Search Results for: The Stranger

Seeking a Roadmap for the New American Middle Class

The next American middle class
Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Livia Gershon | Longreads | March 2018 | 8 minutes (1,950 words)

Over the past few months, Starbucks, CVS, and Walmart announced higher wages and a range of other benefits like paid parental leave and stock options. Despite what the brands say in their press releases, the changes probably had little to do with the Republican corporate tax cuts, but they do reflect a broader economic prosperity, complete with a tightening a labor market. In the past couple of years, real wages hit their highest levels ever, and even the lowest-paid workers started getting raises. As Matt Yglesias wrote at Vox, “for the first time in a long time, the underlying labor market is really healthy.”

But it doesn’t feel that way, does it? From the new college graduate facing an unstable contract job and mounds of debt to the 30-year-old in Detroit picking up an extra shift delivering pizzas this weekend, it just seems like we’re missing something we used to have.

In a 2016 Conference Board survey, only 50.8 percent of U.S. workers said they were satisfied with their jobs, compared with 61 percent in 1987 when the survey was first done. In fact, job satisfaction hasn’t come close to that first reading in this century. We’re also more anxious and depressed today than we’ve been since the depths of the recession, and we’re dying younger — particularly if we’re poor.

So maybe this is a good moment to stop and think about what really good economic news would look like for American workers. Imagine for a moment that everything goes right. The long, slow recovery from the Great Recession continues, rather than reversing itself and plunging us back into high unemployment. Increased automation doesn’t displace a million truck drivers but creates new, more skilled driving jobs. The retirement of the Baby Boomers reduces labor supply, driving up wages at nursing homes, call centers, and the rest of the gigantic portion of the economy where pay is low.

Would this restore dignity to work and a sense of optimism to the nation? Would it bring back the kind of pride we associate with the 1950s GM line worker?

I don’t think it would. I think it would take far more fundamental changes to win justice for American workers. But I also think it’s possible to strive for something way better than the postwar era we often remember as a Golden Age for workers.

Let’s start by dispelling the idea that postwar advances for American workers were some kind of natural inevitability that could never be replicated today. Yes, in the 1940s, the United States was in a commanding position of economic dominance over potential rivals decimated by war. And yes, companies were able to translate the manufacturing capacity and technological know-how built up through the military into astounding new bounty for consumers. But, when it comes to profitability, business has also had plenty of boom times in recent decades, with no parallel advances for workers.

This is the moment to stop and think about what really good economic news would look like for American workers.

Let’s also set aside the nostalgia about how we used to make shit in this country. Page through Working, Studs Terkel’s classic 1972 book of interviews with a broad range of workers, and factories come across as a kind of hellscape. A spot welder at a Ford plant in Chicago describes standing in one place all day, with constant noise too loud to yell over, suffering frequent burns and blood poisoning from a broken drill, at risk of being fired if he leaves the line to use the bathroom. “Repetition is such that, if you were to think about the job itself, you’d slowly go out of your mind,” he told Terkel.

The stable, routine corporate office work that also thrived in the postwar era certainly wasn’t as unpleasant as that, but there’s a whole world of cultural figures, from Willy Loman to Michael Scott, that suggest it was never an inherent font of meaning.

The fact that the Golden Age brought greater wealth, pride, and status to American workers, both blue- and white-collar, wasn’t really about the booming economy or the nature of the work. It was a result of power politics and deliberate decisions. In the 1930s and ‘40s, unionized workers, having spent decades battling for power on the job, at severe risk to life and livelihood, were a powerful force. And CEOs of massive corporations like General Motors were scared enough of radical workers, and hopeful enough about the prospects of shared prosperity, to strike some deals.

A consensus about how jobs ought to work emerged from these years. Employers would provide decent pay, health insurance, and pensions for large swaths of the country’s workers. The federal government would build a legal framework to address labor disputes and keep corporate monopolies from getting out of control. Politicians from both parties would march in the Labor Day parade every year, and workers would get their fair share of the new American prosperity.

Today, of course, the postwar consensus has broken down. Even if average workers are making more money than we used to, the gap between average and super-rich makes us feel like we’re getting nowhere. We may be able to afford iPhones and big-screen TVs, but we’ve got minimal chances of getting our kids into the elite colleges that define the narrow road to success.

And elite shows of respect for workers ring more and more hollow. Unions, having drastically declined in membership, no longer have a seat at some of the tables they used to. Politicians celebrate businesses’ creation of jobs, not workers’ accomplishment of necessary and useful labor. A lot of today’s masters of industry clearly believe that workers are an afterthought, since robots will soon be able to do anyone’s jobs except theirs.

But let’s not get too nostalgic about the Golden Age. As many readers who are not white men may be shouting at me by this point, there was another side to these mid-century ideas about work. The entire ideological framework defining a job with dignity was inextricably tied up with race and gender.

From the start of the industrial revolution, employers used racism to divide workers. And union calls for respect and higher wages were often inseparable from demands that companies hire only white men. The Golden Age didn’t just provide white, male workers with higher wages than everyone else but also what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “public and psychological wage” of a sense of racial superiority.

Just as importantly, white men in the boom years also won stay-at-home wives. With rising male wages, many white women — and a much smaller number of women of other races — could now focus all their energy on caring for home and family. For the women, that meant escape from working at a mill or cooking meals and doing laundry for strangers. But it also meant greater economic dependence on their husbands. For the men, it was another boost to their living standard and status.

Golden Age corporate policies, union priorities, and laws didn’t create the ideal of the white, breadwinner-headed family, but they did reinforce it. Social Security offered benefits to workers and their dependents rather than to all citizens, and excluded agricultural and domestic workers, who were disproportionately black. The GI Bill helped black men far less than white ones and left out most women except to the extent that their husbands’ benefits trickled down to them.

Let’s also set aside the nostalgia about how we used to make shit in this country.

Today, aside from growing income inequality, unstable jobs, and the ever-skyward climb of housing and education costs, a part of the pain white, male workers are feeling is the loss of their unquestioned sense of superiority.

So, can we imagine a future Golden Age? Is there a way to make working for Starbucks fulfill all of us the way we remember line work at GM fulfilling white men? Maybe. With an incredible force of political will, it might be possible to rejigger the economy so that modern jobs keep getting better. It would start with attacking income inequality head-on. The government could bust up monopolistic tech giants, encourage profit-sharing, and maybe even take a step toward redistributing inherited wealth. We’d also need massive social change to ensure people of color and women equal access to the good new jobs, and men and white people would need to learn to live with a loss of the particular psychological wages of masculinity and whiteness.

But even all that would still fail to address one thing that made work in the Golden Age fulfilling for men: the wives. Stay-at-home moms of the mid-twentieth century weren’t just a handy status symbol for their men. They were household managers and caregivers, shouldering the vast majority of child-raising labor and creating a space where male workers could rest and be served. And supporting a family was a key ingredient that made otherwise draining, demeaning jobs into a source of meaning.

Few men or women see a return to that ideal as a good idea today. But try imagining what good, full-time work for everyone looks like without it. Feminist scholar Nancy Fraser describes that vision as the Universal Breadwinner model — well-paid jobs, with all the pride and status that come with them, for all men and women. She notes that it would take massive spending to outsource childcare and other traditionally unpaid “female” work — particularly since those jobs would need to be good jobs too. It would also leave out people with personal responsibilities that they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, hand over to strangers, as well as many with serious disabilities. And it certainly wouldn’t solve the problem many mothers and fathers report today of having too little time to spend with family.

A really universal solution to the problem of bad jobs would have to go beyond “good jobs” in the Golden Age model. It would be a world where we can take pride in our well-paid jobs at Starbucks without making them the center of our identities. That could mean many more part-time jobs with flexible hours, good pay, and room for advancement. It could mean decoupling benefits like health care and retirement earnings from employment and providing a hefty child allowance. Certainly, it would mean a social and psychological transformation that lets both men and women see caring work, and other things outside paid employment, as fully as valuable and meaningful as a job.

As a bonus, this kind of solution would also make sense when we do fall back into recession, or if the robots do finally come for a big chunk of our jobs.

All this might sound absurdly utopian. We are, after all, living in a world where celebrity business leaders claim to work 80-plus hour weeks while politicians enthusiastically deny health care to people who can’t work.

But the postwar economy didn’t happen on its own. It was the product of a brutal, decades-long fight led by workers with an inspiring, flawed vision. And today, despite everything, new possibilities are emerging. Single-payer health care is a popular idea, and “socialism” has rapidly swung from a slur to a legitimate part of the political spectrum. Self-help books like The 4-Hour Work Week — which posit the possibility of a radically different work-life balance, albeit based on individual moxie rather than social change — have become a popular genre. Young, black organizers in cities across the country are developing their own cooperative economic models. And if there’s any positive lesson we can take from the current political moment, it’s that you never know what could happen in America. Maybe a new Golden Age is possible. It’s at least worth taking some time to think about how we would want it to look.

***

Livia Gershon is a freelance journalist based in New Hampshire. She has written for the Guardian, the Boston Globe, HuffPost, Aeon and other places.

 

The Billionaire Philanthropist

Photo: AP Images

Jacob Silverman | Longreads | March 2018 | 9 minutes (2,268 words)

 

 

During the political chaos of the last year, one American institution has emerged stronger than ever. As its revenues soared, Amazon’s stock price has steadily ascended, cresting $1,500 and beyond. Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder and CEO, has experienced what The New York Times described as “what could be the most rapid personal-wealth surge in history.” His net worth hovers somewhere around $130 billion. His 400,000 acres in land holdings — much of it in west Texas, where Blue Origin, his space company, is based — makes him the 28th largest landowner in the country, according to the magazine The Land Report. By any standard, Bezos is one of the richest people to have ever lived, while Amazon exerts an impossible-to-overstate influence on a range of fields, from retail to publishing to cloud computing. As part of the highly touted HQ2 contest, twenty North American cities — finalists winnowed from a list of hundreds of applicants — are falling over themselves to offer tax breaks and other inducements so that Amazon will choose their municipality for its next headquarters. The power of Bezos, and Amazon, seems unbridled.

Reckoning with Bezos’s influence means approaching Amazon and its “notoriously confrontational” culture, as Brad Stone described it in The Everything Store, with a critical eye. Paging through Stone’s 2013 book on the ecommerce giant and its founder, and watching the many Bezos interviews available on YouTube, yields a picture of a smart, cunning, singularly driven executive with total confidence in his vision. Amazon is run on lean budgets, almost like a startup, in an atmosphere of high expectations and continual performance assessments that cause some employees to “live in perpetual fear.” Stone explains that if you’re seeking the source of this tense, high-achieving environment, you should look to the founder: “All of this comes from Bezos himself. Amazon’s values are his business principles, molded through two decades of surviving in the thin atmosphere of low profit margins and fierce skepticism from the outside world.” Read more…

The Man in the Mirror

Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait

Alison Kinney | Longreads | March 2018 | 17 minutes (4,156 words)

 

1.

In the foreground of the early Netherlandish painting stands a couple, holding hands, amidst the comforts of their cherry-upholstered, brass chandelier-lit bedroom. The husband, Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini, raises one hand in greeting, but neither to his unnamed wife, who clasps one hand over her belly, nor to the lapdog at their feet: behind the couple, a small, wall-mounted convex mirror reflects two other men, facing the Arnolfinis in their room yet visible only in the glass. One of these men may be the artist himself, Jan van Eyck.

Like many other paintings where looking glasses, polished suits of armor, jugs, and carafes expand or shift the perspectives, The Arnolfini Portrait shows us how many people are really in the picture. Painted mirrors reflect their creators, or at least their easels, in Vermeer’s Music Lesson; in the Jabach family portrait, where Charles Le Brun paints his mirror image right into the group; and in Andrea Solario’s Head of St. John the Baptist, where the reflection of the artist’s own head gleams from the foot of the platter. Mirrors reveal the whole clientele and an acrobat’s feet in Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère; the two observers of a couple’s ring purchase in Petrus Christus’s Goldsmith in his Shop; and, regal in miniature, Philip IV and Mariana of Austria in Velázquez’s Las Meninas. Sometimes mirrors invite us to regard the artist’s reflection as our own; as John Ashbery wrote of Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,

What is novel is the extreme care in rendering
The velleities of the rounded reflecting surface
(It is the first mirror portrait),
So that you could be fooled for a moment
Before you realize the reflection
Isn’t yours.

The mirror’s revelations surprise everyone except the artist, who, in The Arnolfini Portrait, paints his signature over the mirror, like a graffito on the wall: “Johannes de eyck fuit hic 1434.” Jan was here.

Read more…

Dorm Living for Adults

AP Photo/Julie Jacobson

Instead of having to share your living room with a stranger and make small talk all those hungover mornings while brewing coffee, you can rent a private unit in a shared building from “co-living” firm Common. Marketed as a communal experience, units come with complimentary wi-fi, detergent and toilet paper, and the option to socialize with other residents or not.

At The Baffler, Zach Webb examines this concept and finds nothing redeeming about it. To him, Common exploits a generation anxious about their future prospects. Worse, these units, like so many things in our venture capital-fueled era, “reposition” occupied buildings, disrupting cities’ social fabric. And they reduce a building’s distinctive elements to a type of one-size-fits-all-West-Elm-coffee-shop aesthetic, which helps make cities at large look less like themselves and more like one anywhere America. Instead of truly creating “a commons” where people of different socioeconomic classes meet, Common begs the question: what do we want our cities to be?

In the realization of their houses, a complex network of contact and camaraderie, an entire ecosystem of social practice is displaced, its constitutive bodies dispersed to the far fringes of the city, supplanted by the inorganic experience manufactured by Common. In the former, this net is predicated on “contact” as defined by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities—the passing conversations on the sidewalk, the cup of coffee offered by a neighbor when you’re locked out, the collective monitoring of children at play, all of it undergirded by a balance of public and private life embedded in an area of socioeconomic diversity. The accumulation of these seemingly trivial moments and experiences generates, as Jacobs writes, “a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need.”

Common, for its part, excises the warmth of this community-building and retains only its atomized bits: a greeting mumbled in passing, an Instagram snapped of the local bodega cat, generating the false impression of being within and of a true neighborhood for impermanent Commoners biding out leases usually numbering in months. At Common, a Commoner’s energy is used to network with fellow Commoners of equivalent class status and material use.

Common’s expunging of tragedy from the commons thus takes with it the possibility generated by contact outside a uniform bubble. At Common, there’s just simply no need to borrow a cup of a sugar from a neighbor or fall into conversation with strangers at the laundromat.

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The Stuff That Came Between Mom and Me: A Story About Hoarding

Getty / Illustration by Katie Kosma

Susan Fekete | Longreads | March 2018 | 13 minutes (3,541 words)

 

I lived in Atlanta for six years after college. I only went back to St. Pete twice in that time, and both times I stayed with my aunt Linda.

Mom would make excuses about not having cleaned the house, not having done laundry, and therefore not having clean sheets on my bed. It made me sad, a little, because I knew they were lies. I knew her house was full.

Full — floor to ceiling, windows to walls — of stuff. Her mass of belongings included objects de art, trinkets, furniture, memorabilia, books, magazines, journals. And many cats, especially ones with extra toes. Although no one was sure anymore how many of those — or of anything else for that matter — she had.

When I visited, she came over to my aunt’s house, and we hugged and laughed and loved each other greatly and talked for hours on end. About everything.

Everything except the stuff in her house. My mother was a terrific metaphysician, passionate about the world around her and the lives of others. She was spiritual even at her darkest moments, and funny even in her greatest sorrows. She was a joy to be around, if you could avoid the stuff.
Read more…

The Olympian Who Believes He’s Always On TV

Mary PilonThe Kevin Show: An Olympic Athlete’s Battle with Mental Illness | Bloomsbury | March 2018 | 14 minutes (3,775 words)

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you.” –The Velveteen Rabbit

As Kevin Hall stood onboard the Artemis, a 72-foot catamaran, trying to help his teammates dredge Andrew Simpson’s body out of the water, he wasn’t entirely sure if the scene unfolding before him was really happening or not.

Andrew “Bart” Simpson, whose body might or might not have been in the water, was a stocky British Olympic gold medalist with short, spiky chestnut hair and a wide smile. One of the world’s best sailors, Simpson knew what to do in emergencies, which made his being trapped underwater for ten minutes all the more incomprehensible. The $140-million Artemis was supposed to be a technological wonder, so it made no sense to anyone onboard that it had crumpled so quickly into a taco shell, trapping Simpson in its fold.

Finally, Kevin and his teammates were able to pull Simpson’s soggy two hundred pounds out of the water and onto a floating backboard.

The emergency responders began to perform CPR, one officer cutting open Simpson’s wetsuit so he could apply a defibrillator to his chest. They pushed, the sailors waiting for Simpson to breathe, to show some sign of life. But Simpson was dead. He was 36 years old.

Months of preparation and millions of dollars had gone into the design of the Artemis, a vessel that had stunned other sailors with its foils and gadgets and that had seemed almost to fly over the water. Kevin suddenly felt lost. What had happened? Who, if anyone, was to blame? And why had Simpson, of all the sailors on the boat, been the one to die? Kevin had known Simpson for years, their sailing careers often overlapping, intersecting, and running in parallel. Simpson had something that Kevin and some of the other men on board the Artemis did not — an Olympic gold medal — and he represented something that all of the men on board aspired to be: a champion athlete and family man with a kind heart and generous spirit, seemingly unfazed by the success that he had attained.

Kevin thought about all this and more as the emergency workers took Simpson’s body away and everyone went home. In the days that followed, part of him wanted to talk to his teammates about what had happened, but part of him dared not. Because, if he was honest, he still wasn’t entirely sure that the crash and Simpson’s death had really happened. It seemed too horrifying to be real. And for a few moments, there had been that flash.

The Director. Cameras. Actors. Scripts.

Kevin wondered: Had it all just been part of The Show?
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Doomed in Nashville

Scott Boehm via AP

Monica Drake | Longreads | March 2018 | 19 minutes (4,778 words)

 

When my second novel came out, Chuck Palahniuk invited me, along with best-selling thriller writer and friend Chelsea Cain, to share his book tour. We’d make a joint venture of it.

Chuck is established, the author of the novel Fight Club, of course … “and 15 other books,” as he says. We’ve workshopped together for decades. A tour with Chuck would be a roving literary rave! My only hesitation? At 8 years old, my daughter was still young. She wasn’t a baby; still, I was her daily support.

Her father spent long days earning an hourly wage, leaving our house mid-morning and coming back too late to manage her life. A 40-minute commute on public transit added to his workday. He regularly stopped off at a bar before he made it all the way to the house.

When my first novel, Clown Girl, came out, she was a toddler. I’d brought her along on a homespun, couch-surfing road trip of a tour. She and I darted every which way in an old Nissan sedan, sharing bags of chips and sleeves of Oreos, driving between small towns. We met fabulous people. In other words, I juggled indie lit and parenting, and managed without childcare because as a family, we ran on a very slim budget.

Consequently? She attended 43 readings in 52 weeks, pre-kindergarten. It was boot camp; she learned to sit quietly and color while grown-ups did their thing. She learned patience.

This round, my daughter would stay with her grandmother — and she’d be fine — but still I had a clutch of apprehension. If anything were to go wrong, I’d be across the country, reading stories, tipping up a drink, laughing with strangers. The mother-guilt was thick and ready.

Hesitantly, I released myself, temporarily, from the obligations of daily parenting, and went, joining the team.
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The Invisible Lives of Young Women With Chronic Illnesses

Michele Lent Hirsch

Jessica Gross | Longreads | March 2018 | 18 minutes (4,580 words)

When Michele Lent Hirsch was growing up, she was hardly ever sick. In college, she had to have hip surgery; by her mid-20s, she had also been diagnosed with idiopathic anaphylaxis, thyroid cancer, and Lyme disease. In the midst of these issues, her father, who’d had multiple sclerosis, ended his own life. Now in her 30s, Hirsch has had years of experience moving through the world as a chronically ill young woman. In her new book, Invisible: How Young Women with Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and the Pressure to Seem Just Fine, she interweaves personal experience and reporting to examine, through the lens of chronic illness, issues that she believes all women face.

Hirsch and I are friends—we get together every few months to talk about writing and our lives (she’s a poet, too)—and yet I didn’t know the depth of her experience until I read her thoughtful, complicated, and beautifully written book. I think that’s part of her point: to bring these under-discussed experiences into the light. We met at a restaurant in the West Village and spoke about how chronic illness throws issues of being young and female into sharper relief, how illness intersects with not only gender and age but also sexuality and race, and how, in the midst of these deeply challenging experiences, there is a basic need for empathy.

* * *

I imagine it was an intense decision to write publicly about your experience of illness. Can you talk about deciding to write the book?

I’d had this idea for an embarrassing number of years before I acted on it. I’d had hip surgery, I’d had anaphylaxis that almost killed me, but it wasn’t until I got cancer that I started to think, “This is a very particular experience that I’m having.”

I was diagnosed with cancer in 2011, right before my 26th birthday. Originally, I wanted to write an essay about the particulars of being young, female and sick and all the ways that illness bumped up against what was already difficult about being a young woman in the world. I mentioned it to a friend who was an editor and a writer, and she said, “That sounds bigger than an essay. That sounds like a whole book.” I thank her in the back of the book, because she was right.

For a few years, I didn’t believe her. I think that’s because so many women don’t talk about this stuff with each other, so you could be friends with someone and not even know that they have a chronic illness. But over the next few years, I started to see how often it just came up at parties or in conversation with a stranger or a friend of a friend. I began to realize that not only was this bigger than an essay, it was also way bigger than my experience. So at some point I said to my friend, “You’re right, it’s a book.” It is this vicious cycle: If you keep thinking you’re the only one, then you’re not going to share your experience, and then no one shares it, and then we’re all living in these weird, sad little silos. Read more…

Asking For It

Andrew Matthews/PA Wire

Piper J. Daniels | Hotel Amerika | Winter 2017 | 12 minutes (3,365 words)

When I was a girl, the thing I loved most was the game Light as a Feather. Back then, I felt weightless when any girl had her hands on me, so lying there with six girls’ fingers tucked beneath my body, I’d float to the ceiling, flushed and breathless. The touching was permissioned, so I could just enjoy it, though there was, of course, that fear of the occult. In the days that followed the game, I’d worry about the evil spirits that might’ve entered me. I would lie awake feeling something of the devil a-flicker inside.

Light As A Feather was a ritual performed in murmuring secrecy. It was sexy and witchy, but did not require me to invite anyone or anything inside. Ouija, on the other hand, was a kind of penetration I was not yet prepared for, a game my mother called the occult version of asking for it. 

There are many reasons why in girlhood, we become necessarily preoccupied with possession. It makes sense—the fascination, as you are trying so desperately to grow into your body, with the dark thing that would drag you away. For girls are taught that the zenith of our lives occurs when we are most deeply inhabited by another. It is no coincidence in The Exorcist that the devil selects Regan for writhing. She is a pre-teen, which means most poised to be entered.

Once upon a time, everything carnal or feral in me was made, by faith, moribund.  For fourteen years, my body remained this way — untouchable, untouched.

Once upon a time, I had no idea what I felt like inside. I’d lie in bed at night, fingers pinned beneath the small of my back so that God would not mistake a single movement for a sin.

It was only a matter of time before I was broken open.

***

He was, at the time, my best friend. When I wouldn’t let him kiss me, he shoved his fingers in my mouth. They were cold and smelled sharply of clementines.

And then it happened that he wormed my clothes away, and made me try things on, made me spin in a circle, motioning with his finger, a 360-degree humiliation.

He choked me out on the heart-shaped canopy bed my father built for me when I was a little girl. There was a Maglite under the mattress I used to read past my bedtime, and he fished it out and beat me with it until I agreed to lie still.

“I love you,” he said, like I was an idiot not to know it. “I love you.”

As he entered me, the room went black and filled with tiny stars. I had no idea I was so connected inside.

It was over for maybe minutes, and then it was never over. [1]

For months afterward, I avoided the eyes of my mother, father, and sister. I was worried they could tell by my face that I was changed. And then there was the feeling that everyone could see and smell my hymen ripped open, that the bruised triangle between my legs would point now only to what was missing.

I kept thinking, this creature, this monster, that my friend whom I loved turned out to be — was it there all along? Or was it culled from his body by my body, twirling as his finger guided me, tracing slow circles in the air?

***

In the game Bloody Mary, where girls summon a murderous spirit in the mirror, the point is not to invite evil, to stir the supernatural pot. To summon evil is to acknowledge its inevitability, to address that each moment spent in safety feels like holding your breath. If being a girl means leaving this world in little pieces, let’s get it over with. In chanting, let us exact some small control, let it be clear when and how we are asking for it.

It was over for maybe minutes, and then it was never over.

Sleep was something to be avoided then. Within sleep, all the hidden things choiring like starlings.

The dream in which the graveyard slides into the sea, and I drink the water clogged by corpses’ long, still-growing hair.

The dream where I feel safe from harm in a field of sunflowers until one by one, they give me up like a name they swore they’d take to the grave.

So much of my life was spent in that blue hour of morning, too early for waking and much too late to fall asleep. I’d put myself in a kind of trance watching bloody true crime television. Like melancholic music when your heart is broken, sometimes the only thing you can do with a feeling is lean into it.

Fictional shows in which rapists were captured and punished enraged me. I preferred survivors of torture talking straight to the camera. Stalked, abducted, raped, shot at point-blank range. Then burned, tossed in a trunk, tied with rebar to a desert stone. The actresses reenacting the story crawling so convincingly across lush lawns in blood-soaked nightgowns or running through a dark wood with only half of their heads attached.

A documentary about Seattle singer Mia Zapata, who wrote a song about being murdered and spread in pieces all over town just before being killed by a stranger who strangled her with her own sweatshirt.

A documentary about the Tate murders, in which the crime scene photo of Abigail Folgers shows her less heiress, more lawn stain. Her last words to the man stabbing her, “You’ve got me.  I’m already dead.”

Maybe I was morbid to find comfort or, at the very least, distraction in these stories which were gruesome beyond my imagination. But I needed a break from the narrative I was living. The one where girls in my town were fish that fill a manmade lake, or fair chase pheasants set loose in the forest. The narrative where being hunted was the only thing they ever had in mind for us.

On a popular daytime talk show, footage of a body being exhumed. There are machines to help with the unearthing of the burial vault and tools to break its seal, revealing a cherry colored casket still draped in withered white roses. The shock of these bright colors coming out of the dirt makes it seem as though the casket too could be pried open to reveal a girl who is more like a Russian doll than a decomposing body or even a girl who would open her eyes, like the murder never happened, and say: I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.[2]

When as children, my sister and I named Ken dolls after our enemies and buried them alive beneath the evergreens, and when we dug up dead frogs from the glittery coffins we made for them, praying over their tiny souls in tongues of necromancy, these were not merely games to us, though that is what we said. We knew survival would depend increasingly upon our relationship to resurrection.

***

And so, just as the corn was silking, all I could think about was driving till I hit the Pacific, becoming for all intents and purposes a ghost.

You see, I come from a town where no one leaves and there’s only one way a girl goes missing. Every few years, weighted to the bottom of a golf course pond or stuffed in a storm drain she will be discovered, made Legend.

You see, I come from a town where there’s only one way a girl is made Legend.

And in that town, that the air does not ring with them, that the new crocuses do not chatter with what has become of them, that the hushed ground is filled with them where they will remain forever, it is that more than anything that gave me the courage to leave.

Give me a world, I said aloud to no one.  You have taken the world I was.[3]

And a new world opened for me, by and by.

Each night in that blue light, they flickered across the ceiling. Pretty girls turned hungry ghosts who wanted to leave with me. I could see each of their lives like little boats upon the water, bright first, then burning, then snuffed out by the breakers of the sea.

I come from a town where no one leaves and there’s only one way a girl goes missing. Every few years, weighted to the bottom of a golf course pond or stuffed in a storm drain she will be discovered.

I will not say to you that the Legends as I experienced them were real, that I can prove how the room filled with strange heat, buoyed by their breath.

What I’m saying is whether they were real or mere projections of the mind seen with intense clarity, we belonged to one another. And knowing them, what was done to them, gave me one hundred new reasons to survive.

***

I began at dawn through the green maze of corn, an achingly familiar crop that dizzied suddenly with its vastness, its flickering infinity. I drove all day long, straight through Des Moines’ end-of-the-world darkness, where I made believe the few flickering lights were lanterns of the last survivors. Throughout Nebraska, day and night, earth and sky fused together, falling like a white sheet over me. That such monotony gave way to mountains was its own little miracle, though I couldn’t decide at first whether they made me feel sheltered or loomed over. By the time I got to Oregon, the clouds seemed close enough that you could reach your hand through the sunroof and come back with a fistful of nimbostratus.  And when at last I reached Seattle, lush and so fervently green it bordered upon narcotic, I knew for certain I would find heaven there.

The first thing I did was drive to the corner of 24th Avenue and South Washington Street, the place where Mia Zapata was made Legend. It felt like the only right place to start.  Twenty years had passed since her death, something like 5,520 days of rain, and it seemed to me she still smudged the earth, though there was nothing of her spirit there, which I knew would move through darkened rooms bright as aurora borealis.

I could see each of their lives like little boats upon the water, bright first, then burning, then snuffed out by the breakers of the sea

It was like stepping inside a house where you intuit immediately that something horrible has happened, except that there were no walls around it, making it that much harder to escape.

Aside from my books, I didn’t want anything that home had threaded through. Everything else I burned or left on the side of the road. What I needed, more than anything, was a perfect loneliness, pure and cold and bright. I found a studio two streets east of where Mia had lived when she’d been alive. With the apartment empty but for a mattress, windows clean, ceilings high, walls freshly white, I loved Seattle, which was more a city in the evening when its greenery folded into darkness. That first night, there was whiskey, and the Legends partnered and danced sweetly across the ceiling, and Nina Simone sang to a lover I hadn’t met yet: You’re spring to me / all things to me / don’t you know you’re life itself?

Back in high school, there were girls I loved for their beauty, and for their ability to receive pleasure without needing to return it. I would learn little things about them—a favorite song, a moon sign so I could joke that we were star-crossed or destined depending—but I did not use or remember their names. I wanted them for the way they kissed, the way they moved and sounded in the dark, that they smelled of rosehip and jasmine or Parliaments and Jameson, that beneath my tongue, they’d rise to the ceiling like steam. The only girls I named were the girls with whom things went terribly wrong.

For instance, there was I Should’ve Loved A Thunderbird Instead, who threw a brick through the window of my car, filled the driver’s seat with mayonnaise, and lit all of my shoes on fire before trying to fuck me in the driveway of my parents’ home.

There was What Spring Does To The Cherry Trees, who had feverish dreams I was the devil and tried, on more than one occasion, to spoon holy water into my hair before accosting me one day when I was at the dentist, marching right up to the chair to hit me in the face with the zippered end of her leather jacket.

In both instances, the authorities had to be called, and I authored wild explanations that absolved me entirely. I did not learn, in either instance, that for all the charm in the world, I would always be out of my depth until I could become a woman who could set her heart on something.

***

My favorite book as a girl was Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. I found myself in the farewell letter Willie-Jay addresses to Perry, one the novel’s killers:

You are a man of extreme passion, a hungry man not quite sure where his appetite lies, a deeply frustrated man striving to project his individuality against a backdrop of rigid conformity. You exist in a half-world suspended between two superstructures, one self-expression and the other self-destruction.

The juxtaposition of individuality and conformity could be true of anyone, as could the notion of existing in a half-world. What frightened me then was the misplaced hunger, the way that Perry, pulled by confusion and desire, became a killer, a grown man who had yet to understand his appetite.

The trouble with being a girl is that you are expected to trade craving for hunger, hunger the specter that looms over you even as you sleep. And this makes you feel like a predator, a prowler in the lambs’ midst.

Being both evangelical and gay from birth, I worried at purity balls that my sinner’s skin would singe my satin gown. I was made to wear a purity ring that only a wedding ring could remove—this, an offering of love from my earthly and heavenly fathers.

What I knew that they did not: If God made me, he made me an aberration of nature.  Try as I might to people the wedding chapels of my imagination, there were other things consuming me, other fires, which burned the bridegrooms, and leveled the altars to ash.

It was with this same burning that I left my hometown, determined to find what I wanted and, for the first time in my life, to ask for it.

***

I learned Seattle by watching it like a television. Learned, for example, that I would need to trade my thick Midwestern skin for indifference. Learned that a morning’s bleariness was known to burn away like a marine layer, at which point the branches, hanging lush and wet and low, flickered for a bit in the wide pinking light. And on those days, people would stand in the street with reverence, or perhaps I imagined it that way. In any case, it made me feel that I was less alone.

I met her at a bar called Flowers, quiet and dark, three whiskies in.

From the start it was almost too much to look at her, so I stared instead out the windows, balmy with breath, tracing my fingers through their slow sweat.

The trouble with being a girl is that you are expected to trade craving for hunger, hunger the specter that looms over you even as you sleep.

When I worked up the nerve to be near her I was hooked right away by the friction between the few cautious words she afforded me and the way she knew, like no one had ever known, how to own me with her hot, hungry look. Those eyes that reduced continents to kindling, crisping planets of the Milky Way until the known universe scattered like ash from a cigarette’s sleeve and in that bar, it was only the two of us. And in that moment, I was the first woman ever made or the last one alive at the end of the world.

We compared scrapes born of war stories, and secretly, I named hers after summer constellations.

Southern Crown.
Northern Crown.
Arrow.
Archer.
Shield.

When I touched myself and was close to coming, I whispered her name, evoking her: a séance.

In the nights that followed, she was the specter. Bright, inscrutable orb darting the darkened room.

Every day the Legends got hungrier. I could hear the grinding of each twinkling maw. We were all starving in our own way, them because they’d been denied their rightful lives as women, me as a woman with the world before her too frightened and scarred to do a damn thing about it.

My days with them were lucid dreams. Their stories swirled around me, and if I wanted, I could pluck one from the air and ask her.

Legend who spoke of her body discovered in the dumpster behind Dot Liquor.

Legend who was murdered while playing Bloody Mary in the mirror.

Legends whose sweet mouths appeared still singing in the water, multiples of Millais’ Ophelia.

Legend three days shy of her sweet sixteen birthday party, who received instead the party where everyone searches and searches, finding nothing in the end but a crawl space filled with bone.

I say that I asked them for their stories, but over time, the room became cacophonous. It was sometimes hard to remember I wasn’t one of them. I was beginning to feel like my body was an Ouija board full of vague answers: yes, no, goodbye. Forever anticipating that moment where the wind shifts and the room moves from carefree to electric and malevolent.

The ghost I knew by heart was Mia. She was the only one who moved through the world with me. It was, after all, her neighborhood, and she was nice enough to show me around. We spoke through a kind of telekinesis, girl to ghost, and although it is strange to say so, Mia was my first Seattle friend. I would learn I wasn’t the only one who felt that way, that many girls in Seattle were descendants of Mia, beautiful and strange but because of her story, less innocent, walking home from the Comet Tavern, their keys tiny knives between their fingers, their eyes two fierce dogs gone hunting in the night.

In Buddhism, there is a creature known as the Hungry Ghost, a spirit characterized by great craving and eternal starvation. Small of mouth, narrow of throat, Hungry Ghosts are all desire, with no way to satiate. Sometimes they’ll receive a drop of water which evaporates upon the lips, or food, which bursts into flames before they can swallow. Each iota of desire comes with the consequence of pain, and being a woman had me like a Hungry Ghost. I am no longer willing to forfeit the wild and beautiful things I thirst for all for some craving gone quiet.

What I want now is a balance between woman and ghost.

A courage that has nothing to do with survival.

I want to eat a Clementine without thinking of his cold fingers.

I want Mia to eat my heart from cupped hands as Beatrice did Dante’s, and for everyone to vow on her behalf: I will not let him make of me a craven thing when bravery is so much sweeter.

I want to never forget the Legends, but to set them free, or to trap them in a lucid dream from which I will myself awake, so that I may finally see past them, see instead the first sailboats of morning upon the water, salty and cerulean, and wonder how I got so lucky. And wonder I am alive to know it at all.

“I want to be with someone who knows secret things,” Rilke said, “or else alone.” And I would like that to be my love letter to her.

I want her to see in perfect detail the things that might have destroyed me, and how I chose beauty instead. I want her to know so she never doubts it again, that she is commensurate of that beauty.

I want to move into the terror and the awe of this rare and beautiful thing between us, and hold there until we forget who we are, or how we might ruin one another, for as close and as long as she’ll let me.

And if ever she asks, without a word, I will gently
let her go.


[1] Heather McHugh
[2] William Faulkner
[3] Anne Carson

* * *

The essay first appeared in the Winter 2017 issue of Hotel Amerika, a biannual print literary journal based in Chicago, and is forthcoming in Daniels’ debut essay collection, Ladies Lazarus, from Tarpaulin Sky Press.

My Abuser’s Gender Made Me Doubt My Experience

Caroline Catlin | Longreads | February 2018 | 11 minutes (2,695 words)

Here are some things I know: It happened in September of my junior year at college. It happened on a Friday. I left the party and went home with a well-liked acquaintance. The next morning I met a friend for coffee. She laughed, and said she was proud of me for being so “wild.” As we spoke, another friend walked into the cafe, said I looked “off,” and asked if I was okay. I began to cry. I lay in the bed of a third friend while she researched the process of reporting rape. As I waited, I curled my body into the shape of a comma. There was a circular bruise between my legs. There was blood in my underwear. I saw a therapist, just once. She offered to bring me to the hospital. I refused her offer. Instead, I took pictures of the marks on my body and hid them in a folder on my desktop named “other.” Just in case, I told myself.

***

The summer before I turned 13, I spent most of my time alone in the woods. Something was wrong, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I knew not to talk about this with anyone, knew that the adults would minimize or escalate what was happening inside of me. Besides, even if I wanted to talk about it, what would I say? I convinced myself that if I followed certain patterns, I would feel okay again. Three taps on one tree, two taps on another. Despite my efforts, by the time my birthday rolled around in October, I was becoming unhinged. My parents, loving and generous, had gifted me a birthday trip — a once in a lifetime opportunity to go with my mom to Florida to see dolphins. For the big unveiling, I unwrapped a small wooden box engraved with a dolphin on its front. That night, I took the box to bed with me, cradling it as I cried. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t this — even this — make me happy?


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