Search Results for: Medium

Leaning In with Alex P. Keaton

Illustration by Zach Meyer

Nicole Cyrus | Longreads | December 2019 | 10 minutes (2,713 words)

 

In the ’80s, I was a scrappy black teenage girl determined to solve for x in this equation:

buppie = a young upwardly mobile black professional
buppie + ambition = a black professional hungry for opportunity
buppie + ambition + x = a black female CEO of a Fortune 500 company

A week after I turned 16, I called my mother into the kitchen for a meeting. I was running a personal campaign to become an international business tycoon from my family’s ranch home near Washington, D.C. My mother, a registered nurse, had volunteered to be my assistant. She sat with her hands folded on the wooden table, awaiting instructions.
Read more…

Naked City

Illustration by Homestead Studio, based off Oksana Latysheva & Vivali / Getty

Leslie Kendall Dye | Longreads | December, 2019 | 16 minutes (4,411 words)

“No man is an island.”

John Donne

There is a theory that the mind is a collection of symbiotic identities, some conscious, some unconscious, that form an uneasy alliance for the sake of survival. Truthfully, that’s my theory, although I think I read something similar once. I am now working on a new theory, that New York City is similarly a collective, that what looks like a group of entirely separate individuals who happen to walk past one another all day long is actually one great organism.

I find this idea reassuring, because life here can make you feel not just unimpressive, not just peripheral, but entirely negligible. I have lived in New York for more than 22 years, which I am sorry to say is more than half my life. In that time, I have never stopped asking the question: Do I belong here? Am I woven into the tapestry, or am I a dangling thread? How does everyone seem to know one another, and where is everybody going? Why is the line at Sarabeth’s so long? Why are the libraries closed on Sundays? Was there a memo about wearing Hunter rain boots? Why are dogs not allowed in my building? Every day, I am confronted by mysteries. But if New York City is actually dependent on every last person within its boundaries, deriving not just energy but also narrative structure from all who move through it, then maybe I’m not negligible after all.

I have never stopped asking the question: Do I belong here? Am I woven into the tapestry, or am I a dangling thread?

I have tried to explain to others the feeling I get on a typical day in the city — that we are all characters in some sort of Yiddish short story, but it’s unclear who are the heroes and who are the villains, whether it is a comedy or a tragedy, who are the stars, and who are merely the background. You see and hear so many things in a day. So I’ll start from the beginning — the beginning of yesterday, that is, and go through one whole day, and hope that you’ll come along for the ride.

***

Yesterday began like many others. I was in the check-out line at Zabar’s, and I overheard an exchange that intrigued me. A middle-aged woman in nondescript, baggy clothes, her hair a combination of layered bohemian chic and I-don’t-care gray — a West Side classic — was talking to another woman, who was younger.

“We’ll go downtown to my place, we’ll have a cup of coffee, and we’ll talk. Later, I’ll put you in a cab. Sound good?”

I composed a silent plea. Take me too. I can’t think of any place I’d rather go than downtown to your place, for a cup of coffee. I felt strongly that this woman had curtains — big silk curtains — and her apartment had a sitting room and a poodle or two sprawled on the rug. Her place had a view of a public garden, and there was primrose in bloom, and maybe a fountain, and people smoking, and other people kissing, and a few in the midst of lovers’ spats, and rain kissed the earth, just there, in that garden. A cab! Is there anything to excite the imagination more than the hailing of a cab after someone unexpectedly asks you over for a cup of coffee? I wanted the younger woman’s problems, whatever had invited the older woman’s concern. The word “downtown” had become a cashmere shawl, one I wanted to be wrapped in immediately.


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


The checker put my groceries in the bag. I trudged home, feeling blue. Once again — not at the center of it, not where the action was, the discourse, the problems, the connection. At home, I made myself some coffee, but there were no silk curtains, no poodles, no conspiring or commiseration.

***

A short time later, I traveled south to my dance studio, Steps, which sits in a hub of Upper West Side activity. You’ve got the Beacon Theatre just across Broadway, the Ansonia just south, and next door, Fairway Market, which is a holy pilgrimage in itself. I’ll say just this: Fairway has an entire room devoted to cheese. Also: things you didn’t know you wanted, because you didn’t know they existed. Artichoke paste. Lambrusco vinegar. Garam masala. Chocolate latte balls — $1.25 a bag.

On the elevator at Steps, I witnessed an altercation. A young, paunchy man wearing earphones got on before this other woman and almost held the door for her. I say almost because he held it for a second, then let it go too soon, before she was safely inside, so the door banged into her. She didn’t need a hospital or anything, but there was no question he was in error. The elevator takes approximately three hours to get from the lobby to the third floor — where the classes are — and back. Catching the elevator is therefore a big deal, as is holding the door for that one last person who is desperate not to wait three more hours for the next ride. The woman quietly harrumphed. Message received. Wild-eyed, the paunchy man said, “I HELD THE DOOR FOR YOU.” She did not accept the falsehood. “You did NOT hold the door for me,” she replied. “You let the door SLAM on me.” Enraged, he replied, “I am not talking to you.” “It sure sounds like you are!” she shot back, and he became so angry that I prayed the elevator was almost at the third floor. I didn’t fear for her safety, but maybe a little I did. When she walked off the elevator, he cursed her. I don’t mean he used foul language, I mean he cast a hex. Sarcastically. “Hope your tendus aren’t all sickled!” he said.

You don’t want to get caught sickling your tendus.

Performing arts shade! (A tendus becomes sickled when you point your foot in the wrong direction, which is a gross dance error, the equivalent of a social gaffe while interacting with, say, the queen of England. You don’t want to get caught sickling your tendus.) All at once, I felt kinship with both the aggressor and the victim in this elevator standoff. I don’t know exactly what defines New Yorkers, but it has something to do with our ability to keep the rhythm of these altercations without missing a beat, like children playing double Dutch.

***

In the sunshine of Studio II, a motley collection of dancers was warming up for the 10 a.m. ballet class. The teacher is tall and blond and haughty — so imperious her instruction borders on camp. She speaks with a British-implied accent and adorns her daily performance with an array of hairstyles and lipsticks. Her smile is lopsided and sudden, just enough to alert us that her condescension is mostly for show. She has a fabulous accompanist and sometimes there are 100 people taking class. It’s ballet with a cabaret atmosphere, and I suspect people love this teacher because she makes them feel like party guests. The spectrum of humanity attends. At the barre, one sees principal dancers from American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet, so immaculately sculpted and graceful that they strike one as circus performers or possibly even figments of the imagination. Also at the barre: an elderly woman in a wig who carries her ballet shoes in a plastic bag from the liquor store.

We are all freaks in this room — spiritual cousins of sorts, worshipping at the same church. Here we find rapport and community, gossip and disdain. The mighty sylphs chat with the old loons, and the rest of us try to figure out where on this spectrum we fall. Everyone here is drawn to ballet as a monk is drawn to prayer, and this commonality surpasses — if only in this hour and a half — our jagged differences in achievement.

Everyone here is drawn to ballet as a monk is drawn to prayer, and this commonality surpasses — if only in this hour and a half — our jagged differences in achievement.

A tiny woman stood behind me at the barre. She smiled and said hello. She knew me from the playground I frequent with my child. How was life? How was school? What grade was my daughter in now? Good. OK. Second. Her girls were fine, she said, except for one thing. What was that? I asked. They were both enrolled at the School of American Ballet (S.A.B., as it’s known around here), and they weren’t happy. The School of American Ballet is a “feeder school” for New York City Ballet, which, for many people, is the pinnacle of the art, the highest goal, the shiniest of prestigious places. It’s also known for being a hotbed of sexism, not to mention a place keen on anorexia as a way of life. Still — New York City Ballet! My daughter takes class at another, saner place, but even at 7, she’s heard of S.A.B. It’s where the perfectly turned-out, smooth-bunned, pearl-earring-bedecked baby giraffes are going when they make a sharp turn and head into Lincoln Center. I researched when the annual audition day was — sometime in early spring. I don’t know what made me do it, except of course I do: At the center of New York City’s ineffable glory are cosmic sources of radiation — Times Square, the Chrysler Building, the grandiose arrangements of limelight hydrangeas in the main hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the School of American Ballet.

“Maybe we should go, just to see what the school looks like, Mommy,” Lydia said. “But what if you get in?” I asked. “I won’t go,” she said. “But how could you say no to S.A.B?” I asked. Then we both laughed and immediately remembered that neither of us wanted her at S.A.B. Mostly we remembered that. The other part of us remembered the tiny angels in the second act of the New York City Ballet Balanchine Nutcracker. They hold candles and wear floor-skimming wire hoop skirts, and they shuffle so rapidly across the stage that they create the illusion of floating. Lydia and I were given tickets to the dress rehearsal last year, and at the time, Lydia leaned over the balcony and said, “I want to skim the floor in a hoopskirt.” But only kids who go to S.A.B. can be angels in the New York City Ballet Nutcracker.

Lydia’s own dance school is not far from Lincoln Center. One day I saw a dancer departing the school and rounding the corner. As she passed under the Leonard Bernstein Way street sign, I caught sight of her T-shirt, which read Sing out, Louise, and I promptly fell over and died. This is a line from the Broadway show Gypsy, which has lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, who for theater folk sits at the tippy top of Mount Olympus, with Rodgers and Hammerstein and Cole Porter flanking him. What was great about the shirt was the shorthand — if you love the shirt, you and the wearer can be best friends. You can hug on the spot without formal introduction. (An exception to the no-eye-contact rule generally in play on the NYC streets.) I decided to get one of the shirts for Lydia for Christmas. (Gypsy is about the mother of all stage mothers. Whenever Lydia thinks I am getting too involved in her life, she pointedly whispers, “Sing out, Louise.” I immediately clam up. Smart kid.)

Greta is the biggest personality of the dance moms at Lydia’s school. She is tall and skinny — a gazelle in human form. She is a dancer herself, and her daughter, who takes jazz at Lydia’s school, studies ballet at — wait for it — S.A.B. From Greta, we get all the dirt: who’s dating whom and who’s fighting whom and which former artistic directors are showing up just before curtain to torment the dancers backstage (Peter Martins). She tells us inside things. For example, New York City Ballet dancers aren’t allowed to wear their stage makeup outside the theater, they have to wash it off before they go home. The makeup is copyrighted or licensed or something. It’s in their contracts. Greta makes me feel both closer to and farther from the action. She gives me the same feeling that the weekly arrival of our New Yorker magazine gives me — knowledge without inclusion; glamour, but not mine. I sometimes think The New Yorker exists exclusively to evoke this feeling.

***

In the late afternoon, I had an unpleasant errand — my yearly mammogram. I was headed downtown on the Second Avenue bus, when suddenly, it was nearly black outside; raindrops scattered on the windows like bullets. An omen. Weill Cornell Imaging is in a dreary medical tower on York Avenue. This neighborhood depresses me. If the earth were flat, and you walked to the edge of it, you’d be on York Avenue. It is just so far from anything that feels life-affirming. New York City’s heartbeat can best be felt on the West Side, pulsing through an artery that runs south through Times Square and north past Carnegie Hall, all the way up to the Metropolitan Opera House at 65th. Meanwhile, York Avenue is as far east as you can get without falling into the East River; it’s like a freezing cold finger — no blood flow.

She gives me the same feeling that the weekly arrival of our New Yorker magazine gives me — knowledge without inclusion; glamour, but not mine.

For a mammogram, you go to the ninth floor. This is Breast Land, where every staff member has been schooled in keeping people calm. When you can, please sign here, and How are you doing today? and Would you care for a chocolate or a bottle of water? You stumble along, get your locker, wipe off your deodorant, put a pink robe on, and breathe deeply along the hallway to the next waiting room, where you sit with the other naked-but-for-their-pink-robe ladies and stare out the window at the 59th Street Bridge, which from this close-up looks like a metal brontosaurus. This is the same bridge that Woody Allen lifted to iconic grandeur in the movie Manhattan, but when you look at it from Weill Cornell, amid the steam rising from the manholes on York and the sparse sidewalks around it, it just looks like an angry brontosaurus. Then the breast people call your name and your heart beats faster. A technician in pink scrubs leads you into the next little room, the one with the machines, and asks how your day is going, and rubs you down with freezing gel for an ultrasound, or covers your nipples for a mammogram.

Remember how I said New York is best described as a Yiddish short story? (Are there short stories in Yiddish? I feel that my people tend to run long.) What happened next could really happen anywhere, but somehow, it managed to be nutty in a way I ascribe to this city. You need to know a detail about me first. Two years ago I had a rib removed. It was the third rib, it was under my left breast, and it grew this tumor called a hemangioma — the same as those little strawberries you see on some newborns’ heads. The only way to make it stop growing was to take it out.

“The tumor has fractured your rib,” the thoracic surgeon told me. He prodded me in the chest with his forefinger. “Doesn’t that hurt?” He prodded again. “That has to hurt.” I hadn’t noticed. I had a 4-year-old. I was tired. The jabs, however, got my attention. “Now it hurts,” I said, ever the people pleaser. “’Course it does,” replied the surgeon.

So he took the whole rib, and in order to make my breast sit up properly, he put in a fake rib. The fancy term is “chest wall repair,” but no one outside medicine has ever heard of the “chest wall” so I call it a “fake rib.” A few months after that, I had my first mammogram. If you have not experienced a mammogram, picture a knife spreading a pat of butter across a piece of toast. But really, really hard. Or, as the tech put it, “Your breast is round and the machine is flat.” Or, just imagine a pain so intense that you find yourself clutching the sides of a cold metal machine as tears roll down your cheeks and your soul hovers above your body and everyone prays for the end. After that, I went home. A day later, my fancy “chest wall repair” broke. My fake rib detached from its fake bone anchor and descended into the void of my chest, causing an alarming bubble of air to rise up through my breast like a balloon every time I inhaled. So I had to do the thoracic surgery again. The second time, the surgeon put in Gortex, which he said he hoped would be more durable. Hoped? Back to yesterday.

If you have not experienced a mammogram, picture a knife spreading a pat of butter across a piece of toast. But really, really hard.

I reminded the technician in pink scrubs that I didn’t want my left breast scanned, on account of how the last mammogram broke my fake rib. It had been discussed already, I told her. Pre-arranged, all in my file, I told her. I was just reminding her. She was silent. So I said, “We’ll skip the left, OK? We’ll just do the right.” I stopped talking then, because she was reading my file with concern.

“We can’t screen one breast on a two-breast prescription,” she said.

“Why not?” I asked. “The right breast is one of the two breasts, right?”

“Doctors don’t like it when we change their orders,” she said. “If you want to scan the one, you have to scan the other.”

“But it was pre-arranged,” I croaked.

“She sent a two-breast prescription.”

“She didn’t mean to,” I argued.

“She must have forgotten.”

I began to sweat and wheeze. (If you have never had a rib crushed by a mammogram, you’ll have to trust me, once is enough.) She went to get her supervisor. The supervisor came in to tell me that they could not screen one breast on a two-breast prescription. We were getting nowhere. But then she said that a crushed rib was better than missing a malignant cell and so both breasts had to be scanned anyway. This made sense, and I began to imagine a cycle in which every year I put in a new rib after crushing the last one in the mammogram machine. The room started to tilt as I pondered my choice. The supervisor then said they did not wish to traumatize me, they wished only to make sure I was healthy. I think by then they realized that “healthy” was not, at this particular moment, the right word for me. I was floundering, somewhere near total incapacitation. It was now 6:30 in the evening. The office had begun to clear out. I could hear people saying “good night” and closing desk drawers. I was all that stood between the supervisor and the end of her day. I was alone with her — her and the machine — at the edge of the world, a brontosaurus roaring just beyond the window, black rain engulfing the medical tower.

“I can’t do the left breast,” I muttered, mostly to the wall. I cried. Tears ran. I wheezed again, then hiccuped, then I laughed. I told them not to worry, it was just the pink scrubs, the pasties, the fake rib, the large dinosaur, the end of the world. It was too much, you know? They nodded. They knew.

“We won’t press hard,” the supervisor said. She kept up her patter as she smoothed my pasties and squeezed my breasts into the flattening device, as though coaxing me into a straitjacket. They scanned both breasts. After, they gave me a Hershey’s kiss and a bottle of water.

***

Gusts of wind swept me up First Avenue. I joined the wet commuters on line for the 67th Street crosstown. I was full mammogram chic by now: sweaty, smelly, hair stringy and askew, rivulets of mascara pooling in the tiny lines near my eyes. I felt about as far from the ineffable radiance of the city as possible. I took out my phone to text Courtney, the mother of a little girl in Lydia’s class. She was watching Lydia, and I wanted to tell her that I was on my way back to the West Side.

“How was it?” she asked. (Courtney has had mammograms.)

“A brontosaurus tried to kill me,” I replied.

“Meet us at Santa Fe,” she wrote. “71st and Columbus.”

“‘I’ll get you a margarita,” she added. (Santa Fe has the largest, iciest frozen margaritas in existence.)

Twenty minutes later, I stood around the corner from the restaurant, waiting for Courtney and the girls. A spotlight illuminated a white satin pantsuit hanging in the window of a Columbus Avenue boutique. It was a one-piece, long-sleeved with a plunging lapel. It looked like a Star Trek uniform, but one that you’d wear to the Grammys. I stared at it for a long time, even as the storm threatened to drown me. The hem of my ancient linen pants was torn; I’d long since chewed off my lipstick. Hunger tore at me. I felt faded and chalky, as if my human color had been washed off by the rain. I wondered who was going to buy that suit. Where would she wear it? Probably, she owned Hunter rain boots and had a poodle. Maybe a greyhound. Her building definitely allowed dogs — she would never have moved there otherwise.

Courtney and the girls arrived and we walked into Santa Fe. The host led us to a booth. The girls told me about feeding the turtles in Central Park. Then there was the eating of french fries, and telling the kids to speak more quietly, and restaurant crayons — four to a set, in a tiny cardboard box. Then the married couple at the next table interrupted our conversation.

“Sorry,” the wife said. We don’t mean to keep staring, but there is a dog right outside the restaurant staring in.”

Sure enough, there was — a puppy with big black eyes and a soaking coat. He was tied to a post outside, the very definition of forlorn.

“He belongs to that woman at the bar,” the wife continued. “Poor dog!”

Courtney, who is about seven feet tall with a waterfall of honey blonde hair and a model’s face to match, stood up abruptly, and with a sort of movie star whoosh, gathered her jacket and rushed outside, the girls on her heels. They clumped around the little waif, patting and stroking and soothing. A few minutes later they returned to the table, where I’d remained, transfixed.

“I think the dog’s owner has been adequately shamed now!” Courtney said, as the restaurant gaped at the ill-fated dog. Pregnant women can’t get seats on the bus, pedestrians will knock over a person on crutches, but New Yorkers draw the line at wet dogs peering into restaurants. Sure enough, the embarrassed owner stood up from her spot at the bar, paid the bill, and went out to tend to her shriveled canine, even as she rolled her eyes at the collective presumptuousness that had forced her hand. It was like when someone scurries up or down the subway stairs on the left-hand side. This, with good reason, is not allowed in New York City. One travels up or down on the right-hand side in order to avoid head-on collisions and bodily harm. If a person — often a tourist — wanders to the left, a large crowd will force him to the right in a collective act of censure. For the greater good, of course.

Pregnant women can’t get seats on the bus, pedestrians will knock over a person on crutches, but New Yorkers draw the line at wet dogs peering into restaurants.

In the restaurant, surrounded by dog lovers and people-shamers and candlelight, the stars moved suddenly into position. Swaddled by the rhythms of an untameable city and its undomesticated regulars, the patrons of Santa Fe seemed a Hirschfeld tableau come to life. I was — for a flicker of a second — inside the city’s ineffable glow. I absorbed the warmth totally, like a cat stretching in a pool of sunlight. It was not just the food for a hungry stomach, it was not just the soundtrack of voices mixing with the flickering candlelight, it was not just the hasty alliance of animal lovers doling out opprobrium, nor the pleasurable flush of communal agreement spiked with the recognition of our tyranny and hubris. It was all of those things, yes, but it was also something more, something capturable only by some vestigial sensory organ as yet undiscovered by anatomists. Around me, the city’s plot lines merged into one great circular lane, and inside me, the five senses (and the vestigial organ) arranged themselves in symbiotic formation to produce one thing: joy. I felt mysteriously part of the city’s narrative in some way I hadn’t been a moment before. It was perfect. Then I blinked, and it was gone.

I read once that there is something called “archaic understanding” — something that children have more of than adults. We lose it gradually, but it returns in streaks of primitive insight. An understanding of things in their deepest, mythic sense. Intuition — as brief and bright as a flash of lightning.

We walked home under lamplight glowing in the mist. Some piano music tinkled out of an apartment on 71st. Perhaps it was a party somewhere nearby. The streetlights mixed with the rain like watercolors, and we pushed on, blood cells pulsing through the mighty organism. The sound of the piano retreated — into some corner, behind a curtain, up the stairs in an alley one street over.

There is a line in Peter Pan about Mrs. Darling, and it goes like this: “Her romantic mind was like the tiny boxes, one within the other, that come from the puzzling East, however many you discover, there is always one more; and her sweet, mocking mouth had one kiss on it that Wendy could never get, though there it was, perfectly conspicuous in the right hand corner.”

Like Mrs. Darling, this city is defined by something it will not relinquish. This something seems to be in plain sight just often enough to keep us charged in its pursuit. We race along the city’s streets, we chat and disperse and we hurry on again. Sometimes we stall in the midst of an eddy, looking up, just to spot it — the city’s kiss. Then it is time to retreat, to go home and heat the pan for dinner, linger over drinks, wonder what comes next — all the while secure in the knowledge that tomorrow, we’ll make another play for it — that one lovely kiss that shapes our days — because it will never be ours.

* * *

Leslie Kendall Dye is a writer and actress in New York City. Her work has appeared at The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, Vela, Electric Literature, SELF, The LA Review of Books, and others. She is at work on a memoir about mothers, daughters, drugs, and show business.

* * *

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Why I Wanted To Finish My Father’s Life’s Work

Illustration by Homestead Studio, inspired by photo supplied by the author

Karen Brown | Longreads | December 2019 | 9 minutes (2,139 words)

“Do you think you’ll pursue more significant work one day?”

That’s the kind of casual barb my father would deliver over breakfast on my visits home after I was well into my career as a radio journalist.

That may seem unsupportive, which was not typical. He was the emotional rock in my life for 50 years. He chaperoned my elementary school dances, read every article I wrote for the high school newspaper, and later, sent around news of my journalism awards to his friends and colleagues. Every year, he wrote me a birthday card extolling all the ways he admired me.

And yet. He had this dream for my career, that I would become a nationally prominent journalist who might one day topple a presidency and change the world. Instead I became a regionally-respected public radio reporter who mostly does health-related features.

He made those comments about his tempered expectations to let me know he could be both loving and honest. But to me, they felt annoying and unfair. In the end, we’d reach a mutual understanding that no one gets to do exactly what they dream of.

I’ve been thinking a lot about those conversations as I put my own writing projects on the back burner to try to finish my father’s final book.
Read more…

Running Dysmorphic

Illustration by Jonathan Bartlett

Devin Kelly | Longreads | December, 2019 | 15 minutes (3,955 words)

I’ll begin this essay the way I introduce myself to a fellow runner when meeting them for the first time: By telling you that I’ve run two 4:48 miles back-to-back. That I’ve run five miles in 26 minutes, 10 miles in 55. That I’ve qualified for the Boston Marathon five times and ran my fastest marathon — 2:41 — into a headwind there in 2015. I’ll begin the essay this way because I don’t love myself, because when I see another runner seeing me I assume they see me the way I see me: all baby fat and bone stock.

I won’t introduce myself by telling you that, on days I don’t run, I have to do 200 sit-ups right before dinner if I want to allow myself to eat. That, in the times I’ve had company over or have eaten at someone’s house, I’ve done those sit-ups in other people’s bathrooms. Or that I’ve been known by roommates to, minutes before dinner, rush out the door and run for 15 minutes if I haven’t run at all that day. Or that in college, I bought a scale and a journal and weighed myself three times a day, documenting my weight to the decimal point each time. For a long time I’ve told people that this was about running, that it was about feeling the breeze, beautiful and sun-scorched, for just a little while. But really it was about eating. And permission. And wanting a different body to do all that running in.

I come from a family of runners. My uncle ran a four-minute mile relay split at the University of Missouri. My father ran three miles in 15 minutes as an AAU trackster in Western New York. My brother runs for a track club in Washington, D.C., and has plans to break 70 minutes for a half marathon. He will. Growing up, I ate the same things as my brother but never grew the extra inches. In fourth grade, my nickname was “Marshmallow,” my body Irish white and puffy at the edges. In fifth grade, that same body, some choice lost teeth, and an unfortunate haircut made my nickname “Gopher.” The next year, my brother ran the unofficial middle school record in the gym mile. I smiled through the nicknames and picked up running because I wanted to be like him.

It’s odd to have one of your coping mechanisms become the thing you abuse to seek approval. What I mean by coping mechanism is that I began running because I wanted to, and I kept running because it saved my life. In fifth grade my mother — an alcoholic, a bulimic, an addict, the most beautiful person I know — left my father and my brother and me. Those years, I ran often with a Walkman cradled in my palm so it wouldn’t skip on my downstep, listening to CDs I burned with odd, jangling, melancholic playlists ranging from Jack’s Mannequin to Joni Mitchell. I kept running because it felt good to run away from home and then come back on my own, with no one chasing me, all of it up to my own two feet, my own volition. I kept running, too, because I got less chubby and started to get fast. I kept running through middle school and high school because even after therapy sessions and basement meetings with children of alcoholics, the only time I felt in control of my own body and mind was out on the road, where there was no one to tell me to speed up or slow down other than myself.


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


What they don’t tell you about competitive running, though, is that you are often reduced to the most specific of numbers. In a 100-meter dash, a difference of .1 seconds between two sprinters might as well be a mile. Watch any final kick of a mile race, and you’ll often see five or six runners separated by half a second at the finish line, spread all over the track. And consider how being one single second slower than someone else on each lap of a 5K track race means that you’ll be close to a hundred meters behind them at the finish, which might be the difference between being a professional runner and a nobody for the rest of your life. No matter how good you are compared to everyone else you’re racing, when you’re a competitive runner, you have no choice but to measure yourself by seconds ticking away on a stopwatch.

By the time I left high school, I was a decent enough runner to walk on to the track and cross country teams at Fordham University, where I reveled in comparative mediocrity for four years, never making much of a dent in the outcome of any race or meet. But I still loved what it felt like to race. To really be out there, in that liminal space between the moment a stride is taken and the moment just before it lands, the crunch of cinder under my feet and the blood hot in my cheeks. I wanted to be as good as I could possibly be, to reach my fullest potential. I did not want to be an embarrassment. But I began to feel like one. It started with pictures, when I saw the way my thighs loomed larger than the bare essential thighs of other racers. Why weren’t veins cascading down my legs like a map of rivers? I started to be afraid to take my shirt off on long runs when everyone else did. I began wrapping the towel further up on my torso, so no one would see the un-flatness of my lower belly.

For a long time I’ve told people that this was about running, that it was about feeling the breeze, beautiful and sun-scorched, for just a little while. But really it was about eating. And permission. And wanting a different body to do all that running in.

Years before, in high school, my coach had told me I could stand to lose a few pounds. Then, in college, one of my teammates said, “You’re not fat, you’re just …” before trailing off. I began to understand a few things. I looked in the mirror and saw someone society might’ve deemed as lean or athletic, but someone who was too big, too thick around the bones to be taken seriously as a competitive college runner. I understood, too, that this was an issue the women on my team, and women all around the county, faced daily. I knew female runners who were anorexic, bulimic, the subject of harassment from runners and coaches. I understood all this but also didn’t know what to do with it. I was never satisfied in a terrible way. Nights of impromptu diets, nights of less food, nights spent running secret miles around the block. Nights like this, willed against my body, willed for my body, until I looked in the mirror and saw six hard lumps protruding out of my abdomen, then immediately wished that they were more pronounced, that a creek bed ran between them. I bought a scale and began to measure myself daily, but even then I did not know what to do with this information, with all these numbers. Where was the lowest point I could reach? What was ideal? When would it stop? I didn’t know where to put it. I wanted to put it down, but I couldn’t. I still really can’t.

Those years, I learned to introduce myself among runners before anyone else did, so that they would not have to make any sort of judgement audible. “I’m the fat one,” I’d say. Or I’d grab a fist of lower belly and say, “I gotta lose this! I know it!” I didn’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable with the unsaid. I wanted them all to know that I knew whatever I assumed they were thinking. I wanted everyone comfortable with my knowledge of my inadequacy. And that’s not to say that my teammates were even remotely mean to me. Some of them are still my best friends. I love so many of them dearly. But at a high enough level, even if you’re not very good, you learn to unthink your love for yourself. It’s the bane of being a human. If you’re smart enough to observe the world around you, to overhear one stranger’s snide comment to another, to see the person on the train deleting photos of themself from their phone, you can make the mistake of assuming another person’s judgment even if it’s not really there. The world is cruel that way. It doesn’t promise anything but delivers everything instead.

The idea of believing in your own negative self-image as a route to self-betterment is fundamental to the American experience. I think of faith and the way the church and the state have never really been truly separate in this country. Humble yourself before the Lord, the scripture says. Without you, I am nothing, I once prayed. In America, that you can take many forms. Wealth, power, style, a new body. It is part of some collective understanding here that there is always something more to be other than ourselves. It is told and untold. It eats away at the image in the mirror. I look so hard some days to see someone other than me. Because I want to. Because I need to.

What they don’t tell you about competitive running, though, is that you are often reduced to the most specific of numbers.

But what is the end goal of self-improvement? My answer now is different than it ever was. Years ago, I would have rattled off a series of numbers. Finishing times. I would have told you dreams and ideas. Jobs. Now, my answer varies. Some days, it’s simply I don’t know. Some days, the hardest thing to do is to forgive myself for being myself. America makes this hard. America, where you manifest destiny. America, where you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. America, where you suck it up. This America of no pain, no gain. This America of contradiction, this America of dissonance. This America where our mythological origin story begins with work ethic and ends with a shame we lodge deep inside our collective heart and never acknowledge.

After college, I went to graduate school to become a poet and fiction writer, which was not something I explored a lot in college, where I never took a single creative writing class. I leaned into the idea of this new identity pretty hard, while still holding onto my identity as a serious runner. What that looked like was objectively weird. I took up smoking and drank pretty heavily. I stayed up late with my friends after class and sat in backyards and ripped through packs of cigarettes and six packs of beer and stumbled to the last train back to the city in those first hours of morning. Then I’d wake up, make coffee, and run. I was training for my first marathon and putting in 70, 80 miles a week of running. I’d do workouts on the treadmill between classes, then light up a cigarette the moment I left the gym. I wanted to be both reckless and fit. I wanted to say fuck you to a world that said I had to change things about my body and myself in order to be better. I did not want to fit into a prescribed mold. I relished when people would ask the question you smoke … and run?

This stroked an ego that had never been stroked before. In college, even running at a highly competitive level, my mediocrity was front and center. I would line up to race a 5K on the track knowing that I would not win. And then I’d finish in the middle or the back, walk off the track, and notice all the things that were different about the winners than me. They were always taller, skinnier. They walked lightly along the surface of the earth like angels. And I’d pinch my own thighs, find the fat in me, and want to slice it off with a knife.

But I still loved what it felt like to race. To really be out there, in that liminal space between the moment a stride is taken and the moment just before it lands, the crunch of cinder under my feet and the blood hot in my cheeks.

But with this new identity, I could be a hard-living, hard-running rebel. I could deny my past and honor it too. If I didn’t look like a runner, I could look like a writer. In fiction workshops, I learned that the reader delights when the distance between the expected outcome of a story and the actual outcome of the story is the greatest, or when the distance between the expected tone of the content of the story and the actual tone of the content of the story is at its highest. Think of Barthelme’s “The School,” that wacky story of hyperbolic events spinning out of control told in the flattest tone possible. As a person, I wanted to inhabit that distance of expectation versus reality. I wanted to be a walking fucking delight.

The world often asks too much of us, and then we ruin ourselves to be approved by the world. And I think the most sinister aspect of this is that the world’s asking doesn’t often look like asking. In college and after, nearly every time I heard a voice inside my head telling me to lose weight, I couldn’t actually find the voice, or the mouth it came from. The source of that voice was removed, like an elaborate form of money laundering. The voice was there in the way people fawned over the veins bulging out of a distance runner’s calves. It was there when I overheard another runner say, “Damn, man, you look fit” to someone whose ribs were rippling out of his skin. It was there in comment sections and internet forums, as people picked apart even the bodies of professional runners.

And the same could be said about my new identity as a writer. No one ever told me I needed to smoke, to drink myself toward a twilit stumble every other weeknight. But it was there in the packaging, wasn’t it? It was there when I fell in love with my favorite poet, Larry Levis, his eyes catching mine from the book’s back page through a haze of black-and-white smoke. Or watching an interview with Baldwin, seeing him deliver something searing before pausing to smoke, knowing he had the audience. Or the great stories of the great drunks, or the great stories we thought we told while greatly drunk.

It’s about identity, isn’t it? All of it. It’s about the fact that this life is not comfortable if you’re aware of your own your-ownness. It’s about the comfort of ritual, and sometimes the comfort of demands, about what it feels like to see someone else’s structure then to mold yourself to fit into it. It’s about not wanting to be judged. I wanted to set myself apart but also be a part. I wanted to say I’m one of you to as many people as I could because I was scared of being myself.

I ran my fastest marathon during those grad school years, when I was drinking and smoking more than I ever had or would in my life. I don’t know how, or why. I wouldn’t recommend it. I was also losing a bit of myself, every day, to ideas of who I should be and my desire to both inhabit those ideas and deviate from them as much as possible. I was a tourist in my own life.

Today I am six years removed from my last race as a collegiate athlete and probably 20 pounds heavier than I was then. Maybe 30, I don’t know. I don’t let myself buy a scale. I still look at myself in the mirror every time I take a shower. I turn and turn and see my body in the light. I push the belly around, pull it down, try to find the body I used to have. I am trying to learn how to be proud. I don’t really know how. No one ever taught me. This is part of being a man in America. My girlfriend, coming back from a run of her own, will often mention how she passed a man while running who then, upon realizing he had just been passed by a woman, sprinted past her. This happens to her at least once a week. It’s sad to live in a world where vulnerability is still widely seen as weakness, where the things men are taught to be proud of are often the things pushed outward and not turned inward.

The violence of shaming someone is so often a result of distance between what you see in front of you and how you feel inside. I know this because I shamed and still shame myself. I am concerned with the violence of men. I am a victim of my own masculinity, which is as dark and deep as the surface of a lake stretching out in the middle of the night. The shame of obesity, the shame of addiction. The shame that sounds like pull yourself together, or make better choices, or I did it, why can’t you. Shame neglects the work of understanding. Shame is waking up in the morning to see the lake in daylight and saying it looks too far to cross. The potential for understanding is the rowboat moored along the shore. In America, especially, there is a long line of men sitting on the beach, taking photos of the lake they’ve yet to cross. I am with them, too, waking up each morning to get in the rowboat and begin anew the long, relentless journey of learning to love myself. Some days I don’t even try. Now, more than 15 years after my mother left my father and brother and me while struggling with addiction, I want to hold her and say I don’t get it, but I do. How hard it must have been, how hard.

I still turn to running to find solace, because it’s the only place that offers it for me. Frustrated, tired, stressed — the first thing I think to do is lace up my shoes and go for a run. Out there, years of practice have allowed me, no matter how I look, to maintain some semblance of control over my life. I can speed up and slow down. I can have an easy day or a hard day. I can push my own threshold of pain, dial back, and push it again. I imagine this kind of feeling is not limited to running, and certainly not limited to the physical. I think of dancers, those who meditate. That sense of carving a world within the world that you know just a little bit better.

The shame of obesity, the shame of addiction. The shame that sounds like ‘pull yourself together,’ or ‘make better choices,’ or ‘I did it, why can’t you.’ Shame neglects the work of understanding

Two years ago, my friend Matt convinced another friend, Nick, and me to sign up for a 50-mile race. It was uncharted territory for the two of us. We had run marathons together, but 50 miles seemed daunting, too great a task. I’ve written about that day before, how the unimaginable distance leveled expectation. It was the opposite of the Barthelme story. Because it was so outlandish, the only way to approach it was in the most ordinary way possible: step-by-step.

Since that day, I’ve run multiple ultramarathons, as well as two 24-hour races. They are the only places where I feel at home in my body, where judgment feels unnecessary because of the absurdity of the task. There is a sense with ultramarathons that the further out you go, the less you carry with you to be measured by. Yeah, there are people racing these races, but if you go to any ultra-long distance race, you will find that the majority of people don’t care about the veins bulging out of your calves or whatever rippled leanness you present to them, whatever beautiful and rounded edges. Mostly because everyone is banded by a sublime weirdness. If you run long and far enough, you’ll find something good in yourself and see something good in someone else. The thing is, this isn’t even that strange of a concept, because life is like that, too. All these people. All different. All on the start line of today’s morning wearing different things and being different heights and sizes. It’s not really a cliché so much as a fact. It’s difficult enough, life is. Who cares what you look like doing it?

The word endurance means, quite simply, to suffer without breaking, to continue on. It boils down to the Latin word durus, which means hard. To be without pliancy. Which is interesting because of the way so much of endurance, to me, is to bend without breaking. I think of James Wright’s collection of poetry The Branch Will Not Break and how the title is referenced at the end of his poem “Two Hangovers,” as the speaker gazes at a blue jay alighting on a branch:

“I laugh, as I see him abandon himself

To entire delight, for he knows well as I do

That the branch will not break.”

There are a million branches we each stand on over the course of a given day. A lot of us are standing on branches held out by people we will never meet, people with power behind certain doors, people who want us to buy their shit. I think those branches break. I think those branches break often. And I think the same people who make those branches make other branches to catch us when we fall. There are other branches though. The start line of an ultramarathon is a kind of branch. It’s sturdy, too. Not because the people standing on it are light, or especially fit, or anything other than human. It’s because they are human, and they recognize their own absurdity, and they revel in it, and they give themselves permission to find joy.

The Greeks had their own word for endurance, hypomone, which appears frequently in the Bible and is often translated as endurance or steadfastness, but literally means to bear up under. I find this more agreeable. It is the bearing that remains a constant for each of us, but it is also the bearing that takes on different forms. Bearing can look like bending. One who bears a load on their back must stoop to tie their shoe. Bearing assumes a constancy that is not in the rock-hard, unbending quality of the spine, but a constancy, simply, of the bearing itself. We bear and bear and bear.

To recognize each person’s individual capacities for endurance is, I think, one way in which we can create a world that relies more on generosity than judgment. In what ways can we recognize the race we are each running, on our own separate tracks that have no specific shapes, where there is no such thing as time, no such thing as an Olympic record? It is the exactness of time that destroys us. It is the way time has been commodified. It is the how-much-can-you-fit-in. It is the way, when you begin talking about how much you can do or how much you can consume, you begin to think of how to alter yourself so that you can do and consume more.

What I mean to say is: My better is not your better. I want to say it to myself in the mirror, to the face that looks back at me and says you’re not fat … you’re just … I’m working on it. So much of life is about what you give yourself permission to do or don’t do, and how that act of self-permission leads to joy. This requires the discernment to know what joy is, or how it feels, and in what ways it is true. Both of these acts — permission and discernment — take a lifetime to learn. And the choice to learn requires its own lifetime. It goes on, this work. It endures.

***

Devin Kelly is the author of In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen, (published by Civil Coping Mechanisms) and the co-host of the Dead Rabbits Reading Series. He is the winner of a Best of the Net Prize, and his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Guardian, LitHub, Catapult, DIAGRAM, Redivider, and more. He lives and teaches high school in New York City.

***

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Checking in on the Masculinity Crisis

Richard T Nowitz / Getty

Kelli María Korducki | Longreads | December 2019 | 14 minutes (3,786 words)

 

Not long ago, I noticed a woman reading Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life at my Manhattan yoga studio as we both waited for our Ashtanga class to begin. The sight took me aback. Despite the 2018 book’s many weeks as a nonfiction bestseller, I’d somehow never considered that the scope of Peterson’s audience might extend beyond sulky white men who like to outsource their thinking. That it might include women with the disposable income and leisure time to spend their Saturday afternoons doing sun salutations, whose lives probably look a lot like mine.

Peterson, a once-unassuming psychology professor at my Canadian alma mater (I’d never heard of him during the years we were both there), has emerged in the last few years as a puzzling figurehead among men’s rights aficionados and self-help enthusiasts alike. Wielding a trademark pastiche of literary references and cherry-picked sociological data points, his writing and, to a greater extent, public lectures broadcast via YouTube deliver what is, for many in this age of ‘toxic masculinity’ and #MeToo, a reassuring story: that men are natural rulers, white privilege is a farce, and if millennial men would just make their beds and assume their kingdoms, we’d all be better off.

Peterson speaks to a constellation of loosely connected concerns that have, in the last several years, dominated popular discourse on where boys and men fit into a society in which gender norms play less and less of a role in determining how people fit together. Conversations about rape culture and damaging gender constructs take place alongside global reports of female students outperforming their male classmates. We hear of a workforce that, at least in theory, rewards the “soft skills” women are purportedly socialized to possess. Meanwhile names like “Dylann Roof” and “Elliot Rodger” have become shorthand for an epidemic of male isolation and rage. A New York Times story that followed shortly after the deadly February 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, included the observation that “about the only thing” nearly all U.S. mass shooters have in common “is that they are men.” Read more…

In Praise of Del Amitri’s Album Waking Hours

Photo by Ian Dickson/Redferns

Alex Green | The 33 1/3 B-Sides | Bloomsbury Academic | September 2019 | 10 minutes (2,044 words)

 

At Passover dinner in April 1990, our Seder came to the pivotal symbolic moment where we poured a cup of wine and opened the door for the Prophet Elijah. As if on cue, in walked a guy wearing ripped jeans and a black mask, holding a shotgun. It wasn’t exactly how I’d pictured him. I’d always thought skinny, long hair, a beard, maybe a robe…

“Sorry to barge in like this,” the guy said, “but we’re going to be taking some shit.” Then he whistled out the door and in walked an identical masked intruder with an equally menacing shotgun. The two of them tied my family up and then proceeded to ransack the house right in front of us, pulling out drawers, throwing around dishes, and kicking over plants as they searched for anything of value.

Read more…

A Beautiful, Rugged Place: Erosion of the Body

Photo by Jerry Zhang, Book Cover from Sarah Crichton Books

Terry Tempest Williams | Erosion | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | October 2019 | 39 minutes (7,820 words)

 

“We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves

 

We had just celebrated my father’s eighty-fifth birthday. Louis Gakumba and I were driving back up to Jackson Hole. My husband Brooke texted me, “I love you. Pull over to the side of the road. Call me.” I knew it was Dan. I had been thinking of him as I was mesmerized by the immense cumulus clouds building in the west.

“Is Dan dead?”

“Yes.”

Read more…

The Backcountry Prescription Experiment

Illustration by Natalie Nelson

Mathina Calliope | Longreads | December 2019 | 13 minutes (3,134 words)

In 2014 my doctor took me off the antidepressant I had credited with making life okay for the previous 16 years; at 41 I was trying to have a baby with my boyfriend, Inti. I didn’t get pregnant, but this story isn’t about my failure to become a mother. Instead it’s about how a break from my meds led, ultimately and circuitously, to another kind of birth; to a different life for myself.

My doctor’s orders seemed rash. Going off antidepressants is fraught, especially since so many people who want to stop taking them have been on them for so long. New guidelines are emerging that acknowledge this danger; a 2019 study in The Lancet Psychiatry recommended patients taper “over a period of months and down to amounts much lower than minimum therapeutic doses.” But my doctor was nonchalant. “You have something to be happy about now,” he quipped. “You’re trying to have a baby.” Skeptical, but with a tendency to assent to authority figures, I followed his command to stop cold turkey.

Wellbutrin (bupropion) had helped me leave a stifling marriage (though this story is also not about that). It let me dance salsa two to four nights a week through all my 30s. It gave me the energy to earn an MFA. It fueled ten-mile races, half marathons, and a marathon. It supported me throwing myself a 40th birthday party, my favorite night of my life. And the drug helped me have the clarity to see sweet, steady, easy-going Inti — my dear friend of 11 years — as more.

If the drugs didn’t fundamentally change my depression, did they, instead, by altering hormone levels, merely mask what might be a treatable source of discontent?

In addition to trying for parenthood, I had recently changed almost everything else about my life. In 2013 I had asked Inti to be my boyfriend and move in. To save money toward a house, in summer 2014, shortly after I quit meds, we put my place on Airbnb and went to live with his mother and brother. That fall I achieved a promotion at work, but the role presented unexpected challenges — not least the fact that the job itself, the career even, was not fulfilling. For the first time in more than a decade, anxiety appeared. The usual infelicities of intergenerational living — different standards of kitchen cleanliness, for example — set me on an edge that felt unwarranted. Fortunately my usual yoga, running, and dancing did a lot of the heavy lifting Wellbutrin used to do. Things were rocky, but they weren’t bleak.

A year after going off the drug, I was not quite depressed, but also not quite the same person I had been on the meds. It had become clear pregnancy wouldn’t happen without heroic measures we were disinclined to take. I grew restless and cast about for something meaningful, something, perhaps, to fill the hole I expected a baby would have filled.

Inti and I moved that January 2015 into a posher-than-necessary apartment of our own, and, with no fetus to protect, I started drinking wine socially and coffee daily again. Circumstances evened out and anxiety dissolved. Depression remained at bay, too, so there seemed no need to restart Wellbutrin. Still, something was off.

Although millions of people take antidepressants and are helped — saved, even — by them, psychoactive substances were not, in fact, first used to treat mental illness but to alter one’s state of mind, going at least as far back prehistory (e.g., chewing coca leaves). It was only later and “serendipitously,” as author and MD Marcia Angell writes in a 2011 New York Review of Books article, that scientists realized such drugs altered brain chemistry. They then hypothesized that since, for example, Thorazine, which helped patients who had schizophrenia, lowered dopamine levels, maybe a surplus of dopamine caused the condition. Similarly, since antidepressants increased serotonin and helped patients with depression, perhaps a serotonin shortage caused depression. “Thus, instead of developing a drug to treat an abnormality,” she writes, “an abnormality was postulated to fit a drug.”

Psychologist Irving Kirsch writes in his 2011 book The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth that double-blind, placebo-controlled studies of antidepressants show the drugs to be infinitesimally more effective than placebos. In other words, although many people attest to the medicines’ good, they may in fact be responding only to the placebo effect. Jerome Groopman, an M.D., notes more recently in the New Yorker that clinical trials have “stirred up intense controversy about whether antidepressants greatly outperform the placebo effect. And, while SSRIs [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors] do boost serotonin, it doesn’t appear that people with depression have low serotonin levels.” (Bupropion is not an SSRI; rather, it inhibits the reuptake of norepinephrine and dopamine.)

And if so, I wondered, who cares? The placebo effect is real. But if the drugs didn’t fundamentally change my depression, did they, instead, by altering hormone levels, merely mask what might be a treatable source of discontent? What if my problem was never my brain chemistry to begin with? What if it was my life?

One day shortly after moving into the nice apartment, I ditched work for a day hike on the Appalachian Trail, where I met a couple of backpackers who were walking the whole thing, 2,189 miles from Georgia to Maine. I admired their audacity, and the man told me, “It’s never too late.” I had never backpacked, so I almost laughed out loud. But the idea took hold.

Day hiking had always induced unequaled tranquility, in short supply in the prior year. Surely full-time forest living would do more of the same. I had read and enjoyed Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild, and Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. Theoretically I was a fan of nature. All reasonableness to the contrary, I decided to try it: A thru-hike. I would quit my job, put my furniture in my parents’ basement, break the lease on our apartment (Inti would wait for me in the house he owned with his mother), and spend from mid-April 2016 until whenever I finished, sometime in October, living in and walking through the woods. It was preposterous.
Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

NEW YORK, NY - JULY 15: Protestors left Amazon boxes on the ground in front of an Amazon store on 34th St. on July 15, 2019 in New York City. The protest, raising awareness of Amazon facilitating ICE surveillance efforts, coincides with Amazon's Prime Day, when Amazon offers discounts to Prime members. (Photo by Kevin Hagen/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Will Evans, Tomi Obaro, Rachel Morris, Maya Kosoff, and Michelle Delgado.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Why Mr. Bauer Didn’t Like Me

Illustration by Alice Yu Deng

Blaise Allysen Kearsley | Longreads | November 2019 | 8 minutes (2,056 words)

I always wanted to be liked by everyone’s parents. So with my No. 2 pencil, I wrote a note that said:

Does your father like me?

I passed it to my friend as I walked by her desk — I’ll call her Margaret Bauer. In fourth grade we sat in small groups, clusters of three desks pushed together in the shape of a T. Margaret sat one cluster away from me. I could see her from my desk, with her bushy, light brown, shoulder-length hair in two ribbon-braided barrettes framing her pale pink cheeks, and I waited anxiously for her to write back. When she walked by and handed the note back to me, it read:

I don’t think my father likes you, but my mother does.

That Margaret said her mother liked me was a consolation, but not much. Mrs. Bauer was nice to me but she always seemed a little less friendly when her husband was around.
Read more…