Search Results for: Love

Rock Me Gently

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | August 2019 |  9 minutes (2,273 words)

I have no reason not to believe Rolling Stone when it calls cover star Harry Styles a “21st century rock star.” He certainly looks like one: shirtless, tattooed, his hair a tousled mess, and a smile that may not say big dick energy but definitely says he knows what to do with it. He could be 1977 cover star Peter Frampton, when he was named “Rock Star of the Year.” There’s even a tagline to the left of Styles’s nipple promising sex and psychedelics. But then you start reading, and the setup begins to break down. Sure, he has a reputation for fucking a lot, but it all sounds very consensual and age-appropriate. He also seems unfailingly polite, not to mention sunny. I mean, he gets sad — his new album is “all about having sex and feeling sad” — but he’s not broody and doesn’t seem like he’d ever trash a hotel. This is a guy who appears to sort his problems out the way therapists tell us to: friendships, meditation, even work. “I feel like the fans have given me an environment to be myself and grow up and create this safe space to learn and make mistakes,” he tells the magazine. He describes himself as vulnerable and loose (the mushrooms and weed can’t hurt). Rolling Stone describes one moment as “rock-star debauchery” but all he did while tripping was bite off the tip of his own tongue — the only person he bled on was himself. As for everyone else, he just wants them to feel loved. “I’m aware that as a white male, I don’t go through the same things as a lot of the people that come to the shows,” he says. “I’m just trying to make people feel included and seen.”

The classic ideal of the rock star — the depraved renegade with infinite hotel bills, addictions, and infidelities — is dead. The charismatic young white man (it was usually a young white man, sometimes several) who rebranded selfishness as revolution has been overthrown, taking with him a part of the individualist, white, patriarchal capitalist system he came from. In his place, new rock stars, sometimes white and male, often not, have sprung up to nurture rather than destroy — instead of shutting us out, they let us in. Read more…

In the Age of the Psychonauts

Frank R. Paul, 1924. Forrest J. Ackerman Collection / CORBIS / Corbis via Getty Images.

Erik Davis | An excerpt adapted from High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies | The MIT Press | 2019 | 35 minutes (9,207 words)

Early in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s prophet of the future discovers a tightrope walker preparing to perform in front of a crowd. It is here, crucially, that Zarathustra announces his famous doctrine of the übermensch, the overman, the superhero of the spirit. Humanity, he says, is merely a rope “fastened between animal and Overman,” a rope that passes over the abyss.

Elsewhere Nietzsche describes the spiritual acrobats who can rise to the call of the Overman as “philosophers of the future.” Nondogmatic, often solitary, with a predilection for risky behavior, these radical free thinkers are “curious to a fault, researchers to the point of cruelty, with unmindful fingers for the incomprehensible.” Nietzsche simply calls them those who attempt. Their truths are their own, rather than general facts, and they are “at home in many countries of the spirit, at least as guests.”

Sounds to me like Nietzsche is talking about psychonauts. After all, while we are used to comparing drug visionaries to mystical seekers, from another angle, they more resemble philosophers or mad scientists compelled, beyond reason but with some sense, to put themselves on the line, risking both paranoia and pathology through their anthropotechnics. Read more…

When Your Social Worker Thinks You’re Ungrateful

Illustration by Dola Sun

Dina Nayeri | Longreads | August 2019 | 13 minutes (3,210 words)

In the last two years I’ve become entangled in the workings of the homelessness prevention arm of London’s Camden Council. Camden is the borough that includes the British Museum, the British Library, a small sliver of Regents Park, and a huge chunk of Hampstead Heath. It also has its rough parts, with subsidized or free council housing, artists on grants, young mothers on benefits — as in most of London, Camden’s residents are a varied lot and everyone, whatever their socioeconomic class, uses some kind of government service.

Minoo is an Iranian refugee with two bright children and a sick, immobile husband. In Iran, she was an experienced nurse, her husband an engineer and Christian convert. Her daughter is clever and witty, her sharp eye taking in every detail. Her son is a football star with a head for math. The four escaped religious persecution and possible death in Iran, spent months as asylum seekers having their story scrutinized for lies, then slept in a roach motel for a few more months before being recognized as both refugees and at risk for homelessness. Now, having been granted asylum, they share a tiny room in a Camden hostel and wait for permanent housing.

Minoo and I met two years ago, when her church contacted me to befriend a new refugee who was at risk of depression. She was my age, a mother, like me, and came from my hometown in Iran. We had fled for the same kind of apostasy, though I had been a child and she was in her 30s. We met for coffee. She was bedraggled but smiled for my sake. She insisted on buying my coffee. She had sad, kind eyes, with a drop of something, like a tear, lodged near one iris. To bridge the class divide, and to put her at ease, I made a clown of myself, and soon she opened up to me. “We can’t breathe,” she said. “My son is almost a teenager. My daughter is suffocating.”

The family’s Camden hostel room has a single bed that they share: sick husband, wife, pre-teen boy and girl. From the bed, you can touch the bathroom door and the kitchen table. Three large steps will put you at the opposite wall. Every day, they face potential homelessness, and yet, for two years, the Camden housing authority has run them in circles. It’s important to stress that the family’s status has already been decided. By the (conservative) government’s own estimation, they are at risk of homelessness, and given the husband’s condition, entitled to public housing that includes separate rooms for the boy and girl. And yet, accessing it has been humiliating, repetitive, and opaque. Recently it’s become vindictive, too.
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Shelved: Van Morrison’s Contractual Obligation Album

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Tom Maxwell | Longreads | August 2019 | 12 minutes (2,134 words)

 

Sometime between the massive success of his first single “Brown-Eyed Girl” and the extraordinary musical statement of Astral Weeks, Van Morrison walked into a New York studio and recorded thirty-one of his worst songs.

To be fair, he was terrible on purpose. What became known as Morrison’s “revenge” or Contractual Obligation album is perhaps the most distinguished of many record label f-yous. Comprised of over thirty songs supposedly recorded in an afternoon, with titles such as “The Big Royalty Check” and “Blow In Your Nose,” the work was, understandably, shelved. Apparently that was the point: Morrison wanted to get out of his contract with Bang Records and make a new home with Warner Brothers, and the Contractual Obligation songs were supposedly central to that transition. Morrison’s Bang Records contract stipulated quantity, not quality. The truth, about all of it, is a lot more interesting.

Read more…

‘Nobody in This Book Is Going to Catch a Break’: Téa Obreht on “Inland”

Members of the US Camel Corps in the southwestern desert, 1857. (MPI/Getty Images & Random House)

Ryan Chapman | Longreads | August 2019 | 15 minutes (4,042 words)

Téa Obreht’s debut The Tiger’s Wife casts quite the shadow. It was a National Book Awards Finalist, won the Orange Prize, and landed its 25-year-old author on the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list. We’d understand if Obreht let the acclaim go to her head. We’d even forgive a sophomore slump. Fortunately for us, her novel Inland bears the same storytelling rigor and frictionless prose of its predecessor.

While Tiger’s Wife drew from Obreht’s childhood in the former Yugoslavia, Inland is set a world apart and a century earlier. Namely: the American West, spanning the second half of the 1800s. Parallel narratives follow Nora, a homesteader in the Arizona territories, and Lurie, an outlaw wanderer and conscripted “cameleer” in the U.S. Camel Corps. (An actual troop, and the novel’s genesis.)

As you’d expect, life is punishing and violence ever-present. The well at Nora’s farm has run dry, and her husband Emmett, the local newspaperman, has left to find water; her two grown sons soon follow. Nora is left to protect and watch over an invalid mother, her youngest son, and an annoying teen ward who conducts séances in town. Lurie also communes with the dead, absorbing the posthumous “want” of his partners-in-crime as he traverses the territories. An immigrant Muslim from the Ottoman Empire, Lurie is also a wanted man, pursued by a dogged marshal on a charge for manslaughter. For much of the book Lurie takes cover in the camel corps — led by a charming Turk named Hadji Ali — and bonds with his trusty camel Burke.

Lurie’s and Nora’s stories will intersect, a meeting which elevates Inland to something spectacular and timeless. It’s cliché to say a book has “reinvented” a genre. But Obreht’s achievement feels that way: like a full reset of the American Western. Its characters are those often ignored in cowboy tales, and the Camel Corps spotlights a little-known piece of history while exemplifying the Why not? spirit of possibility — possibly the oldest American tradition. I asked Obreht about her novel over caffeinated cocktails in Manhattan. Read more…

When Running Toward Yourself Looks Like Running Away

Illustration by Greta Kotz

Amber Leventry | Longreads | August 2019 | 15 minutes (3,796 words)

“No one is standing in your way anymore. Not even yourself.”Maryam Hasnaa, clairsentient and spiritual healer.

Once upon a time, not long ago, I presented as someone else. Like so many people, I’d received discouraging information about who I was supposed to be — from my family and from our culture — and I constructed a false identity, held loosely together by shame, alcohol, and obligation. The longer I perpetuated the lie of who I was, the harder life became, and the more I suffered. I was desperate to change; I knew something was missing, but I didn’t yet know what. I was terrified of making even one new choice because of all that was attached to the false ones. Just as one lie leads to the creation of many others in order to maintain your cover, deconstructing just one will inevitably lead to the unraveling of the rest of them.

The truth kept intruding on the false quiet I tried to maintain in my mind. I kept drowning out the sound of it with gin, until it got so loud I had no choice but to listen.

In the space of two short years, after a lifetime of uncertainty and denying what was true, I became committed to being real. I became sober; I came out as nonbinary; I left my female partner of nearly 20 years. I examined everything in my life that I thought defined me and realized in my rush to find myself I had never really been lost, just hidden.

Read more…

Addiction, Disorder, Disease, Call It What You Want: A Reading List on Alcoholism

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No one sets out to become an alcoholic. Life happens. And then life happens some more, and one day one drink is eight drinks is you get the idea.

I never got to meet my dad’s dad. He died just after my older sister was born, when my dad was 21 and became a dad for the first time. Even though Grandpa was an alcoholic — to the point Grandma divorced him over it — that’s not what ultimately killed him. That’s just what I’m afraid will happen to my dad.

Alcoholism falls into two categories: alcohol abuse and alcohol dependence. Growing up, my dad’s drinking habit fell into the “week or weekend, 12-packs of Bud Light don’t judge” kind of dependence. He drank socially, but his specialty was drinking alone in the garage late into the night. Sometimes my mom would become so frustrated with his drinking that she’d go off to her parents’ house to avoid it altogether, leaving my sisters and me behind.

On one of these nights I needed a ride to stay over at a friend’s house and opened the door to the garage. I found Dad in the drunken state I expected and asked him for a ride. After reminding him Mom had left a couple hours earlier, he stared at me with bloodshot eyes, eventually slurring out, “Can you drive?” Not legally.

It took him more tries to get into the passenger seat than it did for me to start the car (one), and he passed out not long after that. When I pulled up to a stop light, an empty bottle rolled from under the seat and hit the back of my foot on the brake. The person in the passenger seat looked like my dad but wasn’t my dad. He wasn’t the person who loved me, who I loved back. He wasn’t the person who went to work every day to support his family. He wasn’t the person who told the best stories and made everyone laugh. He wasn’t my dad. The person next to me was this thing — addiction, disorder, disease, call it what you want — that manifested itself when the sun went down.

I was 17 when he got his first DUI. Attempts at sobriety started piling up after that, with nights of seeing him shake and sweat under blankets. I was 23 when my younger sister died in a car accident. Dad got his second DUI soon after that. Life happens.

There are days when I hope there’s still time for sobriety to stick to him. But I admit, there are more days when I’m a cynic, a realist. I know his body has been conditioned over decades to depend on alcohol in order to function and no one is meant to live forever.

For both the hopeful and the cynical, what follows is a reading list on how alcoholism has been experienced by real people who have struggled and managed to survive. Cheers.

1. For Leslie Jamison, Running and Drinking Were The Two Quickest Ways to Escape (Leslie Jamison, April 2018, Vogue)

For Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams and The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, running and drinking became her escape from shyness when she left junior high.

Jamison describes how she trained to be a long-distance runner and drank her way through high school, literally drinking to the point of passing out the night before her graduation ceremony. She “finally stopped drinking entirely” at 27 and it was at that point when she learned she “needed to be released from that defining sense of self,” created by running and drinking, so that she could “meet the other selves that were in there, waiting.”

If running and drinking both offered a sense of release from myself, they offered it in very different—nearly opposite—ways: Drinking felt like transportation out of myself, while running transformed my sense of who I was. If drinking loosened me from the cloister of my body, then running involved inhabiting that body fully: sweat pooling in my collarbone, flattening my hair to my skull, coating my shins in layers of dust and grime.

2. Distress Tolerance (Kaveh Akbar, April 2018, Gay Mag)

Psychologists refer to “distress tolerance” as our ability as individuals to endure negative or painful experiences. “Alcoholics and addicts, whose lives are often spent lurching from one painful crisis to another,” Kaveh Akbar writes, “tend to display distress tolerances that are significantly higher than those of their sober peers.”

Akbar uses his own experience with drinking as a remarkable case study for this assertion. He describes how he once got into a bike accident while drunk, resulting in a shattered pelvis and a cracked vertebra, but also the discovery by doctors that Akbar had a two-month-old fracture on a different vertebra that he didn’t know he had. Possibly more remarkable is that this wasn’t the turning point for Akbar to get sober. That “took another couple years.”

The more you drink, the more you become defined by the drink, the more you look like a drink and smell like a drink and behave like a drink. In a blackout, this effect reaches its apex — you leave your body completely, and the drink is finally left to move unaccompanied through the world.

3. For Years, Alcohol Was My Only Comfort. Then It Nearly Killed Me. (Heather King, July 2019, The New York Times Magazine)

Heather King, a former aircraft maintenance technician in the Air Force, writes about her history of drinking and how she “felt as if [she] had to drink in order to function, or at least appear to function, as a normal human being.” Alcohol was her “lifeline.” When she nearly dies in a drunk driving car crash, and after her mother bails her out of jail, King realizes she not only wants to get sober, she wants to live “[f]or the first time in many years.” And her desire to live, after nearly 20 years of drinking, finally outweighs the desire to drink.

Related reading: Jane Brody writes about functional alcoholism in a 2009 piece at The New York Times.

What I appreciate most about King’s piece is that she’s a realist. She acknowledges the “struggle” she “fought” to become sober, admitting that “[t]he decision to get sober and stay sober, by no means easy, was the single most important decision” she has made in life. She’s honest that she couldn’t get sober for anyone else, not even her children — she had to want it for herself for it to last.

Alcohol became my solution to everything. I justified it by saying, ‘If you lived my life, you would drink, too.’ I convinced myself I could stop. After all, quitting was simply a matter of will. The Air Force had taught me resiliency and strength. What other tools did I need? But alcohol had me beat; I just didn’t know it.

4. I Hadn’t Seen My Addict Father in Years — Then I Ran Into Him on the Street (Jordan Foisy, August 2019, Vice)

In this intimate and matter-of-fact glimpse of what it’s like to grow up with an addict parent, Jordan Foisy shares what it’s like to finally meet the person they may have been all along.

After not seeing his dad for three years — as the title suggests — Foisy runs into his dad and the two make plans to have lunch the following day. What unfolds is hours of hanging out together and Foisy getting to see that while his dad has a coke problem and lives on the margins of society “garbed in clothes that look like a donations box sneezed on him,” his dad is also “funny, opinionated, hypocritical, charming, strange, and loving.” At the end of the day, though, Foisy is left realizing his dad is “committed to his drugs, and letting them kill him. He doesn’t want to get better because what kind of life is waiting for him on the other side?”

This piece begs the question: Does someone have to get sober in order to live?

A lifetime of movies had left me with these fantasies of The Great Conversation: If I had enough courage, I could engage my dad in a way that would save him, and by saving him, save myself. It would end in great heaving sobs between the two of us, our arms wrapped around each other; him committing to getting clean and apologizing for all his misdeeds; and myself, born anew, filled with confidence, serenity, and, inexplicably, newfound athletic prowess.

5. Chasing Drinks with Lies, and Lies with Drinks (Katie MacBride, April 2018, Longreads)

Before getting sober, Katie MacBride was a blackout drinker who told lies about drinking and, when holes were poked in her lies, doubled down on those lies. She writes about her period of reckoning that started after waking up on a hospital gurney with a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of .4 (blackouts start at .2-.29 BAC), a box cutter and, in her words, “A suicide note I vaguely remembered writing on a Post-it just in case I ever needed it.”

MacBride’s story illustrates how the lies we tell ourselves only take us so far and then we have to start being honest with ourselves.

When there were no clues, I had no story — none of my own anyhow. My life belonged to witnesses, unwilling participants who might know the things that I did not. This is the scariest part of being a blackout drinker: not the inability to remember, the fear that someone else does. The worst thing you can do to a blackout drinker is tell them the truth.

6. The End Of Alcohol: One Writer On Going Sober (Billie JD Porter, April 2019, Elle)

Billie JD Porter writes about being an all-or-nothing kind of drinker since the age of 13 and growing up “relatively used to the idea of hitting the self-destruct button, and the fallout that went with it” as a result of having parents addicted to heroin. When her parents’ struggles with various substances became a mirror for her own alcohol dependency, Porter decided to take a year off drinking to discover the root of why she drinks.

By taking a break, to discover what that may be, I was strengthening my own foundations, so the past doesn’t grow into an even bigger, scarier monster that I’m unable to confront, like it has done for my parents.

At the time of my hiatus, I was only 23; I don’t think my days of cry-laughing into Tyskies and obnoxiously shouting my way through an evening into the early hours are behind me just yet, but I wanted to learn to be able to drink and have fun, in a manner that doesn’t see me descend into a downward spiral, taking me and everything I’ve worked so hard for, with it.

* * *

Alison Fishburn is a writer and recovering Floridian living in Ontario. She’s working on a memoir about the sudden death of her younger sister while learning to grieve. You can find her on Twitter @AlisonFishburn.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

White Looks

Getty / Illustration by Homestead Studio

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | August 2019 |  8 minutes (2,132 words)

 

They have a deep emotional investment in the myth of “sameness,” even as their actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as a sign informing who they are and how they think.

—bell hooks, Black Looks (1992)

 

I’m experiencing some deep angst about this essay. That anxious feeling where you’re standing on the edge of a cliff on a perfect day — no wind, no sound, no bird of prey — and you’re almost certain you’ll throw yourself off. Every time I email a black critic for this article, it’s even worse because I can’t even tell if I’ve jumped or not. Like I’m dead at the bottom of that cliff, but I have to wait for a reply to be informed. That I’m dead. This is what white people call “white fragility,” right? “Socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves, we become highly fragile in conversations about race,” Robin DiAngelo wrote. (As book critic Katy Waldman noted, many people of color could have written White Fragility in their sleep.) I am in fact biracial — my father is white, my mother is Pakistani (she grew up in England) — but I pass. I barely identify with my Pakistani side, except when I see a group of Pakistani people. Then I’m like Hey. I know you. (Even though I don’t.) I don’t think this when I see a group of black people. Although, what’s that line in Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist? “To be an antiracist is to realize there is no such thing as Black behavior.” To be an antiracist is to realize there is such a thing as White behavior.
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Better Late

Longreads Pick
Source: Longreads
Published: Aug 23, 2019
Length: 12 minutes (3,179 words)

Better Late

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Summer Block | Longreads | August 2019 | 11 minutes (3,179 words)

 
Here I am again, the only 40-year-old in the orthodontist’s waiting room. Dr. F works out of a strip mall in North Hollywood which, like every other business in North Hollywood, is across the street from an acting studio and a transmission repair center. In the waiting room a sullen teenage girl is frowning at her phone while her little brother drums the back of his heels against his seat. Four receptionists sit behind the front desk, each wearing perfect teeth and an embroidered lab coat, pointedly ignoring the drumming. Three large high-definition TVs are always on, and always playing Moana — but only the sad parts.

I have a significant overbite and a large gap between my two front teeth. As a child I wanted braces the way some girls want a pony. I was poisonously envious of all my friends’ braces, obsessed with the arcane magic of it: the little flat packets of wax, the seashell pink boxes of tiny rubber bands. Because my parents could not afford braces, I stopped smiling instead. In the last photo I’ve found of myself with teeth visible, I am 7 years old, posing beside my baby sister in a pale purple Laura Ashley dress, grinning a gummy, snaggled smile. In every photo since, my lips are tightly sealed, like a baby refusing a spoon. I’m not smiling in my senior pictures, nor at my college graduation, nor on my wedding day.

For years I planned on fixing my teeth when I could afford it, but by the time I finally could, I felt it was too late. I feared correcting an orthodontic mess as bad as mine would change the shape of my face. Would I still look like me when it was through? Did I want to? More than that, I couldn’t imagine living without constant low-level embarrassment about my teeth, like the roar of silence in a room after someone turns off the TV. I was used to my teeth. In some ways, I even liked them, in the way that all of us secretly treasure even the worst facts about ourselves just because they’re ours. Still I daydreamed about braces sometimes, about looking back at all my childhood photos and finding me in them now, smiling.

* * *

I didn’t learn to swim until I was a teenager. I didn’t learn to drive until I was 24. I didn’t learn to ride a bike until I was 37 and I got into graduate school 18 years after I finished my BA. I didn’t have my period until I was 17; I was still losing baby teeth in junior high. I didn’t drink until I was in college, and didn’t do drugs until after I’d left. I got my first tattoo at 30. I rode a water slide for the first time last summer; I played baseball for the first time last month. I didn’t find my first friend until I was in fifth grade, and I found my true love when I was almost 40.

* * *

At my first Invisalign consultation, I offered up an eager, toothy grin. The hygienist took my photo, printed it out, and stapled a copy to my chart, so whenever I return for checkups, I see it there. My hair is thin and friable, the color of damp straw, my neck ropy and straining. I look like an emu.

At my initial consultation, I explained to Dr. F that I was hoping to fix the large gap between my front teeth. Dr. F assured me brightly that the gap was just one of many, many things wrong with my teeth. A series of 3-D images and X-rays revealed that I had both a significant overbite and a crossbite, the latter responsible for the slight visible asymmetry of my chin. I had a major gap between my two front teeth, of course, but the spacing of my teeth was uneven throughout, crowded on the bottom and rangy on top. Several of my teeth were twisted, most uneven, and I had a chip in my front left. My front teeth were too big, or my gums too small — the effect was very horsey either way. 

I sat through this litany of my many imperfections, my face set in a tight, conciliatory grin.

“Your gums show too much when you smile,” he said.

My teeth were supposed to be done last July, but I’m still waiting. Forty-year-old teeth are stubborn.

I was made to sign a stack of waivers and disclaimers acknowledging what Invisalign could and could not do for my teeth. Invisalign is a purely cosmetic fix, not a structural one. Invisalign can shuffle your teeth within your jaw like Scrabble tiles in their tray, but it cannot change the alignment of your jaw itself. Traditional metal braces would go further to fix some of the issues with my teeth, if I chose them, but they are more effective on adolescents whose bones are still malleable. My bones had spent 39 years solidifying into their present shape. At this point I’d need major jaw surgery to correct my overbite, Dr. F explained, and even then it wouldn’t change the size and shape of my palate.

“I thought there were palate expanders and things, I remember when I was a kid —”

“Oh yes,” Dr. F interrupted cheerfully, “you can fix absolutely anything when you’re young.”

* * *

My father has held many different jobs in his life, from taxi driver to short-order cook, shipping clerk, retail salesman, janitor. When he met my mom he was working at a factory that made drapes. Eventually he fell into being a purchasing agent and he worked for various manufacturing companies until, at age 63, his employer outsourced all their manufacturing overseas and pushed him into early retirement. But he couldn’t really afford to retire, and so he went to work as a substitute teacher. It was simply expedient, at first, but he loved being a teacher and he was good at it. Kids loved him, fellow teachers loved him, parents loved him. He went back to school to get his teaching credential to become a full-time elementary school teacher. He was the happiest I’d ever seen him. At 63, after a lifetime of jobs that were simply jobs, he had found his calling.

I tell this story all the time — because I’m proud of my father, but also because it comforts the listener, and it comforts me. I usually sum it up with some pat sentiment like, “It just goes to show, you really can do anything at any age!” 

* * *

When my children were with their dad, Zac and I would stay downtown in the industrial conversion loft he shared with three roommates and a cat he loved like a baby because he’d never had a baby. The building was a hulking concrete and brick shell choked with vines, its interior walls thrown together by the many resident architecture students. We’d order pizza and go sit up on the roof, where his neighbors gathered on summer nights for concerts and parties, or just to look out over the rooftops of the city and feel good about Los Angeles. 

Then we’d climb down a ladder through the ceiling to his bedroom, a concrete cube only a few inches wider than his bed. His clothes hung from an exposed metal rack, and a small air conditioning unit was mounted unsteadily into the small window above our heads. The room was dark and cool — freezing in winter — and cars rolled over the 4th Street bridge all day and night.  

* * *

Invisalign is a system of clear plastic aligners, each a mold of your teeth, that you wear at all times except when eating. Every Sunday night I put in a new set of aligners, top and bottom, one slight correction closer to perfection. Every two months I return to Dr. F’s office to pick up my next set of eight aligners, each in its own resealable plastic bag. My treatment plan was supposed to take 18 months, or 78 little plastic bags.

This is my 48th week of Invisalign and the gap between my two front teeth is definitely closing. When I’m wearing the retainers, the space almost disappears, and I get a little preview of what I’ll look like when I’m done. I am still, for better or worse, recognizably me.

* * *

The truth about my dad is somewhat more complicated. He does love teaching, and he is great at it. But he’s 70 now, still taking night classes, still attending training workshops, still working with a mentor. He works the equivalent of three full-time jobs. He is subject to age discrimination in hiring, to exhaustion and chest pains and second-guessing. Not to mention the decades he spent doing things he didn’t love until he found, belatedly, the thing he did. 

* * *

It didn’t occur to me that Invisalign would hurt, perhaps because they were just flimsy plastic sleeves and not metal braces. The day I had them put in, Dr. F filed down some of my teeth and cemented anchoring brackets onto others, without any anesthesia. My jaw ached from holding my mouth open for so long. Then there was the actual movement of the teeth themselves, a part of me that hadn’t moved since infancy now subjected to a sudden geologic violence.

When I got back to our house after my first appointment, I was starving but it hurt too much to eat. Zac took a bite of a Snickers bar, chewed it up, and spat it into my mouth.


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Zac had three children but no babies. He was 29 and I was 37. He said that with or without babies, he’d still choose me. I said he might change his mind. We went on a 14-mile hike and we argued about it the entire way, 7 miles up and 7 miles down. 

The night of the company Christmas party, I made a joke about how we’d probably never have kids, and he went outside crying. I caught up to him in front of a tequila-themed sports bar whose patrons were sloshing off the patio and we fought while people all around us shouted at the TVs. We were blocking the valet line, him still crying and me begging him to come back inside, while the black-jacketed valets carried on indifferentl around us, edging SUVs right up to the backs of our knees. At last we made it into our Lyft and we spoke to our bedroom ceiling until the room lightened into dawn.

* * *

The last time I spoke to my dad on the phone, he was thinking of going back to manufacturing. There are a lot of temporary jobs in Reno now, he said, and he has the experience. He loves his students and the work he does, but the administrative wrangling is wearing him out. He got his certification through a program called ARL, or Alternative Route to Licensure, and now it turns out some routes are better than others.

* * *

Today, Moana was bidding her dying grandmother farewell, on mute, while Dr. F frowned over my incisors. There was a gap between the tooth and the aligner that would necessitate new X-rays, new scans, and everything starting all over again.

My teeth ache a little now all the time, under a steady and unrelenting pressure just this side of ignorable. The aligners force a pinched, disapproving expression that ages me 10 years. Then there’s the business of taking them out for every snack, every drink, every meal, and keeping them clean. Nothing makes you feel more like an old lady than slipping your teeth out of your mouth, except perhaps leaving them to soak in blue liquid in a bowl on the bathroom counter.

With all the extra brushing and flossing I do now, I have plenty of time to inspect my teeth. Before all of my ire was directed toward that one gap, but now that it’s improving, I’ve started really looking at all the other problems with my teeth, the problems Invisalign can’t fix. My front teeth are too long and my incisors too pointy. My teeth are too yellow. When I smile my eyes scrunch up too much and my sharp nose points like an arrow directing attention toward my asymmetric chin.

Still, I’ve been smiling more often, though tentatively, and not in a way I would exactly describe as natural. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to smile as effortlessly as people who’ve had four more decades of practice. At times I doubt whether Invisalign has done anything much at all. Are they like Dumbo’s feather, simply giving me the confidence to bare the teeth I might have bared all along? I suppose that might be considered an uplifting ending, but then Dumbo’s feather didn’t cost him $3,000.

* * *

We did everything at once. There wasn’t time or space to date casually, get serious, move in, calm down, get married and then have a baby. The first years we had so much living to do: moving once and then moving again, getting a pet, burying a pet, having sex until 2 in the morning and waking at 6 to pack the lunches, the ovulation test kits and love letters and the fractious night driving, the family vacation where all three children vomited in the car. Sometimes I think it’s easier to have young children in the early days of a relationship, when the fresh intensity of your attachment can mitigate all the stress and exhaustion. When the house is asleep I put my head on his chest and he sings to me, his low voice sounding far but not distant.

‘Oh yes,’ Dr. F interrupted cheerfully, ‘you can fix absolutely anything when you’re young.’

Strangers constantly stop us on the street to tell us we look so happy, excuse me, but they’ve just never seen such a happy couple before. 

The night we moved in together, into a three-bedroom rental house in Burbank, I cried because I wished I could have done all of it with him the first time. I sat on a hard-backed chair in the living room because we didn’t have a sofa yet. Zac moved in with only his books, his computer, and clothes. I had taken only a fraction of my things with me in the divorce, but still I had so much stuff: potted plants and a slow cooker, a sugar bowl from my old wedding registry, a box labeled “kids’ artwork,” plastic tubs of Christmas ornaments, and a 3-foot-tall wooden dollhouse.

That night Zac wandered into the empty living room in the middle of brushing his teeth. Through foam, he said, “I missed you.”

* * *

We got married at 3 in the afternoon on a warm day in June, 89 degrees and unusually humid for Los Angeles. I had ordered a dress for the occasion, pale blue tumbled with sprays of little red roses, but by the time it arrived I’d already grown too big to wear it, so about an hour before the ceremony I pulled on an old jersey dress with gray and white stripes that stretched over my pregnant belly like a dizzying optical illusion. My sister and her boyfriend flew down from Reno to be our witnesses.

Zac wanted a proper wedding, but I wasn’t sure. “I already had a wedding.”

“But I didn’t.”

We drove to the Los Angeles County Registrar’s office in Van Nuys. The office looked like a DMV, with linoleum floors and snaking lines of people clutching forms in their sweaty hands. The walls were painted avocado and lemon meringue, the colors of appetizers in a 1950s cookbook. A sign read “Birth, Marriage, Death” with an arrow pointing down the hall.

The couple in line ahead of us brought along a group of relatives, all dressed up and holding armloads of flowers. They went into the chapel for about 15 minutes and emerged looking excited. 

When it was our turn, we went in to find the justice of the peace, a short, energetic woman with dark brown curls wearing thick glasses and a black robe. She stood in front of a heart-shaped metal arch swathed in pale green tulle and fake flowers; on the wall behind her, little puff balls of orange, white, and yellow tulle hung from what appeared to be a giant coat hanger. The only other furniture in the room was a small table, covered in a white tablecloth and decorated with a vase of plastic flowers, and an empty office trash can. 

The wedding chapel was in a side room with its own door, but the partition wall stopped about two feet from the ceiling, so we could still hear the grumbles of the people on the other side, requesting certified copies of their birth certificate.

The justice of the peace asked if we had prepared any vows. We answered no and she politely carried on, as though she’d accidentally raised a sensitive topic and was now trying to tactfully change the subject. She asked if we had any rings to exchange. We said no again, and she made a comment about how we didn’t need rings — our real gift was the baby-to-be.

She asked us to hold hands and gaze into each other’s eyes, something we both found acutely embarrassing. She declared us man and wife. My sister took pictures and then we all went to Disneyland.

* * *

Our baby is named Margaret Héloïse. She was born on September 21 when I was 39 years old. September 21 is the start of a new season, but it’s a late season, too.

* * *

If you want to really surprise someone, try proposing to them a month after you’ve gotten married. We went out to dinner and Zac gave me his great-grandmother’s ring.

This summer we will have our second wedding. In the course of one year I will have gotten married, gotten engaged, had a baby, turned 40, and then gotten married again. Beatrice, 10 years old, has named herself a “junior bridesmaid,” a concept she read about in a bridal magazine. Five-year-old William will be the ring bearer, and we’ve dubbed Margaret the Baby of Honor. Arthur, 8, wants to pull her down the aisle in a wagon covered in flowers. 

My teeth were supposed to be done last July, but I’m still waiting. Forty-year-old teeth are stubborn. Each time I go in I tell Dr. F they’re good enough, but Dr. F is a perfectionist. The space between my two front teeth, the one that started all this, looks OK to me, but my crowded bottom teeth resist rearrangement. 

I’ve started printing out photos of me and Zac together, smiling. They’re mostly selfies, mostly not very good ones. Neither of us likes to have our picture taken, and it shows. But here’s one of us smiling in front of redwood trees, one at the beach. Some from his old apartment, one trick or treating with the kids. There’s one of us smiling at the Los Angeles County Registrar’s office, one at Disneyland, and a picture of me with Margaret, a few minutes old, wet against my chest — and I’m grinning wildly, artlessly, showing all my teeth.

* * *

Summer Block has written short fiction, poetry, and essays for The Awl, Catapult, The Toast, The Rumpus, and Electric Lit. She is writing a book about Halloween.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands