Search Results for: Outside

Character Work

Illustration by Ellice Weaver

Alison Fields | Longreads | October 2018 | 14 minutes (3,214 words)

My dad moved out of the house on January 1, 1990. He’d packed up his cartons of books, records, and stacks of old issues of the New Yorker from the shelves built specifically to house them. This left his study, my favorite room in the house, vacant. I’d largely accepted my parents’ separation and forthcoming divorce. I wasn’t Haley Mills. I had neither a twin nor a plan to get them back together. I don’t remember exactly how I managed his departure, except the first night he was gone — really gone — I lay in bed reading Anne Rice novels and listening to the Beatles on my Walkman, thinking my mother’s claims of “Nothing will change, everything will be the same, and we’ll be all right” had a fine whiff of bullshit about them.

Dad’s apartment was on the second story of a recently renovated building in downtown Asheville, North Carolina, full of other divorced parents and distracted weekend children. When the custodial schedule put me there, I spent a lot of time wandering our then-empty downtown. I might have stumbled into the sort of trouble that would have made me cooler in high school. But like most red-blooded American teenagers, I was really into Latin and architecture and Renaissance politics, so I spent a lot of time at the Basilica. There I pined after rosaries as jewelry, accidentally stole candles, and visited with the priest. He was a good-natured and quiet man, who perhaps recognized that even pious adolescents don’t spend whole Saturdays alone wandering around a drafty church if they’re even remotely happy. I’m sure I needed answers to a lot of the Big Metaphysical Questions life had served up the past few months, but mostly we talked about the Grand Central Oyster Bar and why my nascent atheism would be a real barrier to entry if I ever wanted to convert to Catholicism.

One Saturday, Dad took my younger sister on one of those guilt-fueled, divorced-parent shopping benders. When she returned, flush with toys, new stereo equipment, and a pair of hamsters, Dad handed me a blank check to take to the public library and pay my king’s ransom in overdue fees. I filled it out at the circulation desk under the twitching eye of the upstairs librarian. On the way out the door, I caught a glance of a yellow flyer that read AUDITIONS TODAY: YOUTH THEATER COMPANY SEEKS YOUNG ACTORS. Finally, I thought, a reason not to find God.

I might have stumbled into the sort of trouble that would have made me cooler in high school. But like most red-blooded American teenagers, I was really into Latin and architecture and Renaissance politics, so I spent a lot of time at the Basilica.

I hadn’t curled my hair, put on lip gloss, nor prepared a song from Les Miserables that was hopelessly out of my vocal range and life experience. But I needn’t have worried; I made the company in about 30 seconds. I was flattered and impressed with myself. I didn’t even have to act. They could just see the talent emanating right off of me. The director said she’d see me at orientation the next week at the theater — your new home away from home! Afterward, I stood on the sidewalk across from Dad’s apartment building, January sleet silvering down on me, and glanced up at the basilica. I thought, That poor priest is going to have to find someone else to talk to.

My mother took me to the information session. Unlike my father, who’d met news of my professional theater career with a “Great job, bud” and a nod back to the golf game, Mom found the whole turning your kids into professional actors pitch suspicious at best. I couldn’t figure out what her problem was. Sure, the audition process was unconventional. The theater, in name only, was a filthy warehouse filled with giant spiders and dingy whitewashed brick, with ancient wooden floors so bowed and worn you could pass notes through the cracks to the cellar. The next production was “an Irish play, you know, for St. Paddy’s Day” that had yet to be written seven weeks out from opening. My fellow young thespians were mostly the homeschooled children of hippie parents, and a handful of tough girls with skinhead boyfriends, lipstick the color of bruises, and pack-a-day smoking habits at 13. My closest peer was coincidentally the daughter of my father’s divorce attorney. I couldn’t exactly figure out what she was doing there, but I was glad she was around. Driving me down the derelict alley to rehearsal the first time, my mother was alarmed at the scruffy day-drunks relieving themselves against the wall across the street. I thought it was bohemian, you know, kind of punk rock. Though I would never have said that aloud because the tough girls would have punched me in the arm and called me a poser.

Mom thought it was possible the owners were running some kind of elaborate con. I was sure I was not being conned. “I mean, they haven’t asked me for a dime,” I said. “Yeah, well, they’re charging me several thousand dimes for you to be involved in all this,” she replied. I felt kind of guilty about that, but I also knew that because of the weirdness of the divorce she probably wouldn’t say no.
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‘I Didn’t Have the Language to Call It Racism’: An Interview with Nicole Chung

Catapult Books / author photo by Erica B. Tappis

Victoria Namkung | Longreads | October 2018 | 11 minutes (3,020 words)

Since the early 1950s, parents in the United States have adopted more than a half-million children from other countries, with the vast majority of them coming from orphanages in Asia, South America, and, more recently, Africa. South Koreans are the largest group of transracial adoptees in the U.S., and by some estimates, make up 10 percent of the nation’s Korean American population.

Nicole Chung, however, was born prematurely and placed for adoption by her Korean immigrant parents in Seattle, and raised in a sheltered Oregon town five hours outside of Portland. Adopted by religious and loving white parents, she grew up as an only child who always felt a bit out of place. The narrative she was always told — that her biological parents made the ultimate sacrifice to give her a better life — comforted Chung as a child, but as she came of age, experiencing racism and finding her own identity as an Asian American and a writer, she began to question the “prepackaged myth” of her adoption. After getting married and becoming pregnant with her first child, a daughter, she went in search of her lost roots.

All You Can Ever Know, her memoir of this search, confronts the ways in which traditional adoption narratives rarely tell the whole story and shows how idealistic and well-intentioned white adoptive parents are often wildly unprepared for raising children of color in a society that is nowhere near the post-racial future of many Americans’ imaginations. She writes: “It feels like my duty as my white family’s de facto Asian ambassador to remind them that I am not white, that we do experience this country in different ways because of it, that many people still know oppression far more insidious and harmful than anything I’ve ever faced. Every time I do this, I am breaking the sacred pact of our family, our once-shared belief that my race is irrelevant in the presence of their love.”   Read more…

‘Just Assimilate Her Into Your Family and Everything Will Be Fine…’

Photo courtesy the author

Nicole Chung | All You Can Ever Know | October 2018 | 14 minutes (3,439 words)

 

My parents’ story together began in the spring of 1973 when they married and struck out west. She was twenty-one, he was twenty-two, and they’d been dating a matter of months when she told him she was leaving Cleveland, a city she had never much liked, for Seattle — where she had always planned to live, and where her own mother had spent the war years, living with her aunt and her uncle, the Swedish fisherman. My mother had not inherited much from her mother, save her red hair, quick temper, and stubborn attachment to the green beauty of provincial Washington State, so different from the smoke and cement of Cleveland and the small farm community outside it where her family lived. She had been to Seattle, carted along on cross-country road trips in the family station wagon, to visit her great-aunt and great-uncle, and she’d never forgotten the pine-scented air or the snow-tipped mountains wreathed in clouds, the hilly city lapped at its edges by a cold saltwater sound. Now she had gotten into nursing school out there — so, was he coming with her or not?

Though their families charged them with desertion, the move had its appeal: they were each one of five siblings, high in the birth order, and in different but defining ways their parents had been hard on them. More than three hundred people attended their wedding. Back then, it was still a little unusual for a Hungarian boy from one neighborhood to marry a Polish girl from another. There were fisticuffs at the reception, and it was generally agreed that the bride’s relatives both began and ended the fight, but everyone was laughing by the time they farewelled the couple.

They did move out west, but not to Seattle; not yet. A printing company had offered him a job in Ketchikan, Alaska, on Revillagigedo Island in the Alexander Archipelago. She found a job at the local hospital. They rented a basement apartment in a cottage on the edge of the Inside Passage, where they could step outside and watch eagles wheeling over the ruffled water. For a pair of born-and-bred Clevelanders, Ketchikan was almost too quaint to be believed with its fishermen and modest tourist trade, its streets and wooden pilings slick with rain one hundred and forty days out of the year. It was not quite the change she had envisioned, but a chance it still was, to escape Ohio and try on a different life. They liked it there, and felt like pioneers.

Still, when the transfer to Seattle came a few years later, they were ready to live in a city again, eager to meet new people. One Sunday, on a whim, they visited a little white-steepled church set into the hills above the neighborhood where they rented an attic apartment. It was nothing like the large, drafty old churches they’d attended as children in Cleveland; everyone wore jeans. The priest’s gentle Polish accent reminded her of her beloved grandfather, but it was someone else at the parish who commandeered their attention: a short, stout nun with blunt brown bangs peeking out from under her minimal wimple, a far cry from the strict, ruler-wielding sisters of their youth. They told Sister Mary Francis they had little interest in organized religion, let alone the church in which they’d both been raised, but the nun somehow convinced them to return. Soon my mother was leading a Bible-study group and my father was running errands for Sister Mary Francis’s elderly mother. They were back in the fold, with barely a token argument raised in their own defense.

This time, though, they were changed: they believed it all. They asked God to move in their lives. They saw his hand at work — in friends met, in jobs found, in day-to-day life — where they had never looked for him before.

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The Targeting and Killing of a Helmandi Combatant

Main Sail / iStock + Getty

Nick McDonell | An excerpt adapted from The Bodies in Person: An Account of Civilian Casualties in American Wars | Blue Rider Press | September 2018 | 25 minutes (6,786 words)

In the tactical operations center the general and I are watching out for innocent people like you, very closely, on-screen. We’re in southern Afghanistan still, a short helicopter ride from OP Shamalan, but most proper nouns inside the room are classified, and in exchange for entry I have agreed to leave my phones and recorders outside, so what I will describe comes from my notes and memory, can be verified only by those who were present. It is not necessarily their mission to tell the truth, but eventually I interview and record all of them separately outside that room, too, and without exception they believe themselves to be doing the right thing.

The operations captain, John, keeps dice on his desk and shakes them in his fist while he coordinates airstrikes. There is, on my arrival, much talk of how we don’t joke, we don’t cheer when we hit ’em, but soon everyone loosens up — like I’m cool with Hiroshima and You can’t say that shit in front of the reporter! And the word for a man who has escaped an airstrike and is running for his life on-screen is squirter. How could they not banter? Some of them are still kids, in that steel and plywood room. Not the chaplain, Sidney, though. Read more…

A Visit to Opioid Country

Getty Images / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Aaron Thier | Longreads | October 2018 | 8 minutes (1893 words)

 

In early November, I got a mild cold. I felt bad for a day, then felt better, then started coughing and didn’t stop coughing for a whole month. As if by way of compensation, the doctor gave me an orange flask of codeine cough syrup. This was a problem for me because I’m a recovering addict. But I didn’t mention this, because I’m a recovering addict. I said to myself: Think of it as medicine.

I was supposed to take 5 mL every four hours, “as needed.” I knew 5 mL was either one teaspoon or one tablespoon, and this confusion was more or less genuine, but I strategically avoided looking up the answer and chose the larger dose. This led predictably to a drug experience. My eyes turned red, I felt a buzzing sensation, I stumbled and walked into walls, I couldn’t relax enough to pee, I couldn’t speak at the right volume, I craved sugar. I was aware that I was behaving more cheerfully than usual, but I did not experience a feeling of good cheer. My head hurt very much. After four hours, I drank what I judged to be a second tablespoon directly from the flask.

I’d been sober for almost eight years. I had not forgotten the danger that opioids represented for me, and I was mostly operating in good faith. I really was desperate to stop coughing. For the next two days, I took the cough syrup more or less as directed, the right dosage at the right intervals. During this time my wife and I had an unusual number of meetings and social obligations, and my own feeling was that I met these obligations with tremendous dignity and grace. True: My eyes were red, my head was buzzing, my equilibrium was disturbed, my voice was either too loud or too soft, sometimes I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and my behavior was manifestly the behavior of a person who was on drugs. But it was OK because I was following the doctor’s orders.

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Falling in Love with Chicago at Night: An Interview with Jessica Hopper

University of Texas Press / Author photo by David Sampson

Ashley Naftule | Longreads | September 2018 | 9 minutes (2,464 words)

It takes a writer of considerable talent to gear-shift from meditations on mortality to goofy stoner daydreams (and not give the reader whiplash while she’s doing it). It’s a tonal trick Jessica Hopper pulls off over and over again in Night Moves, a poignant (and often hilarious) memoir of her time in Chicago in the early aughts. On one page, Hopper is solemnly reflecting, “You make peace with death’s swift manners and it raises you up”; on another, she’s wondering what it’d be like to run over a great poet with a dune buggy. Ruminations on aging, community, love, and friendships stand shoulder-to-shoulder with sharp, madcap anecdotes, like when a stranger at a nightclub says Hopper resembles “a kabuki donkey” on the dancefloor, or when a pair of socialites at a music festival are aghast at how she’s eating an apple directly off the core. The poetry and absurdity of existence are constant companions in the pages of Night Moves.

The veteran author’s easy grace with the written word comes as no surprise when you take her long career into account. Starting off as a D.I.Y. zine writer, Hopper quickly rose through the ranks to become a freelancer and contributor to publications like SPIN, Grand Royal, Rolling Stone, GQ, Punk Planet, and The Chicago Reader. She’s been an editor at Pitchfork, Rookie, MTV News, and the University of Texas Press. Her knack for juggling incisive cultural criticism with personal reflections and wry humor can be seen in her 2015 collection of music writing, The First Collection of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic.

While music comes up often in Night Moves (“Loving the Smiths is one thing, but loving Morrissey is another thing entirely,” Hopper writes), it’s a book that’s more concerned with what happens just outside of and right next to the rituals of listening to records and going to shows. It’s a book about long bike rides to venues, the sadness of watching friends get blitzed on cocaine at dance nights, the joys of holing up in an apartment and reading back issues of The New Yorker while the city freezes outside. Hopper’s book is a testament to the pleasures of bumming around, the ecstasy of slowing down and enjoying the neighborhood and your friends before career and family and all the other milestones of adulthood start accelerating your timeline. Read more…

A Birth Plan for Dying

Aaron Burden / Unsplash

Hanna Neuschwander | Longreads | September 2018 | 18 minutes (4587 words)

 

A week before my daughter was born, I typed up her birth plan. Reading it now, it sounds strange and stilted. “If the baby is born alive, we would like both a birth and death certificate. … I have fears that laboring will be painful without the joy of knowing we will be giving birth to a healthy baby who will come home with us. I have fears that I will be deeply sad during labor/at birth instead of happy to meet our daughter.”

 

How do you organize anguish? How do you bureaucratize grief and fear into bullet points?

 

River’s birth was scheduled for September 26. She would be born in the same hospital where I had given birth to our daughter, whom I’ll call M, two years before. The staff were ready for us. A kind nurse checked us in at noon and led us to a delivery room with a small sign on the door — a leaf with droplets of water that looked like tears. It’s a secret code. It alerts everyone who comes in the room that your baby is going to die, so people don’t accidentally congratulate you for being there.

It’s hard to know how to give birth under these circumstances. While you wait for the Pitocin to kick in and get labor started, do you read? Do you make small talk with your husband? Can you will yourself to disappear? I had trouble sitting still. I went out into the bright afternoon sun and walked a paved labyrinth in the courtyard. As I circled toward the center of the labyrinth I imagined I was coming to meet her. As I unwound, I prepared to say goodbye.

Once the Pitocin-induced contractions got going, they were intense bursts of knotty pain with just 20 or 30 seconds rest in between, very different from the long, rolling waves I recalled from my first delivery. It was tiring. I paced around the room, tried to lie down, paced again. As the sun was setting, we went for another walk. Twilight had painted a dark rainbow at the edge of the sky, and Mars or Jupiter or some planet was twinkling just above it. It would have been beautiful except for the ugly parking lot we were walking through. I remember being confused and then excited about the large silhouette I took to be a horse statue at the end of the sidewalk — what is that amazing statue doing in this ugly parking lot, I wondered — arriving at it only to realize it was a Dumpster.

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Ugly, Bitter, and True

AP Photo/Eric Risberg

Suzanne Rivecca | Zyzzyva | April 2018 | 84 minutes (16,714 words)

 

The most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being. –Michel de Montaigne

 

There’s a tiny park on Hyde Street in San Francisco, on the cable car line, and for about a year I half-heartedly planned to kill myself in it. The park is slightly sunken, set off from the street, mostly concrete: one of those wedged-in, rarely utilized “mini-parks” common to this part of the city. There are a few rickety maroon-painted benches, a banner of tattered Mexican party flags, some scattered plants and trees. Sometimes, on warm nights, people sit there and eat ice cream cones from the famous ice cream parlor on the corner. Sometimes people take their dogs there to pee. But most of the time it’s empty.

I zeroed in on it because it’s near my apartment and ill-lit. I’d made only a cursory stab at formulating the logistics. Mostly I fantasized in broad strokes, visualizing the final result rather than the step-by-step labor. I knew this much: I wanted to put my California ID in my pocket, along with a piece of paper with my sister’s contact information, swallow a bunch of Xanax with alcohol, and hang myself from a tree. I didn’t think about what I’d use to hang myself, or what I’d stand on to reach the tree, or what kind of knot I’d tie. I didn’t even know which tree. My reluctance to hammer out these details probably indicated a lack of genuine resolve. Or maybe it was just indicative of the bone-shaking agitation that made it impossible to focus on anything intently enough to make a plan.

I walked by the park almost every day, but found it hard to enter. Sometimes I’d stand on the sidewalk and just stare into it, my heartrate accelerating. I knew this was the place, but I didn’t want to go in and scope out coordinates and vantage points. If it was going to happen, I didn’t want to be methodical about it. I was waiting for some trigger that would make it inevitable: some fresh humiliation, some galling failure. Something that would make it all fall into place, get the ball rolling organically, negate the need for foresight. I may have also been waiting for an irrefutable reason not to do it at all.

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Trouble

Illustration by Stephanie Kubo

Jill Talbot | Marcia Aldrich | Longreads | October 2018 | 15 minutes (4,207 words)

Sixteen

We met at gas stations. At the water tower. Under a street lamp in a new subdivision off Cartwright Road called Indian Trails, its curved streets and empty lots, its darkness and our darings. We met at Brian Walker’s house. Or Denise Simpson’s. But most of the time at Lisa Harrison’s, because her father always poured his fourth highball early enough to be out by nine. We met at the playground behind Shaw Elementary. The banks of Lake Ray Hubbard. One night, we met in the police station parking lot and waited for Bobby Ryan to walk out, holding our breath ’til he did. We were 16, 17, searching. Back then our town was a dry city, so we’d drive the 10 miles to Buckeye Liquor off Dolphin Road, the first liquor store inside the Dallas city limits. And we waited in our cars for the blonde, big-smiled Michael Nelson to emerge with our wine coolers (Matilda Bay), our cases of beer (Bud Light), and our smokes (Camel Unfiltereds). Michael wasn’t older than any of us, just cocky enough to walk into a liquor store in a shaky part of town wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a purple lei, for a reason I don’t remember. On school day mornings, we met on the marble steps of Mesquite High, planning our next party and laughing about the last close call.

I was known for two things: being the drunkest at every party and having the earliest curfew, 11:30. My father liked to remind me that nothing good happened after midnight, so my after-midnight had to come early. I’d drink two to everyone’s one and wander off to backseats, to backrooms, to the back of a pickup with one boy or another, worried I’d run out of time to be ready enough to call it a night.

We were 16, 17, searching.

I found trouble early. Maybe it began with the beer I drank in my closet one morning before 8th grade English, a lukewarm Bud Karen Miller stole from her dad’s stash in the crisper of their refrigerator. Maybe it was earlier, second grade, when I snuck off to tow-headed Bobby Rich’s house, the one with his father’s Harley parked out front. Bobby and I would kiss on his back porch until we’d hear his father’s coughs through the screen door, and I’d hop on my bike and pedal back home. Or maybe it was those years of parking lots and pickup trucks and that one night when I learned what trouble my trouble could call forth. And how I ran toward it still.

Laugh

It happened early, still it is a story I would tell if I was dying. I’d tell it because that’s when I learned there’s what happens and then there’s the aftermath. What happened took maybe five minutes, I don’t know exactly, but the aftermath, well, it’s still with me. I learned that trouble happens, and I can’t tell my mother about it. How did I know that?

It was a normal day in the fall of second grade at Union Terrace. I was walking home with Mike after school. Often, we went to his house after school, up the block from my house on 22nd Street. A stone house with a Great Dane. His older brother and sister were usually out of the house. His mother was often lying down in her room and wasn’t to be disturbed. My mother preferred that I went elsewhere after school and only cared that I showed up for dinner. Neither of our mothers paid much attention to what we did.


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On that day Mike and I went into the basement and listened to West Side Story. We sometimes listened to Broadway musicals and sang and danced along with the songs. On this day his older brother was in the house. As if timed, Mike went upstairs to see his mother, and his older brother dragged me into the basement bathroom where he made me touch his penis. Did I rub it, did he put into my mouth, did he masturbate? I’m not sure. I know he showed me a small black and white photo of a nude woman with large breasts and pubic hair which frightened me. I remember that. When he was done with me, he unlocked the door and pushed me out, spinning me back into the basement. And he laughed.

I learned that trouble happens, and I can’t tell my mother about it. How did I know that?

Did I tell Mike? No, I did not, though I wondered later if he planned his absence with his brother. I didn’t go upstairs into his mother’s darkened room where she was lying down and tell her. I did go home. But I didn’t tell my mother. I came home and sat down to whatever dinner we were having, probably some overcooked piece of meat, boiled vegetables, and hard rolls, and I picked at the food on my plate, stared at the tall glass of milk, and then excused myself and went to my room where I lay on my bed and turned my face to the wall.

Everything changed that day and yet I told no one, said not a word. My mother did not share cautionary tales or give advice about dangers I might encounter. I don’t think her silence was born out of a trust she felt in the world. It was her fatalism, not her faith that explained why she didn’t even try to protect me.

I wondered what my mother would have thought of his laugh as he pushed me out the door. She would have known what it meant, that he laughed because he knew I wouldn’t tell anyone about what happened, that he would get away with what he had done. Which he did. His laugh: I hear it still.

Threat

Two boys carried me to the car after the concert because I was too drunk to walk, not even 16. I remember I wasn’t 16 because I was always getting rides to school with friends or friends’ older brothers and for about a week, a strawberry-blonde boy who pulled up to my house, always a few minutes before the bell. He bounced on his toes when he walked through the hallways, laughing. And he had an alliterative name, two hard Gs, first name and last. Everyone called him by both, whether he knew them or not. On Friday nights, he ran into the end zone more than anyone else. Number 40, a favorite, a star. And in Texas, that means more than it should. He was only two years older, but he seemed to me like a grown man, devastatingly boyish and dangerously developed.

My father was his football coach. That is to say, my father was the football coach at my high school, so I was known to everyone, that is to say, visible, whether I wanted to be or not, which is why, I’m sure, I eventually leaned fast and far toward edges of nothing good so that I could let go for a few hours of who I was to everyone in that town. To forget. It was never rebellion as much as it was escape.

On Friday nights, he ran into the end zone more than anyone else. Number 40, a favorite, a star. And in Texas, that means more than it should.

I remember he drove a long car, something old that would have been uncool had anyone else been driving it. I remember he drove so fast I stared at the needle of the odometer, willing it to roll back to the left. My body tense, one clenched fist around the door handle. Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” so loud the windows shook. I only rode with him a few days — the threat of being in the car with him stronger than my silent desire.

A few months later, that desire still shook through me like those car windows when I ended up standing next to him at a sold-out concert in Dallas. I remember he ran down to the concessions and came back with two beers. And I remember being more confused at how he got the beer than anything else, but I drank it. And then another and another and I don’t remember how many anothers. I don’t even remember the concert, but there’s this flash, a brief scene of him asking a guy from school, the guy who sat in front of me in English, to help carry me to his car.

And then, he was pulling into the school parking lot for some reason and it was dark and he was on me and then in me and then driving me home. Hazy street lights overhead. I was suddenly alert and awake in a way I had never been, as if I had learned something about the world and my life and myself, and I had. When I asked him why he did it, he laughed before saying this: “I had to do something to sober you up.”

And I did what I did for years, I walked up the long sidewalk to the front door of my house and shimmied the key into the lock as quietly as I could and I tiptoed to my parents’ door and whispered “I’m home.”

Then I went to the bathroom, where I remember being afraid of all the blood. I can still see it.

Then I went to the bathroom, where I remember being afraid of all the blood. I can still see it.

Child’s Pose

Would anything have prepared me, would anything my mother could have said made a difference in what happened? I ask myself this now, so many years later. So many years later I think I have inherited my mother’s fatalism, the belief that no matter what I did, no matter what she did or didn’t do, trouble would find me. I did not rush toward trouble but when it came, when it arrived, it seemed as if there was no other destination possible, as if my mother had given me up, promised me at birth to trouble incarnate.

Even at the age of sixteen, an age when many no longer assume the child’s pose, I was innocent, innocent the way some animals never learn to growl or bite. Plenty had happened to me that should have made me wary, stand-offish. That came later but at this time I was remarkably open-hearted.

It’s funny what I remember. I remember that I was wearing my mother’s cast-off heavy-woven, long green skirt, that fell to my ankles. I wore tights underneath and boots, the long dangling earrings my mother had brought back from Mexico for me, and her old buckskin coat with the fringe on the arms. An outlandish outfit furnished from her castaways. It was a Saturday night in March during spring break and I was going to a party with a friend from school. I didn’t know any details. I’m sure I lied to my parents about where I was going and what I was doing. My friend’s older brother was driving us to the party. He would pick us up later to bring us home.

About this older brother. He was famous around town, thought to be the most handsome guy anyone had ever seen, a gifted tennis player, smart, attending an ivy league college, and trouble, complete and utter trouble. A guy who could get any girl he wanted but who just as easily dumped them when he was done. I had watched him from afar, listened to his sister talk about his misadventures with a long list of girls. In the fall of our senior year, he had seen my senior photo, you know the small versions we give to all our friends. He saw the little black and white photo of me standing by one of the heritage trees on campus and he became obsessed with me, well, not me so much as the girl in the photo. I knew this because his sister told me. He even asked me out to a party on New Year’s Eve. What I remember about that evening was that he was indeed handsome, but he was also dull. He relied on his looks so thoroughly that he neglected anything else or maybe there was some justice in the world and he didn’t get everything when the gods were divvying out the prizes. It was a boring night. I was the youngest, a stranger among the older crowd and I remember feeling his friends were baffled by my inclusion. After that, we didn’t see each other until he drove his sister and I to this party. During the drive he acted as if he didn’t know me and that was ok with me.

At the party I drank with abandon. I took tequila shots with some guy while playing darts. I remember having a wonderful time, laughing my head off, without a care in the world. Not a trace of caution or concern. I remember this because the feeling sometimes comes back to me along with the realization that I’ll never feel quite that way again. I felt safe and happy, completely in the moment. I didn’t think about my parents or older brothers or what might happen to me. And then my friend’s older brother arrived to take us home and suddenly I was so drunk I couldn’t make it down the stairs. The guy I was playing darts with and my friend’s older brother had to carry me down both flights and put me in the car. I don’t remember whether they put me in the back seat or the front seat, but I do remember the hostile look exchanged between the older brother and the guy who I played darts with. I think the dart guy was a good guy and he didn’t like the way the older brother took possession of me. I have no idea what happened to my friend from school.

I was taken to yet another house, whose I don’t know, and the older brother took me into a bedroom and placed me on the bed. I was in and out of consciousness, mostly out, with brief spells when I opened my eyes. I opened my eyes when the older brother pulled down my tights and got on top of me. I have no idea how long he was on me, whether I opened my eyes repeatedly or only when he was finishing, and his groans woke me.

At some point he hauled me to my feet and got me back in the car and drove me to my house. I don’t remember any words between us. He didn’t get out of the car and help me to the door. He leaned across me, opened the car door and looked at me as if to say get out. Which I did. Somehow. And I walked up the flagstone path to the back porch, stumbled around looking for the key, and finally opened the door. It was way past my curfew and my father had been listening for my return. I can’t remember if he saw me or just spoke to me from behind his bedroom door. It’s hard to believe he could have set eyes on me and not known something wrong had happened.

And it’s hard to fathom what he made of my running a bath at 2:30 in the morning. But that’s what I did.

My mother never stirred.

The next morning my father told me my grandmother, his mother, had died last night. A massive heart attack. He never asked why I was so late that night.

After

I’m going back for a moment to Before. Before all the trouble and distrust, before my eyes darted across rooms with concern.

My father had a rule: When a boy walked me to the door at the end of the night, I was not to go beyond the door frame. I was not to linger at the boy’s car or on the walkway or in the shadows of the porch. But the boys did. Nights, they’d knock quietly on my bedroom window, huddle under the street light out front, or call me on the phone and ask me to meet them outside in 10 minutes. The lust in their voices, husky tremors, made me nervous. I ignored them. I hung up. I kept the blinds closed. Once, Brian Walker passed me in the hallway at school, a nervous laugh: “Your dad sure is fast.” The night before, my father had caught five or six of them on the side of the house outside my bedroom window. He chased them for blocks, barefoot, nearly catching them before they hopped the fence to Randy Becker’s house. My father never said a word.

But for all his rules and curfews and threats shouted on dark streets to boys, he couldn’t protect me, not then, and not years later, once I stepped beyond that door frame.

So much of my trouble happened in hotel rooms. Here’s one: A hotel suite in Dallas my junior year, a haze of bodies aglow (blue shadows) in the glare from the TV in the next room. A boy beside me in bed. I’d only had two beers, so he must have slipped me something. My body heavy, boulder-like. I struggled against his hands, the ones that pressed my wrists above my head while he kneed my legs apart. I had never been with a boy (this months before the concert, the truck, the parking lot), so I fought to close my body, my legs, to cover myself as much as I could. After a while, he hopped up from the bed, laughing: “You’re strong.” I watched his shadow blend into the blue shapes beyond the door, and I got home, but I don’t remember how. My parents were out of town that weekend, and when they came home the next morning, they found me sleeping on the couch, my mauve comforter pulled around me. After that, they never left me alone at home, and I will always wonder if they saw the panic in my face, the kind that comes after scrambling back from a ledge.

Thinking back on all this, I can’t remember my mother ever reacting or warning or being aware. Of course I always had cover stories, reasons and explanations I came up with on the drive home, and if she didn’t believe them, she never said.

Years later, in my late 20s, I sat in my apartment living room late into a night, drinking and talking with two other women, friends. After enough wine, we began alternating stories of hotel rooms, of backseats, of back bedrooms. One of the women, tall and tough, described the hours she hid under her bed to avoid a half-brother’s repeated attempts and advances. But we all had something more in common, a siren-like sexual aggression, a craving for conquests, a need for nights to end with a man in our bed, in our mouths, in us.

There’s a difference between being out of control and not being in control, and that night, through our shared histories, our adopted proclivities, we realized we had chosen, somewhere along the way, to be predatory and promiscuous so that no man could ever have the advantage again.

Lost Corridor

The winter of my senior year of high school, my parents shipped me off to board at Moravian Seminary for Girls, the school I had been attending since 9th grade as a day student. They had come to the end of dealing with me after a tumultuous fall. My mother especially was done with me, she said. Done with the trouble I was, the trouble I had always been. She wanted me locked up far away from boys.

I was installed on the top floor of Main, on one of its narrow corridors that held four small rooms and a set of back stairs. The corridor was known as the Lost Corridor because the girls living there had been sent away by their parents and were no longer wanted at home. Maybe they were never wanted. This is where I landed that winter.

Done with the trouble I was, the trouble I had always been. She wanted me locked up far away from boys.

On this corridor, three doors down, at the very end lived Linna. Linna was tall and willowy, with thin brown hair that she wore parted in the middle and fanned both sides of her face in peek-a-boo fashion. She outlined her eyes with black kohl, top lids and bottoms which made her look paler than she already was. I liked this Linna. She moved quietly with long strides and she often smiled at me when our paths crossed. I didn’t know her story though I was sure she had one. We all did. No one came to live on The Lost Corridor without a story. Her chosen quote for the year book was playfully dark from Richard Farina: “Call me inert and featureless but Beware, I am the shadow, free to cloud men’s minds.” Mine was painfully sincere, from Theodore Roethke: “Leaves, leaves, turn and tell me what I am.”

Sometime that spring when I thought nothing more could happen to me, I had a dream. One thing I knew about Linna was that like me she had spent her youth with horses. In the dream Linna and I taught little girls how to ride. We led the horses out of their stalls to the mounting block where we hoisted the girls into the saddle, putting their feet in the stirrups, tightening girths. Then they walked their horses to the riding ring. We both stood in the middle of the ring like my first riding teacher Miss Reba. I faced one side, and Linna faced the other. We were teaching them the voice that horses listen to, the touch that horses feel. I used to wonder if Miss Reba knew which girls would learn and which would not. Linna and I had our hunches. Then we got on our own horses and led our charges down to the water. We told them they were to follow us, to hold on and let their horses swim. Hold on but not too tightly, we said. Don’t be scared. But, of course, some of the little girls held on too tightly and their horses bucked them into the water. Linna and I pulled the fallen girls out of the water and carried them in the saddle before us. We told the girls who didn’t fall off that they had passed the test, a test they didn’t know they were taking, and as a prize they could keep their horses. The last image of the dream was a line of horses with their small riders walking into the woods.

When I woke, I wondered which Linna and I were. Were we the girls who held on too tightly and had to be pulled from the water or did we learn the voice that horses listen to and take our horses into the woods?

Sharp Edges

I think women look at each other and think what we see either resembles our own reflections or something we’d rather not know in ourselves. I know I do this. It’s been 30 years, and every time I put on mascara, I think of Denise Simpson, the way she put on coat after coat of thick black, the way she put mine on when we’d get ready together in her room, the way I couldn’t (still can’t) get my lashes as pronounced as hers. A silly example, but I think it may be a metaphor, like your dream.

One night, a few months into my senior year, I took my father’s car across town without permission to borrow some of Denise’s clothes and forgot to put the seat back. I see myself perched on the fireplace hearth while my father paces the middle of the living room, yelling, “When you leave this house, you’re going to go wild. Wild!” At that crescendo of his second wild, he raises his arms in frustration and fury, and for a split second, I see it: the flash of futility in his attempts to get me safely across the churning waters, to keep me from running as fast as I can toward my own woods.

I already had wildness. I didn’t need to leave home to find it, but wildness begs another trouble, an expectation that the paths we’ve tread will be the ones we take again.

We had all gone to different colleges in Texas and we met at Brian Walker’s house over winter break that first year and we played some drinking game at a table in the garage and Brian brought his roommate home with him, and the roommate had heard enough stories about me that he had a plan, to get me drunk enough for them all to watch. More shadows in the doorframe, more struggling, this time futile.

That night became a different kind of door frame, a different kind of chasing away, one that kept me voiceless in my dorm room for the most of that year. I remember volunteering to repaint the hallway that spring — a mosaic that ran the walls in different directions, a pattern that took patience and my attention for months. Each shape and sharp edge a re-mapping, and I wondered with each brushstroke if I would like this new hallway. I did for a while.

But eventually, I left those walls.

I transferred to a different school.

And I found the woods again.

***

Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction, the co-editor of The Art of Friction: Where (Non)Fictions Come Together, and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction. Her writing has been named Notable in Best American Essays for the past four years in a row and has appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Fourth Genre, The Normal School, The Paris Review Daily, The Rumpus, and Slice Magazine. She teaches in the creative writing program at University of North Texas.

Marcia Aldrich is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton. She has been the editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. Companion to an Untold Story won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is the editor of Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women published by The University of Georgia Press. Waveformessays.wordpress.com. Her email is aldrich@msu.edu.

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Editor: Krista Stevens

Queens of Infamy: The Rise of Catherine de’ Medici

Illustration by Louise Pomeroy

Anne Thériault | Longreads | September 2018 | 18 minutes (4,588 words)

From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on badass world-historical women of centuries past.

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Looking for a Queens of Infamy t-shirt or tote bag? Choose yours here.

The year was 1519. Henry VIII was king of England and still (mostly) happily married to Catherine of Aragon. The throne of France was held by Francis I, also known as “Francis of the Large Nose,” which may or may not have been a dick joke. Charles I of Spain had just become Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. Martin Luther was stirring up shit in Germany. And in Florence, a couple whose union represented a last-ditch coalition between France and the Pope against the ever-expanding Holy Roman Empire welcomed their first child, a daughter they named Catarina Maria Romula de’ Medici (hereafter referred to as Catherine).

I like to think of the Medicis as the Kardashians of Renaissance Europe; at the very least, they had the same intuitive understanding of how to create and exploit a personal brand. Just the mention of the Medici name conjures up images of vulgar opulence, moral decay, and murderous treachery. Machiavelli’s The Prince — the so-called “textbook for tyrants” — was dedicated to Catherine de’ Medici’s father, and it was rumored that each of her children carried a copy with them at all times. Catherine herself inspired such nicknames as the Serpent Queen, the Black Queen, the Maggot from Italy’s Tomb, and (more flatteringly) the Mother of the Modern High-Heeled Shoe. She was also called the Merchant’s Daughter, a dig at her family’s nonaristocratic origins.

Whether or not Catherine was a basilisk who covered her shimmering scales with silk and velvet is up for debate, but it’s true that the Medici dynasty had decidedly common roots. In fact, a little over a century before Catherine’s birth, the Medicis were little more than casually wealthy textile traders. I mean, they had money, but not in mind-boggling amounts. That all changed in 1397, when they started a bank and discovered a latent talent for money management. By the mid-1400s, the Banco dei Medici was the biggest bank on the continent, and the Medicis themselves were the richest family in Europe.

Money can’t buy you happiness, but it sure can get you just about anything else, including various titles, marriages into noble families, a couple of popedoms, and the de facto lordship of the entire city-state of Florence. Also: a tomb designed by Michelangelo! The only problem with the Medici family’s scheme to dominate Europe was that supply couldn’t keep up with demand; even as they acquired all these positions of power, their ability to produce heirs veered into a steep decline. By the time Catherine was born, she was the only legitimate heir of the main branch of the family, and it soon became clear that she was quite possibly the last.

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