relaxed. My chest loosened. Everything was going to be alright.

“You don’t seem like the other girls that work here. You’re better than this,” Rob said.

I rolled my eyes. “So many men say that, thinking they are being clever or complimentary, but I’m going to let you in on a secret.” I motioned for him to get closer, then whispered into his ear, “The girls I work with are my friends. We hate when customers say that kind of shit.”

“Yeah, but I mean — ”

I placed my pointer finger to his lips. “Shh,” I said.

Rob, like I thought, wasn’t interested in getting a private dance. Or spending money on anything other than drinks. There was no way to make money off him. I surveyed the room from my place at the bar on several occasions, considered introducing myself to someone else — tonight was uncommonly busy. But, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was too raw. Opening myself up for any form of rejection, even the faux rejection of the club, might break me.

That was most of dancing. Approaching man after man who delighted in saying no to women who would probably never even speak to them outside the club. Rob bought another round, and I eased into the fact that tonight was going to be another dud. At closing, I had little more than $100. In the beginning of my stripper career, almost four years earlier, a friend had told me: “As long as you make a bill.” Then and still, $100 a night didn’t seem like enough for this job. I’d wanted to make $500 that night, what I used to average. But I hadn’t even made $200 in months.

After the bouncer yelled for everyone to “get the fuck out,” the dancers shuffled into the dressing room. We kicked off our heels, standing flat-footed as we disrobed. Mya wasn’t even five feet tall and once we were both naked, she embraced me, our hot and sweaty bodies stuck together. I loved it — the feeling of being glued to her even for a moment. I breathed her in, peaches and tangy body odor.

“You’re so sexy,” she said and laughed.

Me? No, you are!” It was the first time all night I’d been happy.

She gave me a peck on the lips and then we dressed quickly in jeans and T-shirts.

Mya and I walked out to the parking lot with the bouncer at our side. October was usually wet and cold in the Northwest, but this year it was still dry and warm so it felt like a summer night. My attention was on Mya, so at first I didn’t notice that Rob was standing to our right, in an empty parking space. He tried to convince me to go with him right then “because we had a real connection.” The bouncer stepped between us and told Rob to go, but Rob persisted. I started crying. It was the third time in three consecutive shifts that a customer had waited outside for me.

I adored Mya so much that despite how badly I needed money, I’d hoped for these nights, huddled up with her at the bar. My feelings for her intimidated me.


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“Why does this keep happening?” I asked Mya. The other times I hadn’t cried. I’d made it clear they were crossing boundaries. This time, though, I felt helpless. As helpless as I’d felt earlier that day with my sister. I thought of all the men that had hurt me, and all the men that had hurt my sister. I wanted to take it all away from her, or at least I thought I did.

“It happens to all of us,” Mya said, shrugging. “But you’re too upset.” She took my hand and interlaced her fingers with mine. “You shouldn’t be alone.”

She guided me to her beat-up black Honda Accord. It wasn’t the first time Mya had tried to get me to go home with her. Many times, she’d purred into my ear, “Please come to my place.” And each time I had wanted to, but fear took over. What did it mean that I wanted it? I suspected I was bisexual, but had been told repeatedly that bisexuality wasn’t real. Well-meaning friends and less well-meaning customers told me I was simply bi-curious. I’d heard this so often that I was confused. Was what I felt for Mya only curiosity? It seemed like more. And that scared me. So I’d refuse. And she’d say, “I don’t understand. Don’t you want to be with me?”

I really do, I’d think, but shake my head and leave.

Now, Mya opened her passenger-side door and shut me inside as Rob yelled over the bouncer’s shoulder, “I wasn’t trying to make you upset. I just like you for real.”

I cried harder. The idea that he thought he liked the real me was too much to bear. He didn’t know the real me. No one there did.

“Ignore him,” Mya said as we sped off in her car.

At her place, Mya guided me to her bathroom. She kneeled down, turned on the bathtub faucet, and let the stream of water run over her fingers. “I’m going to give you a bath,” she said. “It’ll make you feel better.”

She stood up and ran her fingertips along the side of my face, then tugged at my clothes, removing each item slowly, and told me to get in. As I settled into the warm water, she poured rose bath gel onto a loofah and massaged it until it was foamy.

“I get the feeling that wasn’t really about the customer. What’s going on?” she asked as she rubbed the loofah over my back in soft, circular motions.

I took a steamy floral breath. I wanted to lie. It seemed like too much to tell Mya the truth, but the truth was too close to the surface.

“Eight years ago, two of my sister’s friends went missing,” I said. This was something I never intended to tell her, or anyone that didn’t already know.

I pretended it hadn’t happened. I pretended it hadn’t had any effect on me. I needed to be the stronger, older sister because so many people — including our mother — made the disappearance of the girls about themselves. Melissa needed me to let her have space to grieve without another person co-opting it. But what happened had also been so painful for me that I couldn’t face it.

“I can’t even imagine,” Mya said, shaking her head. She dropped the loofah, then cupped water into her hands, releasing it over my shoulders. The water cascaded down my back.

“Right after the second girl went missing, my sister—” I stopped, unsure if I should go on.  

Mya looked into my eyes. “You can tell me.”

“Why are you being so nice to me?” I asked, perplexed. It seemed like I might infect her with my pain. I never wanted anyone to see me like this. The suffering was off-limits and only allowed in private.

“Oh, Natassja,” she said, as if that was enough of an explanation. She touched my face and pulled me in for a kiss. “Let’s go to bed and cuddle. I won’t try anything, I promise.”

She took my hand, and I stood. Opening a towel, she patted me dry. She rubbed thick shea butter that smelled like peaches all over my body. The cream warmed quickly, melting as she applied it to my bare skin.

“Do you feel better?” she asked.

I nodded, though it wasn’t quite true. But I wasn’t crying — and that was close enough.

She led me to her bed and untangled my hair with a brush, one of my favorite sensations. It was one of the only tender things my mother had done for me as a child. I begged her to brush my hair until I was a teenager. Mya had no idea, but she was soothing me exactly in the way I needed.

***

“I started making amends,” my sister had said earlier that day as I pulled out of the Portland Community College campus parking lot where we were both taking classes. “And I need to tell you something.” Melissa took a deep and loud breath. I glanced in her direction, the crook in her nose visible from the many times she’d broken it when we were growing up, and then I looked back to the road.

My sister was 21, four years younger than me, and a year and a half clean. Snippets from the first time she received a jail sentence flashed before me. The court officer hauling her away. That I’d tried to tell her that I love her, but a different officer blocked me. She’s my sister, I’d said dumbly, pushing forward against him. I could feel the stiff bullet proof vest under his uniform. He grabbed my upper arm and threatened to arrest me, too. I went limp, and he dragged me to the exit of the courtroom, then flung me out into the hall. Stunned, I rubbed my arm. Red fingerprints would change to a ringed bruise that I continued to rub until it disappeared. It took two years: my sister in and out of jail. But once faced with time in prison, she finally stayed clean.

“Go for it.” I smiled.

I thought my sister might apologize for the time she stole my last $20. I’d called my mother that day and told her what Melissa had done. My mother didn’t believe me. It’s all the money I had in the world, I said, then sat in my car and wept. It was during one of several failed attempts to stop stripping.

Or I thought Melissa might apologize for one of the many times she’d accused me of being her reason for relapsing. In response I’d yelled, my voice strained, cracking: I’m the only person that’s ever truly loved you. Then calmly told her she could no longer be in my life as she sobbed. Later, I clasped my hands on my neck. I wanted to feel all the discomfort of my sore throat; the self-imposed punishment of my cruelty. The awareness that I was trying to guilt her into sobriety came over me, but we still didn’t speak for months. And the truth was that I did worry it was my fault. If it was my fault, it also meant I could control her — her addiction — but that I was failing. I owed her an apology, too.

‘Eight years ago, two of my sister’s friends went missing,’ I said. This was something I never intended to tell her, or anyone that didn’t already know.

“OK, this is it,” my sister said. “I was thirteen the first time I shot up heroin.” She stared ahead. I was confused. This wasn’t an amends. It seemed more like a confession. Prior to this, she’d insisted that she never shot anything into her veins. I hadn’t believed her, but I never suspected she might have been only thirteen.

“What do you mean? How?”

“It was right after Jessica went missing,” she said evenly, “when everyone realized that Allie hadn’t just run away.” I looked at her and she was looking at me. Her grey eyes stared straight into mine. She pursed her lips, and only moments later, unable to hold my gaze, she looked out the passenger-side window.

The mystery surrounding the disappearance of her friends, and how she suffered as a result, was her reasoning: the catalyst for her use of heroin. Except it wasn’t really. In that moment, I thought maybe if that hadn’t happened, she would’ve tried heroin later, at a more appropriate age. When she was 18, or 21. It was illogical. Is there an appropriate age to shoot up heroin?

I knew she’d tried meth by accident — it had been laced in some weed she’d smoked, when she was 11. She started smoking cigarettes and pot at 10. She’d been drunk at a Girl Scout meeting when she was 9. She posted pictures of herself high on Ecstasy on Myspace when she was 15. Her eyes glazed, dime-size pupils almost swallowing her irises, her jaw clenched. A purple pacifier hung around her neck. I don’t know when she started snorting cocaine, I just know it was her “favorite.” The drug she used compulsively, that she could never turn away. When exactly does an addiction start?

“But who gave it to you?” I asked. My chest burned and became itchy as hives blossomed there. I looked straight ahead so she couldn’t see the pain I knew would be obvious in my eyes. In the last year and a half, she’d transformed. The longer she stayed clean, the softer her face. The more she smiled. She rediscovered that she was nurturing, often playing with our younger cousins: rolling around in the grass, chasing and tickling them. She laughed. Thinking back to the little girl she was, the one that got so lost, was unbearable.

“It was Samantha’s stepdad. Remember her? I practically lived over there at one point.”

I remembered. Neither Melissa nor I knew our respective fathers. She latched onto men as result, but I tried to stay away from them. I learned early the damage men can do — at the hands of a family member — and it was something I wanted to inoculate my sister from. But, though the same man didn’t hurt her, I’d been powerless to stop others. Samantha’s stepdad had been one of the men I believed might hurt my sister. But there were many. There was the friend’s father that took Melissa on camping trips — only Melissa, no one else. Another friend’s stepdad that gave Melissa beer and requested back rubs from her. The paramedic who bought Melissa stuffed animals.

I’d begged my mother to stop letting my sister hang out with grown men. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she’d say. “She just wants a father and these men are willing to be something like that for her.”

She’s in danger, I’d plead.

“What do you mean it was Samantha’s stepdad?” I asked, not sure I wanted the answer.

“He was the one that laced the weed that one time. He said heroin would take my pain away and asked me if I wanted to try it.” She sighed.

I nodded, continuing to look ahead at the road, fuming, but trying not to appear rattled. I was afraid she’d stop entrusting me with this information if I reacted too strongly.

“So he found a vein and did it for me.”

“Did it help?” I asked.

Her growth seemed to have been stunted at the age of 10, and I’d been worried about her lack of development. My mind went back to her skinny arms and legs. She’d weighed less than 60 pounds. I’d been relieved when finally, at the age of 17, she grew and gained weight. She was now 5’7”, three inches taller than me, and a normal weight.

“I mean, the pain went away, but I started vomiting. It was awful.”

“Why’d you do it again if you hated it?”

“Because I’m a drug addict,” she said.

I was living in my first apartment by then. Melissa had been navigating the world without me. It stung — the idea that I had left her right when she needed me.

“It was my choice.” Her dark brown ponytail bobbed as she turned her head away from me before going on. “I have to take responsibility for it.”

In her addiction, she never stuck with anything. But now, she showed up each morning for classes at the community college. She maintained employment. She had become responsible, and yet, it seemed like she’d taken this ethos too far.

“But you were a kid.”

“Still, no one forced me. And it’s OK. I’m OK now.”

My knuckles whitened as I gripped the steering wheel, trying to focus on the bridge we were about to cross. We drove past Lucky Devil Lounge to the right, the club I’d be working at later that night. Melissa didn’t know I was stripping again. Months earlier, I’d quit and sworn I was done for good. She wasn’t the only one who lied.

I’d started stripping for the same reason I was doing it again: I needed money. But I’d long ago recognized the high I got while dancing. Nothing else made me feel the way dancing did. No substance could compare to the rush of getting naked for men — men who couldn’t touch me. Men who paid me to tease them, but couldn’t gain anything real from me. I could be as sexual as I wanted and no one could have me. That made me feel like the most powerful woman in the world. And that was the hardest part of quitting. I didn’t want to let it go. Even though, as time went on, the highs came less often. The façade that I had all the power had started to crumble. But, I longed for it anyway.

Was her addiction that much different?

Neither one of us spoke again for the rest of the 30-minute drive to the halfway house where she was living. In six weeks, I’d be moving to New York to study creative writing at the New School. I’d felt OK about moving because Melissa was clean, in school, doing well. Suddenly, I was unsure. How could I leave her? How could I have ever left her? It was irrational and I knew it, but I wanted to reach back into the past and change everything.

***

Two weeks after I graduated from high school, around midnight in the dining room of the duplex where my mother, sister, and I lived, I was hand-sewing a dress for a porcelain doll that would become Melissa’s birthday present when she turned 14. After finding the doll at a craft store for $3, I decided to make my sister something she’d always wanted. I designed my own pattern, using an old newspaper to trace it before cutting it into pieces. I based it on a Victorian ball gown and used shiny, satin fabrics in Melissa’s favorite color: purple, in several shades. And also designed a hat, purse, and parasol to match.

While Melissa was staying at a friend’s house, I was silently, carefully working on the dress when my mother started screaming from the top of the steps.

“You’re being too loud!”

Her sudden yelling startled me. I pulled the stitch I was working on too tight.

My mother stomped down to the dining room. She wore a baby-blue terry cloth robe, and her hair was a frizzy, wild auburn mess.

“You’re being too loud,” she yelled again, pointing at me. In a movie, it would’ve seemed exaggerated and funny. I held the needle strung with lavender thread perfectly still, as if moving would ruin the entire gown. As if I’d move and provoke more rage from my mother.

“I’m so sick of your shit,” she continued.

“I’m just sewing,” I said meekly, as if it weren’t obvious. “I haven’t been making any noise.”

I knew I was making a mistake. If she believed I was making noise, it was fact. She’d done things like this throughout my childhood. She’d burst into my room in the middle of the night, screaming into the darkness at me to “shut up.” I’d wake, confused. This was embarrassing when I had friends over. They’d whisper after my mother went back to bed, “Why’d she do that?” I’d smile weakly, unsure of what to tell them.

“Get the fuck out of my house,” she shouted.

The required reaction to these outbursts was simple: say I was sorry; say I’d be quiet.

I set the dress down while slyly examining the stitch I’d pulled too tight — I hadn’t ripped the delicate fabric. I looked over to her, but I didn’t say what I knew she wanted to hear.

“OK. I’ll go.”

The next day I found my first apartment. It was behind the mall where I worked, and the complex itself was rumored to be the most crime-addled place in the Portland metropolitan area: mostly drug deals, but also an occasional murder or rape. I didn’t care. Or more accurately: I couldn’t afford to care. I shared a one-bedroom with a friend. Rent was $450 a month; $225 each.

I thought about taking Melissa with me. Our mother wouldn’t object. On random slips of paper, I calculated my budget over and over, trying to figure out if there was a way I could afford to take care of both of us. It was 2002, and the minimum wage in Oregon was $6.50. Even if I managed to get 40 hours between my two part-time jobs, it wouldn’t be enough to adequately support myself, let alone another person. Melissa couldn’t come.

She’d weighed less than 60 pounds. I’d been relieved when finally, at the age of 17, she grew and gained weight. She was now 5’7”, three inches taller than me, and a normal weight.

As I grappled over what to do, I asked my closest friends, “What about Melissa?” They told me that I shouldn’t feel guilty; my sister wasn’t my responsibility.

Soon after I moved out, our mother refused to buy my sister school clothes or supplies, something she’d done several times to me. Extended family members or other adults in my life always picked up the tab, and I was both grateful and humiliated. These same adults called me when they found out I’d moved out. They all asked: What about Melissa? How can you leave her alone with your mother? They externalized my internal dialogue, and it deepened my guilt.

So, I did the one thing I could: I picked up the tab for my sister — I took her school shopping.

“Can I move in with you?” Melissa asked while we wandered through Target.

She wasn’t privy to my obsessing about taking her with me; the many pieces of paper that I’d calculated my budget on — then recalculated and recalculated and recalculated. I thought she was just smoking cigarettes and weed, drinking alcohol. I’d been concerned about those things, but she’d already tried heroin and I’d had no idea. Her request sucked the air out of the store. We stood in the fluorescent-lit aisle of office supplies. I focused on a package of gel pens and shook my head. She never brought it up again.

***

“People kept asking me, what about Melissa?” I said to Mya, her arms wrapped around me, her legs tangled in mine. It was a week after she’d bathed me. After that night, I went home with her every time we worked together. “And they were right. How could I have left her? How can I leave her again?” I stroked Mya’s hair.

“It makes perfect sense why you’d feel that way, but it’s misplaced. You realize that, right?” She traced the side of my body with the back of her hand.

“I thought that was true for so long. Now I’m questioning everything I’ve ever done. I feel like I failed her,” I said. I pushed Mya’s hair behind her ear.

“It wasn’t your job to protect her. It was your mother’s,” Mya said.

“I feel like I should take her with me when I move to New York.”

“You can’t fix what already happened. You know that, right?”

I didn’t know that. I believed, inexplicably, that I could still correct the wrongs of the past. But I didn’t say this. I shrugged, then tilted my face up and Mya kissed me deeply. We pawed at each other. Her skin was warm putty in my hands. I bit her neck lightly, then stopped.

“Oh my gosh. I completely forgot to ask,” I said. “Did you register for classes?” The last time I’d been over, we researched what it would take for Mya to become a vet assistant. Only an associate’s degree. We’d both done a happy dance in her living room that night.

Mya smirked. “I did,” she said. “I start in January.”

“You’re starting veterinary school right when I’ll be starting classes in New York. New beginnings for us both.”

“We should celebrate that,” she said, grinning. She climbed on top of me, and for a while I forgot about everything but her.

When she fell asleep, I listened to the even, slow pattern of her breath. I never wanted this to end, but the fact that it had to almost made it easier to just let myself feel. To be in the moment. To not worry about what could go wrong. Four more weeks and I’d be living in New York. Four more weeks to spend entwined with Mya. I opened my eyes. Orange light shone through her curtains. It was already past dawn.

Mya shifted in her sleep, reached out, pulled me in. And even though she was smaller than me, she made herself the big spoon.

***

I’d been living in New York for a year and a half, studying creative writing, when Melissa moved to live with me. By then she was three years clean. After I’d learned about the extent of my sister’s drug use, I hadn’t let go of the idea that she needed to be close to me.

Her first week in the city, we were walking down 2nd Avenue in the East Village when she remarked, “It’s a junkie’s paradise here.”

I froze. I’d worked at a sports bar on 2nd Ave. for most of the time I’d lived in New York. I scanned our surroundings. Everything familiar was still there: the pharmacy, the coffee shop, the bodega on the corner, the bars that lined the street, the indie movie theater, the Eye and Ear Infirmary, bags of trash. Those were the things I’d always noticed. Yet it was like Melissa did a magic trick.

Suddenly, instantaneously, I saw the block the way she did.

A girl in clean, ripped clothing nodded off on the corner: a street kid. She leaned against a building, then slid down to the ground, as if in slow motion. Slumped over, she stayed there — her head hanging, eyes closed, jaw slack. I spotted at least three other street kids nodding off, dotted along the sidewalk, just like she was. My skin prickled with the realization that I’d brought my sister into this world.

Six months later, Melissa and I stood in the bathroom of our apartment. “I need to tell you something,” she said, while pulling her right eye taut and then drawing black liner across her lid. She was getting ready for work. I’d been waiting for this conversation.

“So, I relapsed,” she said, then started lining her other eye.

“I know,” I said. A mix of rage and sadness filled me. Though she’d been able to maintain employment, paid rent on time — was acting as a responsible adult in these ways — her behavior had become more and more erratic. As were her moods. She stopped smiling. She didn’t laugh. Her face hardened. She stayed out many nights. Sometimes it was clear she was hungover, her eyes rimmed red, her face slightly swollen. And she’d lost at least 20 pounds.

“I knew you did. That’s the only reason I’m telling you. But don’t freak out. I have it under control. There is such thing as moderation. And you know that I never even got to drink legally, right?” She looked at me expectantly.

After I’d learned about the extent of my sister’s drug use, I hadn’t let go of the idea that she needed to be close to me.

“I need to think,” I said, then shut myself inside my bedroom. I did not have faith that she could keep it “under control” long-term. Our agreement had been that we would live together as long as she was sober. I’d considered this a formality. Of course she’d be sober. And we’d have a dry home. This changed nothing for me. I didn’t often drink, and never at home.

My hard-drug experimentation was also over. It had been brief, and my primary motivation had been to understand my sister. The one time I tried cocaine ended in uncontrollable sobbing. The one time I smoked heroin resulted in dizziness and nausea. In both cases, all I wanted was for the intoxication to end. And, afterward, a deep sadness settled over me that lasted for days. The only drug I tried and liked was MDMA. It made me feel like I could love, and more importantly, trust freely. I’d had a similar sensation with Mya, except no drugs were necessary. I didn’t feel compelled to actively seek MDMA out again. After experimenting, I felt no closer to understanding my sister or her addiction. My relationship with stripping was still the closest, but stripping was no longer appealing.

When I’d moved to New York I didn’t want to risk not finding steady work, so I’d started dancing at what was considered one of the most upscale clubs (and the first strip club to be traded on the stock market): Rick’s Cabaret. But, of the nine strip clubs I’d worked, this one was the seediest. The first time a customer grabbed my ass, I asked a bouncer for help. He said, “You’re a stripper.”

In New York, touching was against the law, but no one heeded this. I started slapping customers regularly. I’d never experienced anything like it. Even when I’d worked at a club that allowed touching, the girls decided who touched them and how.

One night at Rick’s, a customer whipped his limp dick out in a private room. When I told him to put it back, he asked, “What am I paying for then? Can’t you at least give me a hand job?” He, like the majority of the predominately white and rich clientele, felt entitled to extras. I left the VIP and refused to return until a bouncer helped. A manager eventually lied to the customer, telling him there were cameras in the rooms so that he’d cooperate. This customer claimed he was a famous music producer. The next day I verified this using Google.

Even on nights that I left with $2,000, the high I used to feel was missing. So much about stripping I had loved, but once it was done fulfilling my needs, it had been easy to stop. After six weeks, I quit.

Melissa’s plight wasn’t as simple. She’d experienced so much so young — I never blamed her for wanting to ease her sorrow.

After Melissa admitted she relapsed, I sat on my bed, hands shaking. I needed to tell her to move out. How was I going to do this? We avoided each other for a few days. Then I mustered the courage to approach her. She lounged on our red couch, playing Candy Crush.

I stood, lingering over her awkwardly and said, “If you aren’t clean.” I took a breath. “Then you need to move out.”

She rolled her eyes. “Like I said, it’s under control.”

“I don’t care. That’s the deal.”

It worried me to kick her out, but if I let her stay I’d be enabling her, which was the only thing that would be worse. I gave her 30 days to find another place.

“You’re being dumb,” she said.

I started shaking again. “You have to leave,” I repeated, before going back into my bedroom and burying my face into a pillow so she couldn’t hear me cry.

She must’ve known I was upset, but I tried to hide it from her. I stopped eating because nausea settled in, becoming my new norm. My skin turned sallow and splintered capillaries dotted the puffy skin under my eyes like bright red freckles. I cried often, but never in front of my sister. I thought I was done worrying that she might die or go to prison because of her addiction. Three years, I believed, was enough to know that it was over. Now I understood that “one day at a time” really meant one. day. at. a. time.

***

I fell asleep soon after realizing it was past dawn, entangled with Mya. What could’ve only been hours later, we both rose. We went to brunch. We ate off each other’s plates. Sometimes we got manicures. It was like having a best friend that I also had sex with. This, I realized, was what I had always wanted. I opened up to her in ways that I never had to a man. And in this I felt comforted. I was falling in love, but unlike with a man, I didn’t try to stop it. I let it be. Even with the knowledge the end was sure, it didn’t scare me. I felt like I could love her, but I wasn’t worried about what it meant. I assumed we’d stay friends. I assumed that what was between us would forever be sacred, no matter what else happened. To be with her felt safe. And in a way that I’d never experienced before.

My attachment to my sister wasn’t healthy, I suddenly knew.

And so, after my sister confessed she’d relapsed, absorbed in grief, I’d lie in bed and remember my time with Mya — how she’d soothed me when I’d needed it most. She’d bathe me, and I’d take steamy, floral breaths. She’d nuzzle up to me and I’d feel her warm minty breath on my neck. I’d stroke her hair, tuck it behind her ear. We’d gaze into each others eyes, and neither one of us looked away.

“She’s not your daughter,” she’d said. “And at this point, she’s grown. You need to let go.”

I didn’t listen to her at the time, but I knew that Mya had been right. And that two years after she’d said those words, I needed to listen. I needed to love my sister in a different way. To believe that things could be OK if I wasn’t trying to control where she lived, or what she did. Though our intimacy was so much different, I needed to take the lessons I learned about loving Mya and apply them to loving my sister.

Melissa agreed to move out instead of getting clean, and I tried to accept her choice. I meditated on let go.

Slowly, the color returned to my face; I realized I was starving and shoveled food into my mouth. The responsibility I’d been harboring for my sister started to fade. I stopped asking, What about Melissa? I began to understand that I could love my sister, but not take responsibility for her.

Three weeks after my sister told me she’d relapsed, she told me she was clean.

“And I’m committed to staying that way,” she said while shuffling her feet and wringing her hands. “Can I please keep living here with you?” She picked at the lavender nail polish on her thumb, then raised her head and looked at me.

It seemed like I couldn’t rightfully kick her out if she was sober, but I had no way of knowing if she was telling the truth. As much as I tried to let go of the responsibility I’d felt for her, it wasn’t as simple when she was standing before me. My head started to ache. I rubbed my temples.

“Natassja,” she said. “I swear.”

I clenched my jaw, looked up at the ceiling, and sighed.

“Please give me another chance.” She picked at the last bit of nail polish on her thumb. Sunlight illuminated the fleck of lavender as it floated to the hardwood floor, and I watched it as it fell.

* * *

Natassja Schiel is writing a memoir about her time working as an exotic dancer on the island of Guam titled Tumon Strip. Her work has most recently appeared at The Millions, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Opossum Literary Magazine.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

The Horse Was a Lie (The Horse Is Here With Us Now)

Ernst Haas / Getty

Levi Vonk | Longreads | August 2018 | 7 minutes (1,927 words)

In the prelude to Mario Chard’s “Caballero,” we are presented with a car crash. We are told that the crash happened in the desert, that there was no one around. Two accounts of the crash exist. The first is a succinct description by the Associated Press:

Eight of the 14 people in the Chevy Suburban died
after it rolled several times on U.S. 191 a few hours
before dawn Monday. Salas-López, originally from
Guatemala, told investigators he swerved to miss a
horse. He was arrested after fleeing into the desert…

The second is a quote from the sergeant investigating the crash:

The passengers say no, he wasn’t swerving to miss a
horse, that he was fondling a female passenger in the
front seat of the vehicle.

At first it seems an all-too-familiar migration narrative, the harsh coalescence of movement and death, of sexual exploitation and isolation, which has become a defining aesthetic of the U.S.-Mexico border. Of course the coyote lies. Of course the victim dies. We find ourselves in bitter but accustomed topography.

Instead, “Say it was a horse,” writes Chard in the first canto of “Caballero,” and we move into stranger territory. Read more…

I Would Never Say That, But the Character, He Said It: An Interview with Catherine Lacey

McKeown / Stringer for the Hulton Archive, Getty

Tobias Carroll | Longreads | August 2018 | 16 minutes (4,305 words)

Since the 2014 release of her debut novel Nobody Is Ever Missing, Catherine Lacey has established herself as one of the finest chroniclers of alienation working in fiction today. Her follow-up, The Answers, took as its subject a young woman who is hired to be part of an experimental program to give a famed screen actor a kind of compound girlfriend. Both novels grapple with questions of restlessness and malaise, and turn familiar fictional ground — an American abroad in the former, a larger-than-life celebrity in the latter — into something strange and mysterious.

Lacey is also an acute observer of larger literary and cultural traditions: last year, in collaboration with artist Forsyth Harmon, she released The Art of the Affair: An Illustrated History of Love, Sex, and Artistic Influence. In it, she chronicles the dizzying web of connections between artists of many disciplines over the course of decades — and in doing so unravels the mystique of the solitary genius.

Lacey’s latest book is her first collection of short stories. Certain American States demonstrates another aspect of her literary abilities. The stories found in here cover a wide stylistic range, from the surreal travelogue of “The Grand Claremont Hotel” to the meditation on loss and possessions found in “Please Take.” That stylistic range allows Lacey a way to explore her preferred themes of alienation and interconnectedness in a myriad of ways — making for an unpredictable set of narratives throughout the book. Read more…

Semi-Fluid States: The Rigid Line of Straightness

Illustration by Janna Morton

Minda Honey| Longreads | August 2018 | 11 minutes (2750 words)

 

My friend and I sit on the patio of a tapas restaurant in suburbia with a view of the parking lot, SUVs lined up baking in the summer sun. We sip sangria. We eat off tiny plates. We feel bougie. She tells me about her dating turmoil. She’s not sure where she stands with a man she isn’t sure she should be with. “And,” she says, “the other person he’s sleeping with is a trans woman. I’m trying to be OK with that.”

“I’ve slept with a trans woman,” I say before pushing more shrimp, shiny with olive oil and studded with minced garlic, into my mouth. An SUV pulls out of a parking spot, another SUV pulls in. I can see my friend thinking, the muscles in her lips flexing and relaxing, questions forming and crumbling, but never leaving her mouth.

I wonder if it’s her understanding of me or of herself that is changing. I do not tell her about the graduate-level writing course I took as an undergrad, or about the other undergrad in the class whose writing I loved, and who offered me words of encouragement. I don’t tell her about the night that writer walked me to my car after a reading, or about how the only thing that stopped a kiss was the thought of the boyfriend waiting for me at home. Or the years that passed, the writer resurfacing on Facebook, the Messenger chats about my move back home and about writing and work leading to chats about her being a trans woman, about the excitement of trading T-shirts and jeans for dresses and makeup. Or about our paths crossing at a house party, the hand-holding by the fire, the annoyance at drunk interlopers trying to crash our conversation, the said and unsaid, the invite back to my place, the movie unwatched, the open window in the rain, how consent culture showed us the way: “Is this OK? Do you like this? What do you want?” Yes. Yes. You.

I finish chewing, and instead of telling my friend these things I say, “It’s not a big deal,” and take a drink of my sangria. But I haven’t always been so unprejudiced.

In the parking lot, another SUV pulls out, another SUV pulls in.

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