Search Results for: fuck

Addiction’s Seismic Effects on a Family

Illustration by Laurent Hrybyk

Sarah Evans | Longreads | December 2019 | 9 minutes (2,405 words)

 

“Get the fuck out of my life.”

Sam’s voice wobbles and cracks, confessing to youth and vulnerability that his venom-filled words otherwise mask. The door slams in my face, as my youngest child runs — literally runs — to meet his drug dealer. I heave a sigh and head to bed for the night. We won’t see Sam again tonight, and maybe not tomorrow either.

***

It wasn’t always like this, but I can construct the map that has led us here. Snippets of his childhood haunt me. Tonight I get lost in a memory of a hot summer night when my kids were spinning around like tops in the backyard under the strings of light that crisscrossed our backyard. I can still hear the peals of laughter escaping Sam, barely out of toddlerhood. His pace picked up, making my stomach flip-flop just watching him. His older sister, Mia, came to an abrupt halt and sat down next to me.
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(Who Gets to) Just Up and Move

Patrik Dunder / Getty

Nicole Walker | Longreads | January 2020 | 21 minutes (5,273 words)

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could. — Louise Erdrich

***

Like white settlers did in the 1800s, the trees are moving west. Unlike the pioneers/white settlers, they’re not going very fast. About 10 miles a decade. It will take a long time for the trees to decimate buffalo populations, turn prairie into wheat, kill indigenous populations, and establish Walmart as the largest employer. Still. They’re coming. Thirsty, trees of the east move westward, as, due to climate change, the rain in the east is drying up. Fortunately, rains in the Midwest grow heavier. The trees, tempted by this, send their seeds a little further to the left. It’s mainly broadleaf, deciduous plants like the Scarlet Oak that want to move. Beware Gambel Oak, you scrubbier version. The big trees are coming for your rain.

Salt Lake City had once been the home of the Ute People. Utah gets its name from the Utes, but no one really talks about them. They had escaped white settling for longer than other Native Americans — mainly because of the time it took to bring first trees, then backhoes, then politics to the Salt Lake Valley.

In the 1600s, they were among the first to procure horses from the Spanish and they traded with Hispanic settlers, but remained unmolested until 1847 when the Mormons arrived. Before that, the Utes and some bands of Shoshone people had lived among the rivers and the lakes, catching fish and organizing plants alongside the banks. The rivers were everyone’s and no one had fences, but then the Mormons came and, although the Mormons didn’t kill the Utes straightaway, they pushed the Utes toward the Uintah Basin where there are few rivers and few fish. After moving Utes to a reservation and then taking that reservation back, they forced them into allotments where, even with irrigation, the ground was too salty and sandy to be of much agricultural use. The Mormons shrugged their shoulders and went back to plan their Days of ’47 Parade. The Ute children were sent to Indian Boarding Schools like Albuquerque High, from where half of them never returned home. Move out, the white settlers said as they pulled lines from the Book of Mormon to claim this as their one true home, where God himself told them to come in, make yourself comfortable.
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If My Scars Could Talk

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Tega Oghenechovwen | Longreads | January 2020 | 15 minutes (3,777 words)

Content warning: This piece contains mentions of child abuse and childhood sexual abuse.

* * *

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain

I rise — Maya Angelou

* * *

1. Why is the World Silent?

I am 7. B is 8. We are on the balcony of this monstrous brick house, naked. Our small bodies are soaking in gasoline. Our shirts, shorts, and shoes are on the concrete balustrade with our bags. A Good Samaritan who found us at the bus park trying to run for our lives just dragged us back. B’s teeth are inside his tongue. His eyes are liquid red. Tears and gasoline have washed away my sense of smell.

We face aunty Em. Her eyes pierce us to the marrow. She has a matchbox. She draws out a matchstick. She threatens to strike it. We shout as if shouting was what we were born to do. Our bodies creak and crack with fear. After a short while, Aunty Em fishes a waist-high koboko from the pantry.

“If you ever —” Lash. “If you ever try—” Lash. Lash. “If you ever try to run again —” Lash. Lash. Lash. She lashes us with the koboko until we become like raw beef; until we promise we will stomach her wickedness; that we will forget we are people’s children, and become her footstools.

Uncle Dee is in his study crafting a model boat for a client. He could be building a bomb to finish us. I wonder why he doesn’t hear us weeping. I wonder where the world is.

We hate here. The food we eat here tastes like burnt soil. Even at that, it’s never enough. Why did our parents dump us here? What did we do to deserve this? What?

I draw two eagles with enormous wings on the yellow walls of my room — one for me, the other for B. Aunty Em sees the eagles. She pops my head with the heel of her ko-ko shoe and locks me in a room without any light or window.

Silence speaks in the dark room. I hear the blood flushing my veins, and the worms eating my belly. I cry. I cry until I faint. Why is the world silent? Where is God? Why does He or She do nothing?

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Jersey Girl

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Mako Yoshikawa Story | Summer 2019 | 23 minutes (4,676 words)

 

When my mother first came to America, she wore a pink coat with a rounded collar and four beveled black buttons. A farewell present from her parents and by far the most expensive garment she’d ever owned, the coat was wool, custom-made, and heavy enough to withstand the winters of Boston. It was March 1959; she was 22 and had never been outside of Japan or on a plane, and she’d not seen my father, Shoichi, for a year, but she wasn’t nervous, at least not much, or at least less nervous than excited. In her carry-on was a copy of A Little Princess, a pocket Japanese-English dictionary, and a daikon, a Japanese turnip, that she planned to grate, douse with soy sauce, and share with Shoichi for their first meal together in America.

The story of the eighteen months that followed, when my mother lived with my father in Boston, also sounded like a fairy tale.

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The Christmas Tape

SKIF Production / Getty, and Homestead Studio

Wendy McClure | Longreads | December 2019 | 18 minutes (4,618 words)

The Christmas Tape has always existed.

The Christmas Tape was recorded around 1973 or 1974. My dad thinks we were in our second Oak Park house, the one on Elmwood. I would have been 2 or 3. I don’t remember.

The Christmas Tape was our family tape, a seven-inch reel of holiday music played on an open-reel deck. The first four songs were taped from a folk-music show called The Midnight Special, which aired Saturday evenings in Chicago. I don’t know which one of my parents recorded the Christmas Tape, but I think it was my mother.

The Christmas Tape meant Christmas, which meant that everything was going to be all right.

Because the songs came off the radio — because whoever taped them had only a moment to toggle the RECORD switch — they all have their first few seconds clipped off at the beginning. Each one ends with a few soft thuds of fumbled edits before stumbling into the next song.

Nobody knows these songs; nobody outside our family at least. My brother and I never heard them anywhere else, except on The Tape, and we assumed they came from some alternate Christmas universe.

They are, in playing order:

“The Little Drummer Boy,” by Marlene Dietrich, who sings it torpidly in German while a children’s choir mewls rampa pam pam! in accompaniment. (It sounds, really, like a mash-up between the pageant scene in A Charlie Brown Christmas and a smoky Berlin cabaret.)

“Mystery Song Number One,” one of two folk tunes on The Tape so woebegone and obscure that not even my parents could remember what they were called or who the hell performed them. We thought of this one as “Three Drummers from Africa,” since that was the refrain: Three drummers from Africa/ leading the way/ to play for the baby on Christ-a-mas Day.

“Mystery Song Number Two,” featuring a single guitar and the vocals of a slightly dour-sounding trio or quartet. Maybe called “Come Let Us Sing.” Maybe not even a Christmas song.

“Go Where I Send Thee,” by Odetta: For years my brother and I had no idea who the folk singer Odetta was, so for a long time this song was just a voice, neither a he nor a she, racing through the lyrics of raggedly and breathlessly and ferociously in a tempo so frantic and ecstatic that it matched our own Christmas! Christmas! excitement.

Last year I emailed my dad to ask who recorded The Christmas Tape, since he is the only parent I can ask now. He wrote back saying that he and my mom used to love The Midnight Special. “It featured all the folk songs that killed the 60s,” he wrote. It is the sort of funny thing my father likes to say these days, funny but slightly evasive. Does he not remember whether he or my mother recorded the songs? Does he mean he wanted the 60s dead? (Probably.) When I try to nail down family history details I get genial not-quite-answers like this that I have to work around. This is how I came to think it was my mom who recorded The Christmas Tape.

There used to be more to The Christmas Tape. After those first four songs, my mother recorded two popular holiday LPs, collections of carols and traditional songs by the Harry Simeon Chorale and the Robert Shaw Chorale, so that The Tape drifted off into the more conventional realms of “Silent Night” and “Angels We Have Heard on High” for the next two hours or so. Then it sounded more like any other family’s Christmas tape, if other families had Christmas tapes.

I don’t know why my mother decided to tape albums that we already owned and could easily play on the turntable; maybe she grew impatient with recording songs off the radio. Or maybe she wanted to create an expanse of unbroken time, free from the interruption of radio commercials or the need to turn a record album over. Time that she could live inside, with us, seamless as a snow globe.

It’s true the air seemed to change when the tape deck was switched on: a thick pop from the speakers and then an expectant hum, the world enhanced.
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In Jo’s Image

Columbia Pictures

Jeanna Kadlec | Longreads | December 2019 | 9 minutes (2,136 words)

Some stories get inside you in that way where, later on, it’s unclear if you’ve built your life out of the seed that was the art.

To grow up queer, especially if you don’t have the language or the worldview framework for understanding queerness, can be an isolating experience. It is profoundly strange, to feel unrecognizable, beyond language, even to yourself. This can create a gravitational pull toward characters who, for the first time, hold up a mirror and say, me: you’re like me. This phenomenon of first recognition has inspired an entire category of queer art, like the song “Ring of Keys” in the Tony Award-winning musical Fun Home, sung by the child version of the protagonist (Young Alison) when she sees an older butch for the first time: “Someone just came in the door — like no one I ever saw before! I feel… I feel!

This was my experience with Jo March, the protagonist of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.
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A Woman’s Work: Becoming a Home of One’s Own

All illustrations by Carolita Johnson

Carolita Johnson | Longreads | December 2019 | 24 minutes (6,000 words)

This essay began very differently a few months ago. I had started writing it at the same time as the previous one in this series, “Till death do us part,” and, just as I observed while writing the fifth one, the very act of writing it resulted in a real-time evolution of my understanding, processing, assessment, and reassessment of what I was writing about, to the point that by the end of the essay, it was obvious I was not the same person who had begun writing it. Just as I’ve changed from the beginning of an essay to the end of it, every few months I look back on my life and think, yet again, how much more like myself I feel. Three years, three months or three pages — it can be a long, slow recovery, or it can happen in shorter but exponentially more intense increments. Recent widows and widowers will either be glad to know, or be dismayed to know that, well, from what I gather, and with luck, it never really ends.

***

Immediately after my husband Michael died I found myself alone in the house we had been renting from his daughter for the last year and a half. It had been full of his relatives for a week, from the moment he came home to die. Now, it was empty. Empty except for our stuff, and not just our stuff from our life together: preparing for a future that would now never happen, for the six months of treatment and recovery we had expected to live through after his surgery, I’d stocked up on six months’ worth of toilet paper, paper towels, laundry soap, dish soap — soap and cleaners of every kind — dry goods, anything that was heavy and not available within a mile’s walk for me, since I don’t drive. Now, I felt like a stowaway on an abandoned frigate, floating along aimlessly.

I still had our dog, Hammy, with me, a 14-year-old poodle named after the noir fiction writer, Dashiel Hammett, of the “Thin Man” movies, whose dialogue Michael and I often quoted to each other. Hammy, too, was close to approaching the home stretch of his life, but for now he was there to stand guard while I cried on every floor of the house, with a preference for the one in the kitchen. Have you ever noticed that the kitchen floor is somehow the most suited for letting your knees give out before crumpling to the floor in wretched tears? I recommend it. I suppose it’s because the kitchen is where so much of coupled life happens. That’s where you will have eaten together, had coffee in the morning together, sipped hot lemon water and honey to ward off colds together, cooked for each other. If you’re going to mourn your lost partner, it might as well be in the place where the spirit of your partnership seems to occupy every cupboard, shelf, and drawer.

A friend immediately insisted on “sitting shiva” with me, which, as a modern adaptation (though I’m not religious and am unfamiliar with this Jewish tradition), took the form of bringing me my favorite coffee beverage, a cortado, from my favorite cafe so I wouldn’t have to go outside with my leaky-faucet eyes. This is exactly how the crying began to feel: tears that puzzlingly continued even when I thought I was done crying. I mused that it was as if a pipe were broken inside me and I might need to call some kind of metaphysical plumber soon.
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Queens of Infamy: Mariamne I

Illustration by Louise Pomeroy

Anne Thériault | Longreads | December 2019 | 21 minutes (5,424 words)

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

* * *

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

The year was 54 BC, but not really, because Christ hadn’t been born yet. In Rome, it was 700 ab urbe condita, or 700 years since the founding of the city; at the northern edge of the empire, Julius Caesar was veni, vidi, vici-ing his way into Britain for a second time. In Egypt, it was the 251st year of the Ptolemaic dynasty, and a 15-year-old Cleopatra was scheming. In Judea, which had recently lost its full sovereignty and become a client state of Rome, the year was… who even knows? The Judeans of the time would count it as year 258 in the Era of Contracts, though for Jewish people living after the 12th century, it’s anno mundi 3707. Either way, it was there that a new princess was born into a royal family torn apart by usurpers, civil war, and aggressive foreign meddling. In spite of all the chaos in the Hasmonean household, no one could have imagined that tiny Miriam would one day be that dynasty’s last hope.

Like so many women from ancient history, we have very few concrete facts about Miriam, who would gain wider infamy under the Hellenized version of her name, Mariamne. What little information we do have was recorded by men. Even her birth year is pure speculation, based on the typical ages for engagement and marriage in her culture during the 1st century BCE. What we do know for certain is that things were not going well for the Hasmoneans when Mariamne entered the scene.

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We Are All We Have

Lisa Valder / Getty

Megan Stielstra | Longreads | December 2019 | 22 minutes (5,562 words)

I spent last December taking care of my 70-year-old mother after surgery. She doesn’t like being taken care of. She takes care of herself. She lives happily alone in an impeccably decorated condo near Ann Arbor full of art and books and a fireplace that turns on with a remote control. She does Pilates every morning. She visits my 93-year-old grandmother every afternoon. She wears vegan “leather” and doesn’t eat dairy and goes to her doctors’ appointments and canvasses for the Democratic party and Facetimes her grandson in Chicago on Sundays so I can have a merciful extra hour of sleep. We have the same last name; sometimes her former students read my stuff and email through my website to ask if I am related to the Ms. Stielstra who taught fourth grade and totally changed their lives. I’m her daughter, I say. She’s wonderful, they say, and I say, I know.

“I need surgery,” she told me in September. We were on speakerphone, me stuck in traffic trying to get from the university where I teach to my son’s elementary school. In my head was every movie ever made of a child sitting sad and alone because their mother is late to pick them up. The word surgery hit like a baseball bat: I thought of the inoperable tumor in my best friend’s daughter’s brain, my father’s heart attack on a mountain in Alaska, my friend Randy’s emergency quadruple bypass, the cancers that took both my grandfathers, the hip replacement my grandmother had never recovered from, and the tumor they peeled years ago off my ovary. Please don’t let it spread, I thought.

“Not that kind of surgery,” my mother said, responding audibly to my inner monologue. We talk three or four times a week and she knows how I think. Or maybe it’s a mother-daughter thing, our bodies tied together across miles and molecules. Maybe she’s really a witch. “It’s foot surgery,” she said. “Again.”

Five years before she’d had a cyst removed from the bone in her foot and something hadn’t healed right. The pain was constant. She used a cane. She couldn’t drive long distances. She’d been to countless podiatrists, orthopedists, physical therapists. “Looks okay,” they said after X-Rays. “Try this exercise, this ice pack, this orthotic.” She bought special shoes. She bought a stationary bike. Nothing got better and no one could say why. “These things happen as we get older,” they told her, another way of saying It’s all in your head. “I know my body,” she told them, another way of saying Fuck that noise. Of course my elegant mother doesn’t use the word fuck. “Ladies can say shit, damn, and hell,” she always told me, reciting the sentence like it was gospel, like she’d read it in Emily Post. “But they can never say — ” She didn’t finish the sentence.

“Foot surgery is good, right?” I said into the speakerphone. My relief was near-tangible, a thing I could hold to my heart. “Maybe they’ll find out what’s wrong.”

“That’s the plan,” she said. “But I won’t be able to walk for a month and — ” She hates asking me for help. I have a kid and a job and she doesn’t want to bother me even though I tell her repeatedly that it’s the furthest thing from. Of course I’ll be there. This is how we take care of each other.
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Guns and Marriage

Photo by Dwight Eschliman / Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Simone Gorrindo | Longreads | December, 2019 | 16 minutes (4,400 words)

The little boy and I looked out through the sliding glass door at the men in the yard. We both watched as his father, Jack*, picked up a rifle from the patio table, the other men gathering around him. My husband was among them. Jack aimed at an old Kevlar vest sitting in the weeds, and I instinctively took a step backward, but the toddler drew closer, pressing his hands to the glass.

Neither of us startled as the shot rang out through the rural subdivision. In the year and a half that Jack’s son had been alive and my husband had been in the Army, we’d both grown accustomed to the sound of gunfire.

I heard these gunshots on base, as common as the sound of birds, and saw men ruck-marching down the main roads before daybreak, M4s clutched to their chests. But here in the South, I’d become most intimately acquainted with guns in west Alabama backyards like Jack’s, where soldiers shot inanimate objects for weekend entertainment while chicken thighs sizzled on the grill.

Jack put down the gun. Through the glass, I could hear his voice shake as he pretended to make a call over an imaginary radio, fuck and shit splicing the rehearsed lines. The huddle of men around him broke into laughter. I started to laugh, too, but then I realized: He was doing an impression of my husband losing composure during a mission. I was only vaguely aware of what these missions looked like, but I knew that tremor in Andrew’s voice, and Jack was mimicking it perfectly.


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The moment Jack was recalling was a dangerous one, of course, the instant in a mission when things go south (nothing ever really goes as planned, my husband had said to me once). Here was a catch-22 I was learning to live with: I wanted to know my husband, I needed to know him, but I survived emotionally by knowing as little as possible about a huge part of his life. There were days I wished he could tell me more, and others I had to put my hand up like a warning and say: I can’t. I was blocking the image of what could happen to him. Just as much, though, I was looking away from what he might be doing to someone else.

Jack handed the rifle to Russel*, who kicked the Kevlar vest aside, brought the gun to eye level, and fired a shot into the young pine trees lining the fenceless backyard. Between the trees, I could see the world that lay beyond: other identical, fenceless backyards, kids waging water gun wars in the hot afternoon.

Jack’s wife looked over at me from the kitchen, the light from the windows illuminating her bare face. “They’re just shooting at the ground,” she said. The worry must have shown in my eyes.

“They were,” I said. Russel fired another shot into the trees.

She groaned as she walked over to me. Hailey* had grown up in a 3,000-person town in Idaho and had been terrified to drive the interstate when she first got here. But she didn’t bat an eye at guns going off in her backyard.

She slid open the door. “What the hell?” she yelled in a no-bullshit tone I could never muster with the guys.

The men all turned around with the same slightly amused, slightly bewildered expressions on their faces. Jack muttered something under his breath before taking the rifle from Russel.

When Andrew and I left to go back to our house in Georgia on the other side of the Chattahoochee, I asked him if it was safe for Russel to be shooting into those trees.

“That was stupid,” he said as he pulled out of the driveway.

“But he hit the trees, right? I mean, he’s a good shot,” I said.

We paused at a stop sign. Andrew looked over at me. “He could easily miss, Simone. Anyone could. And at that range, a small tree like that might not stop the round. You know that, right?”

Here was a catch-22 I was learning to live with: I wanted to know my husband, I needed to know him, but I survived emotionally by knowing as little as possible about a huge part of his life.

I didn’t. I knew nothing about guns. I’d spent my childhood in California’s Bay Area and had worked as an editor in New York City before moving to Georgia. In my liberal, urban corners of the country, I’d never had the opportunity or need to even touch a gun; they had been something to oppose, to lament, the occasional shot heard from a safe distance at night. Where I’d grown up, owning a gun was about as sinful and strange as voting red. And I had come of age in the era of mass shootings, was just 13 when I watched the news about Columbine unfold on the television for weeks. Something in me had cemented then: a distaste not just for guns, but also for the people who owned them, championed them, fetishized them.

But I was a long way from home now. Guns were on the hips of men shopping for instant mashed potatoes; at every social gathering we were invited to, on top of refrigerators, in kitchen drawers, on shoe racks and in closets. I knew I should learn how to handle one. Andrew had offered to take me to the range before, but the prospect filled me with dread, a queasiness that I suspected had less to do with my upbringing and more to do with that warning hand I put up in the face of my husband’s stories. Shooting a gun, I sensed, would put me in closer touch with what my husband did for a living. It could satisfy a curiosity that might be safer to ignore.

***

Ladies’ Night, read a wrinkled flyer that hung by the front door of Shooters. A few of the salesman nodded at Andrew and I as we entered and walked quickly through the aisles of guns for sale to the shooting range in the back. The thin fabric of my dress clung to my thighs. As far as I could tell, I was the only lady here today.

 

The guy manning the gun rental counter was younger than the men up front, and he seemed to be the real beating heart of the place, the territorial guard dog standing between the range and the rest of the world. He looked as though he’d spent the best years of his adulthood behind that counter, growing out a thick beard, letting his plaid button-downs get snug around the waist. On a leather string around his neck, he wore a crucifix patterned with the American flag.

“You military?” he asked. They always knew.

Andrew nodded, sliding his California ID across the glass counter. Beneath it were rows of handguns, gleaming like wedding bands.

“The left coast, huh?” the man asked skeptically as he studied the ID. He looked up at us. “I’m from Minnesota originally,” he said in a conciliatory tone. “The communists live there too.”

Andrew gave him a weak smile. This talk had surprised us when’d first arrived — could the stereotypes really be so accurate? But we’d gotten used to hearing this kind of thing with some regularity: communists, Yankees, traitors. People had teasingly called us every one of these names, simply for being from somewhere else, a fact that was as impossible to hide as our race or sex.

Andrew chose the lowest caliber weapon they had on offer — a silver revolver —  and got us some “eyes and ears,” protective glasses and ear protection. We signed a few waivers and bought some overpriced ammo. It was almost time to start shooting; there was just one more thing.

“Pick a target,” the man said, nodding toward the area behind us.

We turned around. Neatly stacked in a wire rack were typical targets for a buck apiece. For two dollars, you could purchase a skeleton or goblin or bloody zombie bride. A bear-size man approached and grabbed a target that was above my line of sight. As he walked away, I caught a quick glimpse of it: A bearded cartoon in a Keffiyeh sneered at me, a Kalishnakov clutched in his hands.

“Is that — ?”

“Yep,” Andrew said with a finality that I knew could only mean: Let’s not talk about this here.

Andrew opened a heavy door that led to a vestibule, a kind of portal between the range and the rest of the building. The moment Andrew opened the next door, the air turned humid. The cement room smelled of sweat. Empty bullet casings rolled under my steps as I followed Andrew to the shooting stands, where a row of men stood, their backs wet with perspiration. Most of them looked, from the back, like suburban dads, their bodies and T-shirts softened by age. Their guns went off in startling waves. My shoulders jumped with each blast.

“These aren’t working!” I yelled at Andrew, pointing to my ear muffs.

“It’s the sensation,” Andrew yelled back. “You’ll get used to it.” It was a sensation more than a sound, an unsettling tremor moving through me.

“Shooting is athletic,” he yelled, setting down the gun in front of him. “How you hold your body matters.” He demonstrated: left foot forward, arms taut but slightly bent, the way a batter might ready himself at home plate, except forward-facing. I mimicked him, and he gave me a thumbs-up.

“All right, tell me three of the basic rules of gun safety,” he said. He had drilled these into me on the ride over.

“Treat every weapon as if it is loaded.” I began dutifully. “Never point the weapon at anything you don’t intend to destroy. That seems like an important one,” I said, stalling.

Andrew waited.

“And … keep your finger straight and off the trigger until you’re ready to fire.”

“Good. Now line your eye up with the sight, and make sure that red dot you see is just below where you’re aiming.” He paused. “Release the safety,” he said, doing it for me. “Take a breath, and then pull.”

“What if it goes spinning out of my hands?” I yelled.

Andrew laughed. I took a breath, and, just as I closed my eyes, I heard Andrew tell me to keep them open. I pulled the trigger.

Nothing. I opened my eyes and pulled again. And again.

“What am I doing wrong?” He took the revolver from me and shot off a few rounds.

“You’re afraid,” he said gently, handing it back to me. “Don’t be.”

I paused, regained my stance, and tried again. Nothing.

“Pull a little harder,” Andrew said.

I pulled again. My finger was starting to cramp.

“I can’t,” I said, and let the gun slip gently out of my hands onto the counter. The barrel pointed toward us.

Andrew scooped it up. “Never point a gun, loaded or unloaded, toward anyone.”

“Sorry.” I felt myself blush. Maybe the fact that I was unable to shoot meant we could abandon our mission, go home, and do something I was good at, like reading books.

‘Sorry.’ I felt myself blush. Maybe the fact that I was unable to shoot meant we could abandon our mission, go home, and do something I was good at, like reading books.

Andrew left then and returned with a Glock .45. It was heavier and somehow more serious looking; by comparison, the silver revolver seemed like a prop out of an old Western. He showed me how to load the first couple bullets.

Just pull the trigger, I told myself. I squinted, located the floating white dot and then, after a moment’s hesitation, went for it.

The force of the shot went through me instantly, the gun kicking back against my hands, through my arms, into my shoulders, and then out of my body.

Some people describe their first time shooting as exhilarating, a rush, the top of a roller coaster before you plummet. I understood the appeal of a rush, the kind of moment that requires surrender. But this was different. This was asking me to trust — not the gun or the men running the range or Andrew, but myself.

“Keep shooting,” Andrew said.

I adjusted my feet, tightened my arms, and pulled the trigger again. The same bone-rattling power surged through me.

“Wouldn’t you rather at least have some familiarity with guns?” Andrew had asked when I’d turned down the range in the past. But why? I wasn’t interested in hunting. I’d spent my life strategizing how to avoid violence, not engage in it. If I needed to defend myself, the only weapons I could imagine wielding were mace or a good old house key wedged between my fingers. Guns had never felt like a realistic or viable option, perhaps because they had never been real to me. They had always been, for me, more idea than object, a symbol of an irrationality in the human heart. The notion of them as tools of utility or purpose — or fun — was outside of my understanding. But moving to the South and joining the world of the Army had forced me to acknowledge that guns were not only real; they were common, as unremarkable on a man’s hip as the cell phone in his hand.

I unleashed a few more shots, put down the .45, and looked at the target: I hadn’t gotten a single bullet on even its far borders. And somehow, I was exhausted.

“I’m going to take a breather,” I yelled over the noise.

From the safety of the vestibule, I watched Andrew. He shot round after round, a swarm of little holes appearing around his target. After a rocky childhood and a string of tempestuous relationships, I felt like I’d found home when Andrew came into my life. We had fallen in love, in part, because we each felt seen by the other. He gave me a sense of belonging, of wholeness, of all my fractured selves coming together. He made sense, so I made sense. But the longer he was in the Army, the less sense he made to me, and the more I began to wonder how well I had seen him after all. I knew my husband better than anyone, and yet, this part of him — the part that shot guns for fun and went eagerly into combat — felt like a story someone else had told me, a narrative I was straining to understand. Those parts of him were the back hallways of his life I was not allowed to visit, and the shadows that obscured them made me feel uneasy, unsure of who he was, who we were — who, even, I was.

Those parts of him were the back hallways of his life I was not allowed to visit, and the shadows that obscured them made me feel uneasy, unsure of who he was, who we were — who, even, I was.

I had not wanted him to join the Army. Years before, when he’d first mentioned the possibility at the beginning of our relationship, I’d even told him I’d leave him if he did. Why on earth did he want to seek out violence? He remained silent about it for two years after that, but then recruitment pamphlets started appearing in our home, and I found notepads on his nightstand filled with workout regimes. He wasn’t going to give up on this desire, which was so strong and enduring some might say it was a calling. If I wanted Andrew, I would have to say yes to the Army.

Nine days after we married in a New York City courthouse, he shipped off to boot camp. His sudden departure, his decision to do things I did not want to think about, felt almost like a betrayal. My husband was the kind of man who brought me flowers, who asked forgiveness when he made a mistake, who’d walked a mile in the sticky summer heat of Brooklyn with a bookcase on his back, carried it up two flights of stairs, and lined it with my treasured books to surprise me. His very presence anchored me. He was thoughtful and gentle. He was tender and loving. He was also a killer.

***

A month after our day at the range, Andrew brought a gun into our home.

“That was scary easy,” Andrew said as he walked into our bedroom, where I was sitting on our bed, reading a book. He took a black handgun out of a crumpled brown bag and set it down on our faded paisley comforter. I’d known this was coming. Initially I’d pushed back, but ultimately, I’d acquiesced. Guns were a part of Andrew’s daily life and world, after all. Even so, the unloaded 40-cal felt like a threat to my cozy home, my marriage. I didn’t want anything to do with it.

Because Andrew had purchased the gun from a friend, he wasn’t legally required to register it in his name. It was free-floating in the Georgia atmosphere now. Andrew believes in gun control. He supports background checks and thinks owning a gun should be a tested, licensed activity, like driving a car. He also likes guns. His father got him his first BB gun at age 8, and his first .22 rifle at 12. On family road trips, Andrew’s father took him out to shoot it in the Nevada desert. Andrew had told me those stories in the early years of our relationship, when he was a classics student tending bar to support himself. But I’d ignored them, or blocked them out. Instead, I’d absorbed the chapters of his childhood spent on a commune, the afternoons running shoeless in the woods. I envisioned these parts like a film reel, a story about Andrew that matched the man I fell in love with.

But his father saw in Andrew what he’d always wished for himself: physical strength, a native athleticism, an electric current of intensity. Andrew remembers being 8 years old, riding in the passenger seat of his father’s Toyota, rotating Chinese meditation balls in his palm that his martial arts teacher had given him. At a stoplight, his father put a hand over Andrew’s to stop the movement. “Be careful with those,” he told him. “You’ll become too peaceful.” Though everyone in our liberal families was taken aback when Andrew joined the Army, I imagine his father, who died when Andrew was 18, would have been pleased.

His very presence anchored me. He was thoughtful and gentle. He was tender and loving. He was also a killer.

Andrew handed me the gun. It felt cool in my hands. I stared at it, trying to quiet the dissonance I felt. It was the same sensation I experienced when I picked him up from deployment in a parking lot late at night and I could sense immediately, even in the dark, that he was different, that I was different. I felt it, too, during the fights we’d started having since coming to Georgia, clashes over politics and world views that made me question when we’d stopped seeing eye to eye, or if we ever had at all.

“I think I’ll stay away from it,” I said, and handed the gun back to him, though I wanted to say more: Why would you bring this into our home? This is a part of your world, not mine.

But our lives and livelihoods were intertwined. Violence put food on our table. As his wife, I owned the gun as much as he did. In the past, I had pushed to understand: Tell me what you like about guns. Tell me why you think we need one. And long before that: Tell me why you need to join the Army. Now, holding this gun, I was asking nagging questions of myself: Tell me why you’re letting a gun into your home. Tell me why you allow violence to put food on your table.

I didn’t have an answer. I only knew that sometimes I’d pushed Andrew so hard I’d pushed him away. When he first joined the Army and told me the kind of work he’d be doing in a rapidly deployable combat unit, I asked, in a tone like a slap, “Why would you want to do that?”

He’d considered my face for a moment.

“You look ashamed,” he’d said sadly.

***

Here was the greatest surprise: Sometimes the gun set me at ease. A few weeks after Andrew purchased it, someone pounded on the door at 2 a.m., and I felt a swell of warmth as Andrew roused and moved toward the nightstand.

When Andrew discovered the intruder was a friend walking home drunk from a bar, I was embarrassed. I’d felt real affection for the gun, for my husband as he reached for it without hesitation. I knew he was thinking far more of me than of himself; or, more likely, he was not thinking at all. I saw, in that moment, how love and violence are inextricable for him, linked not by philosophy or ideology, but by instinct. Maybe it is like that for all of us. We fiercely defend, of course, what we love.

But “defend” is such a sanitized word, the kind civilians use in patriotic talk about the military, the sort of language I use when I don’t want to think about what Andrew really does. Inside the Army, they talk freely — enthusiastically — about killing. The Army trains its soldiers to kill, and they’ve gotten very good at it. According to months of interviews U.S. Army historian Major S.L.A. Marshall conducted with servicemen during World War II, fewer than 25 percent of soldiers aimed and fired their weapons with the intent to kill. Marshall’s methods have been scrutinized since he published his findings in 1947, but his studies impacted the military’s approach to training. After World War II, the military focused on conditioning its soldiers to kill, training them to overcome their hesitations through muscle memory-building “kill drills” that simulated combat as closely as possible. In “Men and Fire in Vietnam,” Maj. Russel W. Glenn estimated that, just a few decades later, around 90 percent of troops in combat were shooting to kill. Now, after 18 years of nonstop war, we have the most seasoned, all-volunteer wartime Army the U.S. has ever seen. These soldiers are professionals, and killing the enemy in combat is a duty. But, as in any career, it’s also a purpose and a skill that is celebrated.

Several months after Andrew brought home the gun, we drove to our friend Robert’s* for a weekend barbecue in Harris County, a rural area north of Columbus. He owned a small prefab house that was dwarfed by the acres of surrounding land. The men liked to congregate there; it was a vast, legal, unsupervised place for shooting.

Robert brought a long plastic case out of his closet a few minutes after we arrived. The guys swarmed as he lay it on the kitchen table, while the women barely glanced up from where they sat on the floor, playing with their babies. In the case sat a semiautomatic tactical rifle, a civilian version of the kind the men used at work and overseas. Its presence set me on edge in a different way than handguns and hunting rifles did, but once it was in Robert’s hands, something quieted in me. He handled it with a kind of familiar care, as though it were a beloved instrument he routinely played.

I listened as the guys talked shop about guns, trading in narrative as they always did: stories about wild boar hunting in the Texas prairie land, stalking deer in the north Idaho mountains, camping out in the vast public lands of the Arizona desert, their rifles piled in their truck beds. For most of them, these were the only places they’d known outside of the cities and countries where the Army had sent them. For some, these were still the only spots in the world that felt right to them, their time with the Army just a way station on their journeys back home. Guns were a part of these men’s greater story, the one they’d been given and created for themselves. It was so hard for me to grasp, but I knew some of them would feel, stripped of their guns, without a home in the world.

Our formative years were shaped by such drastically different rites of passage, it was a wonder that we could converse at all. But we did. I even loved some of these men. They stood in the line of fire for my husband without a second thought, and more poignantly, they stretched to understand me: the woman who was raised without God or guns; who’d reduced these men when she met them to “white males from conservative rural areas”; who drank a little too much at these barbecues and unwittingly became enraptured as she listened to them talk about their lives and witnessed their love for one another. They stretched to know me because I stretched to know them. “What are you writing right now?” one of them asked me with timid intimacy at a military ball. I struggled to explain.

They stretched to know me because I stretched to know them. ‘What are you writing right now?’ one of them asked me with timid intimacy at a military ball. I struggled to explain.

Watching the guys in Rob’s dining room, I thought about those afternoons Andrew had spent in the hot desert with his father, those lifetimes he’d lived before I loved him. There was something sacred in those memories that I couldn’t touch. It had taken me some time to realize, but I could not always reach Andrew. And maybe that was okay. In those times, the work of loving may be failing to understand him but choosing to love him regardless, to go to the bookstore with him and share in something we both understand and enjoy. It was allowing both of us a kind of grace; sometimes, I only gave it to us grudgingly. He was better at setting aside, at bringing me close again. He had long ago taught me that other essential ingredient to loving that I still had to work so hard at: letting go.

At dusk, we drove home through the bleak back roads of Columbus, passing aging billboards that advertised fireworks and condemned abortion. The sun was setting. When we’d first arrived, I’d hated almost everything about the city — the heat, the conservative politics, the slow-moving post office lines — but I loved that big sky, the way the sunset softened the whole city. Andrew was leaving the next day for a three-week training. These goodbyes had become routine at this point, less painful, but I still felt like something was being ripped from me when he left. The ground I walked on was less solid, the scenery in my world less vibrant. I put my hand on the console between us. He reached for it and squeezed.

*Names has been changed to protect privacy.

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Simone Gorrindo is a writer and book editor living in Tacoma, Washington with her husband and two children. She is writing a memoir about the secret lives of women on the home front of America’s longest war.

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Editor: Krista Stevens
Fact checker: Steven Cohen
Copy editor: Jacob Gross