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Unleashed in Paris

Illustrator Kate Gavino walks a group of dogs in Paris and speaks in French when giving commands.
Illustration by Kate Gavino

Kate Gavino | Longreads | April 2019 | 7 minutes (1,663 words)

A few years ago I had a big, fluffy chow chow-German shepherd mix named Colleen. Neither of us spoke much. She was old -- 11 or 12 -- and was so docile and well-behaved that I never had to order her around with too many commands. We lived in a companionable silence. This suited me, since words have always been best expressed through writing rather than speaking.

 Last year I moved to France when my husband got a job in Paris. The first few weeks were jarring.

You know that feeling when you say a word out loud for the first time, having only ever seen it before in a book? The moment you learn how badly you mispronounce it, the shame hits you sharp and quick, like a mosquito bite. That’s what it’s been like to learn French in Paris. Each time I try out a new word, I gird myself for the new and innovative ways I will mangle the delicate language.

While living in Paris, I started to write and draw as a full-time freelancer. I spent a lot of time working at home or at the library. I missed having a canine companion, but I knew our tiny 30-square-meter apartment wasn’t the best home for one.

After a few weeks, I enrolled in beginner French classes. My first few months of learning the language showed little improvement. I angered French speakers with my incompetence.

I wondered if some of it had to do with them seeing my Asian face and assuming I was a tourist, not here long enough to warrant the extra time spent listening to me. Then when they heard my American accent, it threw them off more. Many people didn’t know what to make of me. This ambiguity was frustrating. A thoughtful traveler makes an effort to learn a country’s customs and rules of etiquette. But when your face or skin color immediately give you away as different, you find yourself bending over backward to be polite and, more often than not, taking up as little space as possible.

A common cliché passed around in French classes and cultural integration workshops is the Peach/Coconut Dichotomy. Americans, it claims, are like peaches: tender and pleasing on the onset, but with a hard center that’s impossible for outsiders to crack. Meanwhile, the French are like coconuts: a hard, seemingly impenetrable exterior that protects a soft, sweet interior. I hoped this overly simple metaphor extended into the French language. Maybe after a couple of years of hammering away at the coconut’s exterior, I’d finally get to enjoy its meat. (Ew.)

 I’ve always had a fear of sounding stupid, no matter the language. Even in English, I’ve felt the words that come out of my mouth rarely match up with what I truly mean. Sometimes the barrier is my own anxiety or shyness, and other times, it’s just the speed of my own thoughts. Figuring out exactly what to say and then translating it into French seemed impossible.

I came across many people who had moved to Paris because, like me, their partner worked or lived here. Usually that partner was French. A Colombian woman told me she was still a beginner at the French language, but when she argued with her French boyfriend, she suddenly became fluent, her rage conjugating verbs and pulling insults from the air. I longed for a similar magic shortcut. I eventually found one. Sort of.

One day, desperate to leave the freelance dungeon of my apartment, I offered to walk a fellow expat’s dog.

We walked to the Tuileries, the sprawling park that was once a residence to monarchs and now a paradise for dogs and screaming children. The first time I called for Lola in French, she did so obediently. I was quietly stunned. I felt a weird sense of accomplishment when she had understood my French.

Even stranger, the other dog walkers at the park spoke to me. Or rather, they spoke to Lola, and I had to answer for her.

We walked back to her owner’s apartment, traipsing along the Seine, having the kind of postcard-worthy moment that so often happens in Paris. For once, I felt like I was experiencing it not as a visitor, but as someone who lived in the city. I knew once I returned Lola I would revert to being invisible or a nuisance, but I batted the thought away.

I had a flexible schedule, so I began to walk dogs for my friends and neighbors. Through word of mouth, people began recommending me as a trustworthy dog walker who kept dogs safe and texted owners dozens of cute photos from our walks. I desperately missed owning and caring for a dog of my own. Hanging out with other people’s dogs was the next best thing.

At the time, dogs were allowed almost everywhere in Paris, except, curiously enough, most parks. When I walked other people’s dogs, I’d take them to bookshops, cafes, and the occasional department store. On these walks, Parisians would stop to scratch the dogs’ ears and whisper “très mignon!”

I wondered if French people setting aside their aloof, hard coconut shells to coo at dogs represented a cultural-wide vulnerability. It reminded me of one of my favorite, albeit depressing, Parisian sites. The Cimetière des Chiens et Autres Animaux Domestiques is a gated-off pet cemetery on the outskirts of the city, the final resting place for a select number of dogs, cats, and even some lions and monkeys. When I visited a few years ago, the dog gravestones stuck out to me the most, each one erected with such sentimentality and care. Walking past countless memorials, I thought only of Colleen.

The Tuileries was overrun by dogs on weekday mornings. I’d take a dog there and engage in brief conversations with the dog owners. Once a man lost his little dachshund, Eugène, in the park’s tall hedges, and we all called out, “Viens, Eugène, viens!” while squeezing squeaky toys and holding out treats. Eventually we found him near the big arch, sniffing cigarette butts. We all cheered.

There was a man who didn’t own a dog but was at the Tuileries without fail every morning. He played with the dogs and threw sticks for them to catch. He seemed harmless to me, but the other dog owners regarded him with suspicion, like a childless man lurking around a playground. One morning, the owner of a shaggy maltese regarded the man and whispered something that sounded like “pleut,” the French word for rain. I looked up at the clear blue sky and shrugged.

Another time, I heard her say it again, this time hearing a “c” at the end of the word. Google Translate told me she was saying, “plouc,” an insult meaning slob or country bumpkin. I filed the word away with the countless others I was learning from the dog park.

A few months in, I had a small coterie of dogs I walked regularly.I walked each dog individually since, for various reasons, they all had slightly antisocial personalities. They didn’t bark or bite other dogs -- they simply preferred to be alone. So each afternoon, I walked past the big crowd of dog walkers with their extroverted, frisbee-catching packs, onto a quiet corner of the lawn hidden by a tall  hedge. Occasionally one of the social dogs approached one of mine, and I’d have to explain to its walker that my dog “préfère être seule.”

Despite this, we still crossed other dogs along the Seine and on the tiny streets leading up to our destinations. As the dogs sniffed each other, I engaged with their owners in basic French conversations that consisted of simple questions.

When addressing a dog, you use the informal form of you: “tu.” This lended an unexpected sense of closeness to my conversations with other dog walkers.I was usually so scared of offending anyone, I used the formal “votre” more often than “tu.” But dog walking was one instance when “tu” was appropriate.

Once a German shepherd without a leash lunged at the tiny schnauzer I was walking, terrifying the little dog. To my surprise, I yelled, “Attention votre chien!” to its oblivious owner. For days after, I turned the phrase in my head over and over again: “Attention votre chien!” I had yelled out a French phrase without even thinking. The pride was enough to get me through weeks of mispronunciations and bungled conjugations.

Walking the streets and quais of Paris with a dog made me more confident. The fact that I was established enough to navigate the city with a dog seemed to signal to others that I wasn’t a tourist. More people started to ask me for directions. When I walked a hyperactive papillon around the Jardin de Luxembourg, I casually befriended another woman with the same breed.

Speaking in French to these four-legged companions was easy. I knew they understood me when they sat as I said “Assieds!” My dog-friendly French unlocked something within me. It was a tiny step toward the intimacy I had with the English language, which I spoke fluently and easily, despite the anxious fog that lived in my head.

Bilingual people often say their personality changes when they switch languages. For so many months, I felt like I had no personality when I attempted to speak French. I couldn’t discuss my favorite books or make dumb jokes. I couldn’t tell someone I loved their haircut because it looked like Faye Wong’s in Chungking Express. I was rendered silent.

I doubt I’ll ever speak flawless French. But it’s been over a year, and each time a dog reste when I say restes, or vien when I say viens, it feels like an accomplishment. On some level, despite my accent, despite my mother tongue, we understand each other.

* * *

Kate Gavino is a writer and illustrator. She is the creator of Last Night’s Reading, which was compiled into a published collection by Penguin Books in 2015. Her work has been featured in BuzzFeed, Lenny Letter, Oprah.com, Rookie, and more. She was named one of Brooklyn Magazine’s 30 Under 30. Her second book, Sanpaku, was published by BOOM! Studios in 2018.

 

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

‘There’s Virtually No Conversation In Chicago … About the Aftershocks of the Violence.’

Residents, activists, and friends and family members of victims of gun violence march down Michigan Avenue carrying nearly 800 wooden crosses bearing the names of people murdered in the city in 2016 on December 31, 2016 in Chicago. (Scott Olson / Getty)

Hope Reese | Longreads | April 2019 | 11 minutes (3,002 words)

 

In recent years Chicago has had more homicides than any other city in America. From 1990-2010, roughly 14,000 people were killed there — more than the combined number of US soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, giving a horrifying legitimacy to the city’s infamous nickname Chiraq. It’s not clear, exactly, why this is so — the rest of the country is experiencing a period of historically low crime. In fact, Chicago contributed nearly half of the country’s overall uptick in homicides in 2016.

Veteran reporter Alex Kotlowitz, author of the bestseller There Are No Children Here and producer of the award-winning documentary The Interrupters, has been chronicling the effects of violence on the city’s neighborhoods for decades. Kotlowitz, whose recent book, An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago, presents the cumulative effects of violence on the city through 14 vignettes. “For reasons I don’t fully understand, we just seem to be in the place where we have this extraordinarily tragic [violence],” he tells me. “Anybody who tells you they found the answer is just lying to you. Because nobody really knows.”

The book documents the complicated relationships between victims and perpetrators, the nature of the killing — how it is often cyclical and retributive — the way that violence scars communities, and his awe at surviors’ resiliency. Read more…

The Light Years

Ted Streshinsky/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images

Chris Rush | The Light Years | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | April 2019 | 33 minutes (6,653 words)

 

Fate is a crazy bird, swooping down from heaven.

I’m in a helicopter — it’s inconceivably loud. Out the porthole, I see a blue bay and a tiny island. It’s Alcatraz, but I don’t know that. I barely know where I am. Across from me sits an angelic blonde woman, her lavender gown falling to the floor. On her lap rests a black attaché case and a Bible. She keeps smiling at me.

Why am I so afraid?

Read more…

Wonder Woman

Getty / Simon & Schuster

Mary Laura Philpott | I Miss You When I Blink | Atria Books | April 2019 | 10 minutes (2,808 words)

 
People blame their parents for their flaws and eccentricities all the time. In interviews, in therapy, in memoirs, they enumerate the many ways their mothers fucked them up. It seems we can’t discuss the way we are without assigning some responsibility to the generation before. Anyone can do it.
 
 
Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I was in first grade. My mother picked me up from school in our family Buick, as always. My dad, still in the early years of his medical career, was off working at the hospital most of the time, so the role of daily caretaker fell to her, as it did with most mothers then. She had been a schoolteacher before we were born—me, then my brother—and once she had us, she stayed home and we became her tiny class of two. When we were little, she was the one human being we saw most. She was our guide to how the world worked, not to mention our food source, our referee, our correctional officer, our chief entertainer—the de facto center of our universe.

That afternoon, I unloaded my Wonder Woman book bag onto the vinyl bench seat of our car and showed my mother the stack of papers we’d all been sent home with, a list of words printed on each page. Easy ones like love, candy, bike, and harder ones like breath, power, and understand. That week there was to be a spelling contest, winnowing the class down to the best spellers, ultimately crowning a champion.

Later that evening and every night that week, after my brother had been put to bed, she sat at one end of our green chenille sofa and I sat at the other as she called out two pages’ worth of words for me to spell aloud. I flailed around on the cushions, impatient, wanting to get down and read a book. “Why two?” I whined. “The teacher said one page a day.” My mom—in the same matter-of-fact tone she used for important edicts such as Stay out of the street; Eat your fruit; Go back and brush those teeth again, they’re still yellow—said, “Always do more than expected. That’s how you win.”

That’s how you win.

By the time the spelling bee started on Monday, I was ready. I moved on to the next round and did it all again on Tuesday, then Wednesday, then Thursday. When Friday came, sure enough, I clinched that spelling bee. I don’t remember if I got a medal or whether the other kids high-fived me, but I can vividly remember—as if she were standing in front of me right now—my mother’s beaming face. She raised her eyebrows and nodded as she broke into a smile. She was proud of me, and I was the Wonder Woman of spelling.

Had the term existed back then, my mom probably would have been deemed a tiger mother. She taught my brother and me to read when each of us were three, starting us out with Hop on Pop and Go, Dog, Go! In second grade, she offered me a Rubik’s Cube if I could ace my multiplication tables before the class deadline. In middle school, she woke us up every weekday at 5:45 a.m. to practice our piano. She never used cruelty—we weren’t chained in a cellar practicing fractions, although our protests may have sounded like we were. But through repeated practice, she made it clear that we were not fully prepared until we were overprepared, and that the desired goal, the only goal, was an A. Nobody makes a B in this house.

It was a simple rule—“work first, play later”—and it taught me that the natural order of things was to study hard, achieve your goal and receive the approval of your loved ones, and then (but not a minute before) relax.

We weren’t a family who held hands during the blessing or told each other we loved each other out loud, but the look on my mother’s face when I showed her an A+ said, “I love you.”

Good grades gave me evidence that, at least until the next test, I was secure in my place as a preferred person in my house and in my school and—probably, why not?—in the world. Naturally it stood to reason that the opposite was true as well. I remember the times I didn’t make good grades. There was a decimals test in fourth grade. After we got it back, everyone had to get it signed. I held it out to my mom, searching her face for a reaction as she put her signature on the page right next to the dreaded 80, feeling in my gut the absence of her smile. It was the absence of the ground beneath my feet. I may not have grasped decimals perfectly, but I could do this reverse calculation: If an A means You are loved and you belong here, then anything less than an A must mean You are not and you don’t.

When you internalize what you believe to be someone else’s opinion of you, it becomes your opinion of you.

I came to rely on grades for my regular jolt of self-esteem. It’s a miracle I didn’t end up with a back injury from bringing all my books home every night in case I realized I needed to complete an extra assignment in something. It became my routine, one that lasted well past middle school into high school and even college, long after the days of bringing grades home for a signature: Study my ass off, panic that my run of luck was over and I’d fail, then get my grades back. The validation would rush to my head, a perfect high. Each hit set chaos into order. Every check mark, every gold star, confirmed it: I succeed, therefore I am.
 
 
Perhaps this is why misspelled words cause me a disproportionate amount of rage to this day. When I see mischievous spelled mischeivious I don’t just think, Hey, that’s wrong, I think, WHERE IS THAT WRITER’S SELF-RESPECT? Somewhere inside my brain, first-grade-me is also wondering, aghast, Don’t you want to be loved?

I had a freelance editing client years ago, a CEO who’d been at her job for decades. She refused to accept my edits whenever I removed the double spaces she placed after periods at the ends of sentences. Again and again, I’d strip out the extra spaces and send her documents back with single spaces, and she’d add the spaces back in. That was what she ’d learned in school, she insisted. I’d get purple in the face explaining that, yes, double spaces were required back in the day when everyone used typewriters but that modern word-processing programs had rendered obsolete the manual widening of the space between sentences. One space was the new rule. “Don’t you want to be right?” I’d say, exasperated. “I am right,” she ’d say. Maybe we were too much alike, an impossible match.
 
 
I worry that my kids will inherit my worst traits, that they’ll turn out too much like me, fixated on racing to the finish line with a perfect score. So when they walk through the door in the afternoons these days, I ask them what they had for lunch. I don’t actually care what they ate. I mean, I do—I’m their mother, so of course I’m concerned that they’re working their way around the food pyramid or the food train or whatever it is now. The lunch question is about something else.

We’re all a little weird thanks to our mothers. I’m carrying that tradition on with my own children.

I’d be thrilled if my kids made the dean’s list, and you better believe I make them learn those extra spelling words. But I also want my daughter to try a risky science experiment, and when it goes differently than expected, I want her to shrug it off and try another one. I want my son to bring home paintings and clay sculptures he’s proud of because they’re beautiful in his own eyes, not because they got him a good grade.

So I don’t ask them about their grades the minute they come home. Silently, I give myself an A+ for this move. I award myself an invisible certificate of achievement for parenting excellence, with high honors in nurturing a value system that emphasizes effort and curiosity over quantification. I do that because over in a little corner of my head, six-year-old-me sits on a big green sofa, clutching her spelling pages, wanting desperately to hear, Good job. She never left; she ’ll never leave. It’s too late for her, but not for them. They can be better than I am.

Maybe they’ll grow up to have a strange obsession with lunch, and blame me.
 
 
So there you have it.

When I was growing up, my mother was a hard-ass, and she turned me compulsive.

It’s all my mother’s fault.

* * *

Or:

When I was growing up, my mother was my cheerleader, and she made me successful.

It’s all to my mother’s credit.
 
 
Chapel Hill. First grade. My mom picked me up from school. Left to my own devices, I might have crammed those spelling pages back to the bottom of my book bag with the empty, peanut-butter-smeared sandwich baggies and the balled-up sweatshirt I hadn’t worn in a month.

But my mother intervened and changed everything. She had seen how quickly I took to books, how I’d sit and read, focusing until I got to the end of a story. She had noticed how naturally I recalled a word once I’d seen it a single time. She saw potential I could not have seen in myself at that age. She reached for that stack of spelling words.

And so my brother was sent to bed while I was allowed to stay up. I got to snuggle into the nubby pillows of the green sofa next to my mom as I learned tricks for training my brain to hold as much as it could. I found that if you spell a word out loud five times in a row, the sixth time is a snap.

“Hair. H-a-i-r. Hair,” I spelled.

“Yes!” she cried.

I started spelling words in conversation: “I’m going o-u-t-s-i-d-e now.” “Do I have to wash my f-a-c-e tonight?” My mother showed me how to bump up against what felt like the natural limits of my mind and then keep pushing into the territory that lay beyond.

When I won that spelling bee, I got a smile from my mom that no one else got. This wasn’t just regular love like all kids got from their parents. This was extra love, something more, just for me. It filled me up, and I would never again settle for anything less.

When I held out my math test with a B on it, she didn’t reward me with a smile, because she believed I could have made an A. In time, I believed I could make A’s, too. She held me to the standards she knew I could meet. As if running alongside my bike with a hand on my seat, then letting go, she guided me until I could excel on my own.

My work ethic helped me earn my way into opportunities that changed my life: contests, college, jobs, assignments. I became a person other people can count on, someone they trust to do a good job. I grew to think of myself this way, as a helpful person, a reliable person.

My mother the wonder woman made me a wonder woman, too.

* * *

Even small events can have a formative effect on our lives. Everything sinks into the soil.

That’s how I think of that first-grade spelling bee. Did it really change me from one kind of person into another? I suspect it was less a cause of my perfectionism than simply the first manifestation of it, but I remember it as a before-and-after marker on my timeline. My best guess is that something within me, some strand of DNA, was extra susceptible to the idea of quantifiable self-worth, and school was the perfect environment for it to thrive. (Seriously: a spelling bee for first graders? The 1980s were hard-core.) Plenty of other kids had strict parents, too, but they didn’t all become obsessive about grades. My brother grew up right alongside me, but when he got a B, he just went into his room and played his Bon Jovi tapes. Big deal.

Of all the genes parents pass down and values they instill, how does one take hold so much stronger than the others? How do two kids with the same genetic ingredients and upbringing turn into such different people? My brother became a high-achieving student, too, but also a sneaky, laid-back teenager, the kid who hid beer in our backyard tree house and laughed it off when he got caught. I became uptight and anxious, the one who religiously performed all three steps of the Clinique three-step cleansing system every night because the instructions said, Wash, tone, moisturize. He stood right next to me when my mother said, “Practice your piano for thirty minutes each while I’m at the grocery store.” So why did I slog through thirty minutes of Beethoven every time and then watch in fuming rage as he played video games? Does it even matter why?

It filled me up, and I would never again settle for anything less.

There’s not much I’d blame any parent for, honestly, now that I am one. Cruelty, neglect, abuse—absolutely—but word-drilling on the green sofa? No. We’re all a little weird thanks to our mothers. I’m carrying that tradition on with my own children.

What a job, to raise someone from birth to adulthood, bestowing upon them your knowledge and your values and, despite your best intentions, any number of traits you’ve inherited yourself. What a loaded task, to make every move, every day, in such a way that the impressionable larva-person in your home will see your example, process it into something within themselves, and grow layers of muscle and soul over it until she is a fully developed human being. And all the while, the little person you’re nurturing is fighting you—spitting out the broccoli, not wearing the helmet, rolling her eyes at your carefully chosen words of advice—–and you become constantly worn down even as you pour your energies into loving her.

My mom gave me all the tools she had, some of which I couldn’t use. She grew up to be a plant whisperer after helping her dad tend his garden in the wild green lot behind their little house outside Birmingham, Alabama, and she tried to teach me to be one, too. I used to follow her around our backyard, watching her reach into a mass of stems and leaves with her clippers and snip this bloom or that one to toss into her basket; then I’d sit mesmerized as she stuck them into vases and bowls, creating what looked like tabletop parade floats. She ’d coach me to do the same—“Here, put some greenery in, make it look softer”—and I’d stab a branch into the bunch, ruining the loose beauty of her arrangement. You point to anything with roots, and she can name it, arrange it, and/or cook it, and I can’t keep a pot of basil alive for longer than a week. Why didn’t that stick?

What did stick—whether she intended to pass it along or not—was her sense of humor. When it came to academics, my mom may have been a warlord zipped into the body of Sally Field, but the rest of the time, she cracked us up. Whenever a Little Richard song came on the car radio, she would bust a move at the wheel like a one-woman episode of Dance Fever. She let me play beauty salon and make dozens of tiny pigtails all over her head with my colorful plastic barrettes. When I was bothered by the fact that none of my Barbies had underwear, she sewed a complete trousseau of tiny lingerie. Like her, I love little visual absurdities (ah, the inherent hilarity of a teeny-weeny doll bra), dry one-liners and well-timed cracks, and perfectly executed, utterly insane mishmashes of curse words. (My mom, upon walking into a messy room: “It looks like the ass end of destruction in here.” The ass end of destruction!)

When I was seventeen, I might have told you I was a neurotic student because my mom was so tough about grades. When I was twenty-five, I might have shrugged and said, eh, maybe it was my mom who made me a control freak or maybe I’m just me, who knows. By the time I reached my thirties and had my own children, I knew perfect parenting was a myth, and I understood that while she was responsible for making me, she couldn’t have known how I’d end up made. No one could have. That’s a little mystery we all unfurl on our own.

* * *

 

“Wonder Woman” is an excerpt from the book I Miss You When I Blink © 2019 by Mary Laura Philpott, published by Atria Books on April 2, 2019.

Buy the book

 

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

I’m Writing You from Tehran

House party in an affluent section of northern Tehran. Photo by David Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

Delphine Minoui | I’m Writing You from Tehran | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | April 2019 | 32 minutes (6,421 words)

 

It all started with flowers. Flowers, everywhere flowers. And all those shouts of joy escaping from chadors. I remember that May 23, 1998, as if it were yesterday. The second of Khordad, according to the Iranian calendar. A year had gone by since Khatami was elected. The scent of spring permeated the Iranian capital. On Enghelab (Revolution) Street, Iranians were celebrating the first anniversary of his victory. I had landed in Tehran a few days earlier. I was staying with Grandmother, my last family connection to Iran since your passing. Despite her inordinate protectiveness, I had managed to extricate myself from her house. It was my first outing. To help pay for my journey, I had pitched a documentary project on Iranian youth to Radio France. In the West, Iran had become respectable again, and in Parisian newsrooms, questions were pouring in from all sides. Did Khatami’s victory signal the end of repressive theocracy? Was democracy compatible with Islam? What did “Generation K” — all those young people my age born under Khomeini; raised under his successor, Khamenei; and the main electors of the new president — dream of? The stipend for my freelancing only just about covered my plane ticket. But the idea of working for one of the biggest French media companies and being in the land of my ancestors was more than enough compensation for me.

Read more…

The Good Bad Wives of Ozark and House of Cards

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Sara Fredman | Longreads | March 2019 | 11 minutes (3,057 words)

 

What makes an antihero show work? In this Longreads series, It’s Not Easy Being Mean, Sara Fredman explores the fine-tuning that goes into writing a bad guy we can root for, and asks whether the same rules apply to women.

 
The antihero shows of the early aughts relied on wives as antagonists. A wife became another hurdle to leap in her husband’s quest to run a criminal organization/become an undisputed drug king/sleep with whomever he wanted in an attempt to outrun his past. More recently, however, there have been shows that seem to push back on the impulse to pit husbands and wives against each other. What if, they asked, an antihero and his wife were partners instead of rivals? But in giving their wives a promotion of sorts, shows like Ozark and House of Cards also open the door to female ambition, which can become as problematic for fictional women as it has been for their real-life counterparts.

The first post in this series, “The Blaming of the Shrew,” discusses Breaking Bad’s Skyler White, among other TV wives.

The first episode of Netflix’s Ozark follows the antihero script to a T. It’s all there: a talented main character, a sad backstory to which we slowly become privy, and foils more villainous by several degrees designed to make our main guy look good in comparison. That guy is Marty Byrde, a financial planner who launders money for the second largest drug cartel in Mexico. His wife Wendy is initially set up as the Skyler to Marty’s Walt: her days are all Costco, Zumba, and cheating on her husband with a man she calls “Sugarwood.” Soon after we meet Marty, he fantasizes about an encounter with a prostitute that gets oddly specific about his life: “Let me guess, your wife won’t do what you want her to do. If you were my man, working all day so I could stay at home — which, uh, let’s face it, it was a bitch when they were little but now they’re both teens and in school all day … not only would I not cheat on you, I’d let you do anything you wanted.” This is the kind of interiority, indispensable to the antihero genre, that lets us know that Marty is doing everything right despite Wendy’s worst efforts.

But when Marty is forced to move his family to southern Missouri and launder $8 million to save them from the cartel, Wendy shifts from antagonist to helpmate. She isn’t excited about the plan but, unlike antihero wives of yore, she hasn’t been kept in the dark about Marty’s criminality and she willingly presents a united front to their children and the FBI. The important thing, Wendy and Marty agree, is that the family stays together and safe, and they’re prepared to do anything to keep it that way. Family as sacrosanct, as the highest good, is a theme of this show. Versions of “I did it for our family” are repeated like a mantra throughout the series. Marty and Wendy both use it as a rhetorical justification and also as a kind of mystical prayer meant to insulate them from their own internal critics.

Ozark offers us an antihero team but finds a different way to humanize a flawed man, with a wife so helpful that she eclipses the antihero himself.

By season two, however, the family becomes a battleground, with Marty and Wendy developing a low-grade rivalry. They operate less as a team than as dueling pianos, each taking turns making decisions “for the good of the family” without consulting the other. It turns out that Wendy has her own expertise to contribute from her years working in Chicago politics, which makes their partnership more equal but also more fraught, and the show’s almost pathological focus on the family becomes yet another way to make an antagonist out of a wife. Ozark’s initial bait and switch turns Wendy from an antagonist into a helpmate who recognizes the necessity of her husband’s infelicities but a more cunning reversal has Marty become the one to stand in opposition to the show’s plotline. The final episodes of season two see him preparing an escape plan for his family only to be thwarted by his wife, who makes the unilateral decision that they will stay. It’s not clear when Wendy makes the decision because she doesn’t get the kind of interiority that Marty does — only long, meaningful looks out onto the horizon. Naturally, she frames the decision as the best thing for their family. But the show’s writers have already given Marty the insight that this kind of rationalization, the very premise of the show, has been undermined: “We’re not fit to be parents. It’s not even a family, it’s a goddamn group of criminals.”

Explaining her decision to stay in the Ozarks, in danger, in criminality, Wendy says: “This is who I am, and this is who I want to be.” Marty was only ever portrayed as a reluctant criminal, a serf in service to his family. Wendy’s first-person declaration is ambition, which we should know by now isn’t usually a good look on a woman. Ozark offers us an antihero team but finds a different way to humanize a flawed man, with a wife so helpful that she eclipses the antihero himself. It turns Marty into the hero who wants to save his family, if only his wife would let him.

* * *

Wendy Byrde isn’t the first wife of an antihero to have higher aspirations. House of Cards was always a show about two people with naked ambition. Frank and Claire Underwood didn’t have any children so their nefarious deeds were never in the service of providing for, or saving, anyone other than themselves. They wanted power and they were going to get it as a team. Until they weren’t. Things start to unravel at the end of season three. Frank walks into the Oval Office to find Claire sitting behind the desk: “Look at us, Francis, we used to make each other stronger, or at least I thought so, but that was a lie. We were making you strong and now I’m just weak and small and I can’t stand that feeling any longer.” House of Cards could be extremely woke about power and gender. More than any other antihero show, it seemed to be aware of the conventions of its genre and what those conventions meant for women. What family is for Ozark, power was for House of Cards, and it recognized what it meant to want power as a man and as a woman, that there was a difference between the two. The show could also be extremely meta, especially the final season, in which lines like “Are you telling me she knew nothing of what he was up to?” and “Are you even capable of defining her on her own terms?” could be talking about the characters, the actors who play them, or the tropes they were called on to embody for six seasons.

If nothing else, the power struggles between the two Underwoods over the course of the series can help us see how the roles of antihero’s wife and politician’s wife overlap. Both kinds of wives are at once essential to their husbands’ stories and outside of them. They are tasked with humanizing the men with whom they partner, but it is understood that the partnership is premised on a withholding of their own humanity; their story must remain the B plot. So when House of Cards suddenly found itself an antihero show without an antihero, you would think the solution would have been simple since, as it turned out, Claire’s ambition was to become a main character.

And an antihero marriage, like a political campaign, does not easily accommodate a woman at the top of the ticket.

Claire’s struggle to move beyond the helpmate/antagonist paradigm of her foremothers and become the antihero of her show is a major plot point of the show’s later seasons. The season four finale has Claire and Frank look at the camera together, her first fourth wall break. This is Frank’s signature move so there is reason to believe that Claire is finally gaining the strength she craves. And, indeed, season five in many ways seemed to be about setting the stage for Claire to eclipse her husband. This is signified, in the show’s mallet-to-the-head way, by Frank’s fascination with the app that turns his face into Claire’s and back again. But there continues to be friction: “We have one rule Francis,” Claire rails, “I cannot be your ally if I don’t know what you’re thinking … You should have talked to me instead of making a last-minute decision like this.” Frank has just let her in on his plan to resign the presidency and make Claire the leader of the free world. You would think Claire would be pleased with this turn of events but she knows, as we do from Ozark, that where you are matters less than who made the decision to put you there.


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Just as concepts like “leader” and “free world” don’t mean quite what they used to, so too Frank has emptied out the presidency of its power before handing it over to Claire. “Where does the real power lie? The power behind the power?” he asks. The answer is the private sector, the existence of which the supposedly brilliant politician Frank Underwood is apparently just learning. Exaggerated eyerolls aside, this show is one in which a woman finally gets her hands on some agency, only to discover that the rules have changed and she’s not holding anything at all. “It’s no longer about who lives in the White House,” Frank’s civic lesson continues, “it’s about who owns the White House … the real power isn’t here.” And when he says, “I wanted you to be the president, I’ve made you the president,” Claire realizes that for an antihero and his wife, there is no such thing as equal partnership. And an antihero marriage, like a political campaign, does not easily accommodate a woman at the top of the ticket. While wives may humanize presidents and antiheroes alike, for this wife at least, a husband is only a liability.

So season five ends with Claire ignoring Frank’s calls about a presidential pardon and turning to the camera to declare: “my turn.” This could have become more true than anyone had planned once the allegations against Kevin Spacey became public and Netflix cut ties with him when the show was already into production on season six. But the show wasn’t prepared to become a female antihero show. Frank had already told us that “If she doesn’t pardon me, I’ll kill her,” and season six was supposed to be a showdown between the two Underwoods. Instead of coming up with a new story line, we get Frank by proxy. Unable to use his face or his voice, the show’s writers turn Frank into a series of human horcruxes, transposing his malintent onto several new characters we are supposed to care about but don’t. Oh, and Doug. Poor loyal, murderous Doug, who is like if the legion of antihero fans sticking with Tony, Walt, and Don to the bitter end became one person with a weakness for sad brunettes. While the final season can identify the predicament of the antihero’s wife who yearns to break free — it begins with a reading of threatening tweets and other online content, including a contest for the most creative way to kill Claire — it never comes close to resolving it. Instead it centers on Frank’s absence. Claire spends most of her time as commander-in-chief trying to figure out how to distance herself from Frank’s crimes and escape Frank’s shadowy posthumous vendetta against her. She never gets a chance to be a president, or an antihero, on her own terms.

Even when Claire makes it to the Oval Office, she is only, as Frank tells her in their very last conversation, ‘the most powerful woman in the world.’

It wasn’t just the writers who couldn’t seem to let Frank go. In December of last year, Kevin Spacey, who had no qualms about using Frank’s face or voice, released a video in which he blurred the line between himself and the character he played for five seasons. Looking straight into the camera, he attempted to recreate the camaraderie with the audience that made his House of Cards character so unique and effective:

I know what you want. Oh sure, they may have tried to separate us but what we have is too strong, it’s too powerful. I mean after all, we shared everything, you and I. I told you my deepest darkest secrets. I showed you exactly what people are capable of. I shocked you with my honesty, but mostly I challenged you and made you think. And you trusted me even though you knew you shouldn’t.

This is Frank’s shtick of making us feel like we’re in on a secret while also implicating us in the violence necessary to keep it. Spacey’s inhabiting of his character as a response to the real-life allegations against him shines an unflattering light on the cultural power of the antihero, particularly our complicity in enabling bad behavior if the person is good enough at what they do. In taking his case to the public this way, Spacey was betting on the magnetism of the fictional Frank Underwood to insulate the real-life Kevin Spacey from the bad things he did, kind of like what must have happened during the first season of House of Cards, when he had only to participate in a “training process” after allegedly harassing someone on set, a training that does not seem to have had its desired effect. The sheer brazenness of the video, that it ends with a play for a Spacey-led House of Cards revival (“wait a minute, now that I think of it, you never actually saw me die, did you? Conclusions can be so deceiving”) and hit the internet on the very day that it was announced that he would be charged with indecent assault and battery, suggests that Spacey must have really believed that his character could save his career. The video has almost 250,000 likes, which isn’t enough to bring Frank Underwood back from the dead, but is yet another testament to the power of the male antihero — in this case the character and the man who plays him — to command adoration in spite of the destruction he leaves in his wake.

The Kevin Spacey/Frank Underwood mash-up video can’t help but point out that “all this presumption made for such an unsatisfying ending,” an opinion held by mostly everyone. But what was it that made the final season so anticlimactic? Was it, as Kevin/Frank implied, the absence of its antihero? Was it because, as FX network president John Landgraf argued back in 2013, a female antihero just isn’t the same? Is the antihero genre, ultimately, a male one? Kind of. Like presidential politics, antihero shows have been built for men. Claire never got a clean break and she spent the final season fighting off the ghost of Frank. But even if she had, the show was never calibrated to make her its centerpiece. In an interview with the magazine Capitol File, Robin Wright recounts that the only note David Fincher gave her when she started on the show was to be still:

People were suggesting to base the character on Hillary Clinton or other strong women personas, and I didn’t want to do that. When we shot the first couple of scenes, David would come over to me and say, “Don’t move. Don’t move. Claire is a bust.”

Statues are memories of heroes, not the heroes themselves. House of Cards was built around Frank’s dynamism; Claire’s steely mystery could stoke or temper that dynamism but was meant to always exist alongside it. The show was about seeing Frank work and he kept us close, bringing us in and making us complicit. Even after Claire promises us that it’s going to be different (“I’m going to tell you the truth”), she keeps us at a distance. This is partially because the show wants to preserve the mystery of who killed Frank until the very end, but it’s also because that’s who Claire has always been: a stoic and a secret keeper. Instead of finding the right formula that would allow her to become the antihero she’s always wanted to be, the show shoehorns her into Frank’s.

* * *

In writing wives who don’t fit neatly into the antagonist/enabler binary of shows like Breaking Bad and The Sopranos, Ozark and House of Cards allow them to operate in the gray alongside their husbands. By bringing their wives into the fold instead of shutting them out, these shows get us thinking about what would have to be true for a woman to step into the role of an antihero herself. But while both give their wives more to do and the ability to exercise their own ambition, they ultimately handicap that ambition. Even when Claire makes it to the Oval Office, she is only, as Frank tells her in their very last conversation, “the most powerful woman in the world.” For the wife of an antihero, the glass ceiling is her husband. Perhaps Ozark will surprise us and turn Wendy into the show’s new antihero rather than an antagonist standing in the way of her family’s well-being, but season two hinted at the way a wife in control might go. Local drug lords Jacob and Darlene Snell are two of the more villainy foils who serve to humanize Marty and Wendy in season one. They initially operate as a well-oiled machine: when he asks for more lemonade, she knows it’s time to murder the man who launders their money through a strip club. But eventually, caught in a standoff with the cartel, the fissures appear. Darlene wants to keep fighting while Jacob wants to live in peace. “What do you do, Martin,” Jacob asks, “when the bride who took your breath away becomes the wife who makes you hold your breath in terror?” The show has already emphasized the parallels between the two couples: “What deals did you just make behind my back?” Darlene asks Jacob; “You made these plans without me?” Wendy demands of Marty. Darlene out-villains her husband, killing him before he can kill her, and the Snells’ storyline influences how we see Wendy’s season two arc. The lesson is that your helpmate can eventually become your killer and what is exciting and intoxicating in a man — quick thinking and smart, strategic maneuvering — is off-putting and unsettling in his wife.

Is there any hope for the wife of an antihero? Will we ever see a female antihero we can actually root for? Does having a family make a female antihero more effective, or less? Does Soviet Russia hold the key to one or all of these questions? Maybe! Tune in to the next installment on The Americans.
 

The first installment in this series: The Blaming of the Shrew

* * *

Sara Fredman is a writer and editor living in St. Louis. Her work has been featured in LongreadsThe RumpusTablet, and Lilith.

 

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk

Memoirs of a Used Car Salesman’s Daughter

Chris Ison/PA Wire

Nancy A. Nichols | True Story | January 2018 | 35 minutes (7,098 words)

 

Back in the 1920s, my father’s brother, Donny, was killed at the age of seven in an accident of some kind. Exactly what happened has never been clear.

My father told many versions of this story. He used to say that an older boy had been playing with his little brother, and there was a rope around Donny’s waist. Donny was playing the part of the pony, and the older boy was riding him. In one version of the story, the older boy pulled the rope, and the little boy crashed into the curb and died almost instantaneously. In another version, Donny broke free and ran into the street, where he was hit and killed. Sometimes the older boy was my father; sometimes it wasn’t.

Read more…

Into the Wild On an E-Scooter

Photo of the author, Brandon Tauszik.

Rental scooters have descended on many American cities, clogging sidewalks and opening riders up to head injuries. Brands like Skip and Lime have the potential to improve city life by increasing mobility, especially in areas with lackluster public transportation. But how would the scooters perform outside the city? For Gizmodo, Joe Veix decides to ride a Skip scooter out of San Francisco and toward the ocean, to test its limitations and see if it can help him escape into nature. The company stated many clear rules. Riding the scooter “as a means of escaping society” was not one of them. But the rules’ undefined edges constituted their own kind of frontier, and Veix embraced this urban adventure.

The Presidio is out of Skip’s service territory area, which is limited to San Francisco proper, excluding its parks. In their app, there’s a border drawn around the map of the city. Outside the area is a purple-colored no-man’s land, free of scooters, presumably ravaged by violent gangs with poor mobility. When I crossed into this lawless territory, I worried that my scooter would shut off and the whole plan would sputter to a stop, leaving me at the mercy of the hordes and their perverse whims. But upon entering the forbidden zone, the scooter kept moving. I was safe… for now.

I rounded the circuitous path up to the Golden Gate Bridge and began crossing. It was crowded with tourists and bikers in spandex. Other than a few odd looks from people, it was mostly uneventful. The bike path along the western side of the bridge was wide and accommodating.

Beyond the bridge, the small screen on the scooter indicated that I had about 50 percent battery left. Not heartening, but it would have to suffice. I rode west, up into the Headlands. The engine churned up the hill at 5 mph. Though sluggish, it was enough to overcome a group of road bikers, who looked upon me with searing disdain.

This is the story of a fun little jaunt by a very funny writer. But there’s also something profound about seeing the e-scooter stripped of its context. Out there on a hiking trail, far from the bustling world of venture capital that created it, it’s no longer a new, potentially lucrative urban accessory poised to disrupt traditional modes of transportation. It’s just a rickety little bunch of plastic with a dying battery.

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The Tyranny of Chairs

Photo by Don Harder via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)

To eat in public while fat is to invite stares, judgement, and commentary — and that’s assuming you can be comfortably seated at your restaurant of choice. For larger people, picking a place to eat doesn’t just involve looking online for menus or reviews, but for pictures of the chairs. In the New York Times, Kim Severson explores the pains (often physical) and challenges of trying to spend an evening in a place that was not built to accommodate you, in an industry where even the king of hospitality has a fat-person sized blind spot.

Danny Meyer, 60, whose restaurants include the Shake Shack chain and high-end destinations like Union Square Cafe, said customers’ size is a new consideration. “I don’t believe we have ever designed a restaurant saying, ‘Let’s make sure there are two tables that can accommodate someone who is larger,’” he said.

And when you don’t? This happens.

Traci Armstrong, 46, who runs Specialty Catering in Bluffton, S.C., travels to eat at the nation’s best restaurants as a hobby. She is 5-foot-4 and about 335 pounds. She always books two airline seats.

She flew to Washington, D.C., over a holiday weekend to eat at Pineapple and Pearls, which has two Michelin stars. When she got there, her reserved seat was at a stationary bar stool at the chef’s counter. She didn’t fit. The staff offered to seat her outside or accommodate her at a sister restaurant, but she declined and left.

“I was mortified,” she said.

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The Day New York Rose Up Against the Nazis On the Hudson

A demonstration near the German ocean liner SS Bremen in New York, after Hugh Wilson, the American ambassador to Germany was recalled in the wake of Kristallnacht, 1938. (FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Peter Duffy | An excerpt adapted from The Agitator: William Bailey and the First American Uprising Against Nazism | PublicAffairs | March 2019 | 20 minutes (5,458 words)


Hear it, boys, hear it? Hell, listen to me! Coast to coast! HELLO AMERICA!
—Clifford Odets, Waiting For Lefty

Seven million New Yorkers, few of them in possession of the luxury item known as an electric fan, woke up to the best news in three weeks on Friday, July 26, 1935. During the overnight hours, the humidity plunged by 33 points. By sunrise, the temperate air from Canada had completed its work. The heat wave was over.

“Humidity Goes Into Tailspin,” the New York Post exulted. “Rain Ushers in Cool Spell,” declared the Brooklyn Eagle.

The New York Times and Herald Tribune didn’t make much of a fuss that morning over Varian Fry’s revelations about his conversation with Ernst Hanfstaengl. “Reich Divided on Way to Treat Jews, Says Fry,” was the cautious headline on page eleven of the Tribune. One faction of the Nazi Party, the paper went on in summary of Hanfstaengl’s comments to Fry, “were the radicals, who wanted to settle the matter by blood.” The other, “the self-styled moderate group,” wanted to “segregate the Jews and settle the question by legal methods.” The Times ran its version on page eight and devoted most of the article to Fry’s retelling of the Berlin Riots. “There were literally hundreds of policemen standing around but I did not see them do anything but protect certain cafés which I was told were owned by Nazis,” Fry was quoted as saying. The paper saved its preview of the Holocaust for the ninth of eleven paragraphs. The nation’s newspaper of record didn’t see the value in highlighting the disclosure that “the radical section” of Hitler’s regime “desired to solve the Jewish question with bloodshed.”

Reached for comment in Berlin, Hanfstaengl called Fry’s account “fictions and lies from start to finish.” Read more…