Search Results for: language

Appetite of Abundance: On the Benefits of Being Eaten

Photo by born1945

J.B. MacKinnon | Orion | July 2013 | 12 minutes (2,875 words)

 

Our latest Longreads Member Pick comes from Orion magazine and J.B. MacKinnon, author of The Once and Future World.

Thanks to Orion and MacKinnon for sharing it with the Longreads community. They’re also offering a free trial subscription here.

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College Longreads Pick: 'A Canine in a Cummerbund,' Peter Kaplan (1977)

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:

The New York media world grieves for editor Peter Kaplan, who died last week. Kaplan worked at several publications during his career, and he’s best known as the longtime editor of the New York Observer, but The Harvard Crimson’s archives also contain 29 of Kaplan’s student bylines, mostly reviews. One, about a 1977 Hasty Pudding production, has the seeds of the voice Kaplan would perfect at the Observer: “So much confidence in the sameness of the future do the Pudding participants have that, more interested in the project than the theater, they can put on this elaborate celebration of the way things are, were and will be.” Kaplan’s voice, bequeathed to a generation of writers, became the root editorial language of the Internet. His influence spread across platforms and mastheads across the city.

A Canine in a Cummerbund

Peter Kaplan | The Harvard Crimson | February 28, 1977 | 7 minutes (1,542 words)

Professors and students: Share your favorite stories by tagging them with #college #longreads on Twitter, or email links to aileen@longreads.com.


Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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How a Bubble Sheet Killed Learning

“‘There was this transformation of the whole culture—and curriculum,’ Andrea says. ‘I could see it mostly through the homework. It really looked like test prep. There were even ­bubble sheets.’ Oscar had more than a year before the third-grade test, when students start taking the New York State ­English ­Language Arts (ELA) and math tests—but the thinking goes that the sooner they learn how to take big standardized tests and the sooner any skill shortfalls can be dealt with, the better they’ll do in the long run. Oscar, however, had a paradoxical reaction. ‘His interest in school,’ says Andrea, ‘took this immediate plummet.’”

“She felt as if her son had been caught in a vortex: The school starts teaching Oscar differently, he loses whatever spark of curiosity inspired him to want to learn, and the school punishes him for it. He made it to third grade, but by then, test prep had come to dominate his classroom. Grand plans for science experiments and hands-on interactive projects, Andrea says, ‘would just kind of fizzle out and disappear because there wasn’t time to do them.’”

Robert Kolker, in New York magazine, on parents opting their children out of standardized tests. Read more on education from the Longreads Archive.

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Sasha Belenky on Jeanne Marie Laskas's 'The People V. Football'

sasha
Sasha Belenky is a senior editor at The Huffington Post.

Whether it’s negotiating murder-for-hire with a fake hit man or visiting old stomping grounds with the vice president of the United States, if you’re in the car with Jeanne Marie Laskas, you’re pretty much guaranteed that the story will be good. I’ve found myself most riveted, however, by her 2011 profile in GQ of Fred McNeill, former star linebacker for the Minnesota Vikings — which similarly begins in the car. It’s a heart-wrenching scene, with McNeill’s wife, Tia, fighting his dementia along with the Los Angeles traffic, and it’s a great example of Laskas’ gift for capturing language. As journalists continue to shed light on the concussion crisis in football, Laskas’ article stands out as one of the most personal, most devastating accounts of the long-term damage being done on the field.

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The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side: Our Longreads Member Pick

The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side

Mark Oppenheimer | The Atlantic Books | November 2013 | 88 minutes (22,700 words)

 

Longreads Members not only support this service, but they receive exclusive ebooks from the best writers and publishers in the world. Our latest Member Pick, The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side, is a new story by Mark Oppenheimer and The Atlantic Books, about Eido Shimano, a Zen Buddhist monk accused of sexually exploiting students.

We’re excited to feature the first chapter below, free for everyone. If you’re not a Longreads Member, join today to receive the full story and ebook, or you can also purchase the ebook at Amazon

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EIDO SHIMANO, a Zen Buddhist monk from Japan, arrived at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on December 31, 1964, New Year’s Eve. He was 32 years old, and although he had just spent four years in Hawaii, part of the time as a university student, his English was poor. Besides his clothes, he brought with him only a small statue of the Buddha and a keisaku, the wooden stick a Zen teacher uses to thwack students whose posture sags during meditation. Before flying east, he had been offered temporary lodging by a couple who lived on Central Park West. Not long after he arrived—the very next day, according to some versions of the story—he began to build his sangha, his Zen community. He did this, at first, by walking the streets of New York. The followers just came.

“It was the middle of the 1960s, full of energy,” Shimano recalled when we met for lunch in 2012. “And all I did was simply walk Manhattan from top to the bottom. And in my Buddhist robe. And many people came. ‘What are you doing? Where are you going?’ So I said, ‘I am from Japan and doing zazen practice’”—Zen meditation. It was a kind of Buddhism, he told the curious New Yorkers. Now and again, somebody asked to tag along. Yes, Shimano told them. Of course. Before long, he had a small space to host meditation sessions, and all were invited. “Little by little, every single day, I walked entire Manhattan,” Shimano told me in his still-fractured English. “And every single day I picked up two or three people who were curious. And that was the beginning of the sangha.”

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Ingenious

Jason Fagone | Ingenious, Crown Publishing Group | November 2013 | 20 minutes (4,972 words)

 

Below is the first chapter from Jason Fagone’s book, Ingenious, about the X Prize Foundation’s $10 million competition to build a car that can travel 100 miles on a single gallon of gas. Thanks to Fagone and Crown Publishing for sharing it with the Longreads community. You can purchase the full book here. Read more…

‘Quebrado’: The Life and Death of a Young Activist

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Jeff Sharlet | Sweet Heaven When I Die, W. W. Norton & Company | Aug 2011 | 37 minutes (9,133 words)

 

Our latest Longreads Member Pick is “Quebrado,” by Jeff Sharlet, a professor at Dartmouth, contributing editor for Rolling Stone and bestselling author. The story was first published in Rolling Stone in 2008 and is featured in Sharlet’s book Sweet Heaven When I Die. Thanks to Sharlet for sharing it with the Longreads community. Read more…

‘It Is An Opportunity for Great Joy’: The Power of Narration & Medicine

Jalees Rehman | December 2012 | 8 minutes (1,957 words)

Jalees Rehman is a cell biologist and physician at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who’s been featured on Longreads in the past. Below is an essay first posted at SciLogs, which he has allowed us to repost here for the Longreads community.

* * *

I was about 12 years old when I found out that my grandfather was born on 12/12/12. If he were alive, he would be exactly 100 years old today. I found out about his birthday, when he came to stay with us in Munich for an eye surgery. He was a diabetic and had been experiencing deterioration in his vision. At that time, it was very difficult to find an eye surgeon in Pakistan who would be able to perform the surgery. My grandfather spoke many languages, such as Punjabi, Urdu, Persian, English, Arabic and some Sanskrit, but he could not speak German. His visit occurred during my school holidays, so I was designated to be his official translator for the doctor visits and his hospital stay.

On the afternoon before his surgery, we went to the hospital and I was filling out the registration forms, when I asked my grandfather about his birthday and he said 12/12/12. I was quite surprised to find out that he had such a wonderful combination of numbers, when the lady at the registration desk saw the date and asked me whether he was absolutely sure this was the correct date. I translated this for my grandfather and he smiled and said something along the lines of, “It is more or less the correct date. Nobody is exactly sure, but it is definitely very easy to remember.” I knew that I was supposed be a translator, but this required a bit more finesse than a straightforward translation. One cannot tell a German civil servant that a date is more or less correct. If we introduced uncertainty at this juncture, who knows what the consequences would be.

I therefore paraphrased my grandfather’s response as, “Yes, it is absolutely correct!”

She then said, “Eine Schnapszahl!”

My grandfather wanted me to translate this, and I was again at a loss for words. Schnapszahl literally means Schnapsnumber and is a German expression for repeated digits, such as 33 or 555. The origin of the word probably lies in either the fact that a drunken person may have transient double vision or in a drinking game where one drinks Schnaps after reaching repeated digits when adding up numbers. I was not quite sure how to translate this into Urdu without having to go into the whole background of how German idioms often jokingly refer to alcohol.

I decided to translate her comment as “What a memorable date,” and my grandfather nodded.

We were then seen by a medical resident who also pointed out the unique birthday.

His comment was “Darauf sollten wir einen trinken!,” which is another German idiom and translates to “we should all have a drink to celebrate this,” but really just means “Hooray!” or “Great!”

My grandfather wanted to know what the doctor had said and I was again in a quandary. Should I give him accurate translation and explain that this is just another German idiom and is not intended as a cultural insult to a Pakistani Muslim? Or should I just skip the whole alcohol bit? Translation between languages is tough enough, but translating and showing cultural sensitivity was more than I could handle. My Urdu was not very good to begin with, and all I could come up with the rather silly Urdu translation “It is an opportunity for great joy.” My grandfather gave me a puzzled look, but did not ask any questions.

* * *

On the day after my grandfather’s eye surgery, the ophthalmologist and the residents came by for morning rounds. They removed his eye-patch, inspected the eye and told me that everything looked great. He just needed a few more days of recovery and would soon be able to go home. After putting the gauze and eye-patch back on, the doctors moved on to the next patient.

Once the doctors had completed rounds, I made the acquaintance of the head nurse. She seemed to think that the eye ward was her military regiment and was running it like a drill-sergeant. She walked into every room and ordered all the patients to get out of bed and walk to the common area. Only lazy people stayed in bed, she said. The best way to recuperate was to move about.

I told her that I did not think my grandfather was ready to get up.

“Did any doctor forbid him to get up?”

“No, not really”, I replied.

“If he has two legs, he can walk to the common room. If not, we will provide a wheelchair.”

“He just had surgery yesterday and needs to rest”, I protested and pointed to my grandfather’s eye-patch.

“Yesterday was yesterday and today is today!” was the response from the drill-sergeant.

This statement did not seem very profound to me and I was waiting for a further explanation, but the drill-sergeant had already moved on, ordering the patients from the neighboring rooms to get up.

My grandfather and I did not have much of a choice, so we joined the procession of one-eyed men who looked like retired, frail pirates. They were slowly shuffling out of their rooms towards the common area.

The common area consisted of chairs and sofas as well as a couple of tables. I sat down in a corner with my grandfather, and we started talking. He told me stories from his life, including vivid descriptions of how he and his friends proudly defied the British colonialists. My grandfather recited poems from the Gulistan of the Persian poet Saadi for me in Persian and translated them into Urdu. He wanted to know about German history and what I was learning at school. He asked me if I knew any poems by Goethe, because the Indian poet Iqbal had been such a great admirer of Goethe’s poetry.

We talked for hours. Like most children, I did not realize how much I enjoyed the conversations. It was only years later when my grandfather passed away that I wished I had taken notes of my conversations with him. All I currently have are fragmented memories of our conversations, but I treasure these few fragments.

I then pulled out a tiny travel chess set that I had brought along, and we started playing chess. I knew that he had trouble distinguishing some of the pieces because of his eye surgery. I took advantage of his visual disability and won every game. During my conversations with my grandfather and our chess games, I noticed that some of the other men were staring at us. Perhaps they were irritated by having a child around. Maybe they did not like our continuous chatting or perhaps they just did not like us foreign-looking folks. I tried to ignore their stares, but they still made me quite uncomfortable.

On the next day, we went through the same procedure. Morning rounds, drill sergeant ordering everyone to the common area, conversations with my grandfather and our chess games. The stares of the other patients were now really bothering me. I was wondering whether I should walk up to one of the men and ask him whether they had a problem with me and my grandfather. Before I could muster the courage, one of the men got up and walked towards us. I was a bit worried, not knowing what the man was going to do or say to us.

“Can you ask your grandfather, if I can borrow you?”

“Borrow me?”, I asked, taken aback.

“He gets to tell you all these stories and play chess with you for hours and hours, and I also want to have someone to talk to.”

Once he had said that, another patient who was silently observing us chimed in and said that he would like to know if he could “borrow” me for a game of chess. I felt really stupid. The other patients who had been staring at me and my grandfather were not at all racist or angry towards us, they were simply envious of the fact that my grandfather had someone who would listen to him.

I tried to translate this for my grandfather, but I did not know how to translate “borrow”. My grandfather smiled and understood immediately what the men wanted, and told me that I should talk to as many of the patients as possible. He told me that the opportunity to listen to others was a mutual blessing, both for the narrator as well as the listener.

On that day and the next few days that my grandfather spent in the hospital, I spoke to many of the men and listened to their stories about their lives, their health, their work and even stories about World War 2 and life in post-war Germany. I also remember how I agreed to play chess, but when I pulled out my puny little travel chess set, my opponent laughed and brought a huge chess set from a cupboard in the common area. He beat me and so did my grandfather who then also played chess with me on this giant-size chess board which obliterated the visual advantage that my travel set had offered.

* * *

Since that time I spent with my grandfather and the other patients on the eye ward, I have associated medicine with narration. All humans want to be narrators, but many have difficulties finding listeners. Illness is often a time of vulnerability and loneliness. Narrating stories during this time of vulnerability is a way to connect to fellow human beings, which helps overcome the loneliness. The listeners can be family members, friends or even strangers. Unfortunately, many people who are ill do not have access to family members or friends who are willing to listen. This is the reason why healthcare professionals such as nurses or physicians can serve a very important role. We listen to patients so that we can obtain clues about their health, searching for symptoms that can lead to a diagnosis. However, sometimes the process of listening itself can be therapeutic in the sense that it provides comfort to the patient.

Even though I mostly work as a cell biologist, I still devote some time to the practice of medicine. What I like about being a physician is the opportunity to listen to patients or their family members. I prescribe all the necessary medications and tests according to the cardiology guidelines, but I have noticed that my listening to the patients and giving them an opportunity to narrate their story provides an immediate relief.

It is an indeed an “an opportunity for great joy,” when the patient experiences the joy of having an audience and the healthcare provider experiences the joy of connecting with the patient. I have often wondered whether there is any good surrogate for listening to the patient. Medicine is moving towards reducing face-to-face time between healthcare providers and patients in order to cut costs or maximize profits. The telemedicine approach in which patients are assessed by physicians who are in other geographic locations is gaining ground. Patients now often fill out checklists about their history instead of narrating it to the physicians or nurses. All of these developments are reducing the opportunity for the narrator-listener interaction between patients and healthcare providers. However, social networks, blogs and online discussion groups may provide patients the opportunities to narrate their stories (those directly related to their health as well as other stories) and find an audience. I personally prefer the old-fashioned style of narration. The listener can give instant feedback and the facial expressions and subtle nuances can help reassure the narrator. The key is to respect the narrative process in medicine and to help the patients find ways to narrate their stories in a manner that they are comfortable with.

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First Chapters: ‘You Are One of Them,’ by Elliott Holt

Elliott Holt | The Penguin Press | 2013 | 12 minutes (2,854 words)

 

Our latest First Chapter is from Elliott Holt’s novel, You Are One of Them. Thanks to Holt and The Penguin Press for sharing it with the Longreads community.

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Prologue

In Moscow I was always cold. I suppose that’s what Russia is known for. Winter. But it is winter to a degree I could not have imagined before I moved there. Winter not of the pristine, romantic Doctor Zhivago variety but a season so insistent and hateful that all hope freezes with your toes. The snow is cleared away tooquickly to soften the city, so the streets are slushy with resentment. And I felt like the other young women trudging through that slush: sullen and tired, with a bluish tint to the skin below the eyes that suggests insomnia or malnutrition or a hangover. Or all of the above. Every day brought news of a drunk who froze to death. I saw one: slumped over on a bench on Tverskoy Boulevard with a bottle between his legs and icicles decorating his fingers. Distilled into something so pure and solid that I didn’t recognize it as death until I got up close. The babushka next to me summoned the police.

I cracked under the weight of the cold. My only recourse was to eat. I inhaled entire packages of English tea biscuits in one sitting. They came stacked in a tube, and when I found myself halfway through one, I decided I might as well finish it. I polished off a whole tube every night after work and then pinched the extra flesh around my hips in the bathtub and thought, At least I’m warm.

It was 1996. At the English-language newspaper where I worked, the other expats were always joking. Russia, with all its quirks, was funny. There was a sign at Sheremetyevo Airport, perched at the entrance to the short-term-parking lot, which had been translated into English as acute care parking. It was a sign better suited to a hospital, where everything is dire. And at the smaller airports, the ones for regional flights, the Russian word for “exit,” vykhod, was translated into English as get out. A ticket to Sochi, for example, said you would be departing from Get Out #4. I laughed with them, but I knew that eventually these mistranslations would be corrected, that Russia would grow out of its awkward teenage capitalism and become smooth and nonchalant. You could see the growing pains in the pomaded hair of the nightclub bouncers, in the tinted windows of the Mercedes sedans on Tverskaya, in the garish sequins on the Versace mannequins posing in a shop around the corner from the Bolshoi Theater.

At the infamous Hungry Duck, I watched intoxicated Russian girls strip on top of the bar and then tumble into the greedy arms of American businessmen. American men still had cachet then; as an American woman, I hugged the sidelines. (“Sarah,” said the Russian men at my office, “why you don’t wear the skirts? Are you the feminist?” They always laughed, and it was a deep, carnivorous sound that made me feel daintier than I am.) Everyone in Moscow was ravenous, and the potential for anarchy—I could feel its kaleidoscope effect—made a lot of foreigners giddy. Most of the reporters at my paper spoke some Russian. But among the copy editors, many of whom were fresh out of Russian-studies programs and itching to put their years in the language lab to good use, the hierarchy was built on who spoke Russian best. They were not gunning for careers in journalism; they just wanted to be in the new post-Soviet Moscow—the wild, wild East—and this job paid the bills. The Americans with Russian girlfriends—”pillow dictionaries,” they called them, aware that these lanky, mysterious women were far better-looking than anyone they’d touched back home—began to sound like natives. They were peacocks, preening with slang. In the office each morning, they’d pull off their boots and slide their feet into their tapochki and head to the kitchen for instant coffee—Nescafe was our only option then—and they’d never mention their past lives in Wisconsin or Nevada or wherever they escaped from. “Oy,” they said, and “Bozhe moy,” which means “my God” but has anguish in Russian that just doesn’t translate. A little bravado goes a long way toward hiding the loneliness. You can reinvent yourself with a different alphabet.

On Saturdays at the giant Izmailovo Market, tourists haggled for Oriental rugs and matryoshka dolls painted to resemble Soviet leaders—Lenin fits into Stalin, who fits into Khrushchev, who fits into Brezhnev, who fits into Andropov, who fits into Gorbachev, who fits into Yeltsin. History reduced to kitsch. While shopping for Christmas gifts once, I stopped by a booth where a spindly drunk was selling old Soviet stamps. And there, pinned like a butterfly to a tattered red velvet display cushion, was Jenny. Her image barely warped by time. “Skolko?” I said. The man asked too much. He had the deadened eyes of a person who hasn’t been sober for years, and I didn’t feel like bargaining, so I handed him the money. He could smell my desperation. He put the stamp in a Ziploc bag, and on the way back home on the Metro I studied her through the plastic. My best friend, commemorated like a cosmonaut. Her name had been transliterated into Cyrillic: ДЖЕННИФЕР ДЖОНС, it said above the smiling photo of her freckled face. A five-kopeck stamp from the postal service of the USSR. I had just paid ten dollars for something that was originally worth next to nothing.

Conspiracy theorists will tell you that Jennifer Jones’s death was not an accident. They will tell you that her plane crashed not because of mechanical failure, not because the pilot was suffering from dizzy spells, but because the CIA shot it down. She had become a Soviet pawn they say, too sympathetic to the party. Others say that the KGB was responsible, that after the press took pictures of her smiling at the Kremlin and quoted her saying how nice the Russians were, they needed to quit while they were ahead. I’ve read the official reports. I heard the pundits spew their Sunday-morning-talk-show ire. But I don’t recognize the Jennifer Jones I knew in their versions of the story.

Some people will tell you that all of it was propaganda, that she was just a pawn in someone else’s game, but the letter—the original letter—was real. It came from a real place of fear. The threat used to be so tangible. I was prepared to lose the people I loved best. My mother, with her fuzzy hair and lemon-colored corduroys; our dog, Pip; and Jenny. Always Jenny, whose last act must have been storing her tray table in its upright and locked position. Yuri Andropov wished her the best in her young life. Maybe this blessing was a curse.

Or maybe her luck just ran out.

* * *

Chapter One

The first defector was my sister.

I don’t remember her, but I have watched the surviving Super 8 footage so many times that the scenes have seared themselves on my brain like memories. In the film, Isabel (Izzy, for short), four years old, dances on a beach. She is twirling, around and around and around again, until she falls in the sand. There is grace in her fall; she does not tumble in a heap but composes herself like a ballerina. She wears a bathing suit with the stars-and-stripes design that the U.S. swim team wore in the 1972 Summer Games in Munich. It is the same suit that Mark Spitz wore when he swam to gold seven times. On Izzy the Speedo bunches near her armpits but is taut across her stomach. Her body has already lost most of its toddler pudge. Her legs are long and lean and are beginning to show muscle definition. My parents were both athletes; Izzy’s coordination and flexibility suggest that she, too, will win many races. But her belly still protrudes slightly like a baby’s, and there are small pockets of fat on her upper thighs. Her hair is startlingly blond and tousled by the wind. Her eyes are green and transparent as sea glass. Behind her the ocean is calm. Her expression betrays—already!—a hint of skepticism. She is the sort of child who is universally declared beautiful. She looks directly at the camera, unafraid of meeting its gaze. My mother hovers at the right side of the frame in sunglasses and a wide-brimmed straw hat. She wears a pink paisley bikini, and she holds me, a juicy nine-month-old with a half-gnawed banana in my right hand, on her lap. The camera rests for a moment on my face, but I am blurry, and before the focus can be adjusted, the lens turns abruptly back to Izzy, who is kneeling in the sand, strangely reverent and, judging from her moving lips and rhythmically tilting head, singing something. The camera pans to my mother once more. She is laughing, head thrown back.

Three minutes of footage, shot in August of 1973, exactly one year before Nixon resigned. There are several notable things about this short film: (1) My mother looks relaxed and happy. Half of her face is obscured by the hat, yes, but the smile she wears is an irrepressible one. She is laughing at her older daughter, squeezing her younger one. She is all lightness and joy. (2) The camera lingers on her lovely legs for at least four seconds, which suggests that my father the auteur was, at this point, still very much in love with (or at least attracted to) my mother. (3) My sister is alive.

Just three months after this scene on the beach, Izzy died of meningitis. It was the sort of freak occurrence about which every parent has nightmares: a sudden fever that won’t go down, a frantic call to the pediatrician—supposedly one of the city’s best—and six hours later, despite said pediatrician’s reassurances that “it was nothing to worry about,” a visit to the emergency room at Georgetown University Hospital, where my sister’s meningitis was diagnosed too late to save her. It had already infected her spine and her brain.

This happened on November 7, 1973: my first birthday. Forever after that it was tainted. My parents could never bring themselves to celebrate it convincingly. During every subsequent birthday, they would excuse themselves at various points and disappear into their own private corners to grieve. At my fifth birthday party—the first one I remember—I could hear my mother’s wails from the laundry room in the basement. The sound was so alarming that the clown who had been hired to make balloon animals kept popping her creations. She seemed skittish. “Why is your mom crying?” the kids from my kindergarten class wanted to know. “I had a sister, and then she died,” I said. I used to deliver this information matter-of-factly. It was no more weighty than the fact that our house was stucco or that my father was British. I was three when my parents told me I’d had a sister, and it was a relief to know that there was an explanation for the absence I’d felt for so long in my limbic memory. I’d reach for a baby doll—a doll I later learned had belonged to her—and picture it cradled in another set of arms. Sitting beneath our dining-room table once when I was four—I liked to crawl into private spaces to play—I was overcome with déjà vu. I was sure I had sat in the same spot with Izzy. It must have been just before she died. I must have been eleven months old. I could almost hear a breathy, high-pitched voice urging me to “smile, little Sarah, smile!”

And soaking in the tub, even now as an adult, I sometimes sense the memory of bath time with my sister. My foot touching hers under the water as the tub filled, the sight of her leaning back to tip her blond head under the faucet. Letters of the alphabet in primary colors stuck on the porcelain sides of the tub, arranged in almost-words, and my mother crouched on the floor beside us, her sleeves rolled up so that her blouse didn’t get wet as she washed our hair. And after we were pulled from the water, did we wriggle free of our towel cocoons and chase each other around the house naked? Did I make her laugh? I have no proof that it didn’t happen. I feel certain it did.

Intuitively I knew that something was missing long before I knew how to articulate it. Long before I knew that most people’s parents slept in the same bedroom, that most people’s mothers weren’t afraid to leave the house, that some children had never seen their parents cry, I knew that something was off in my family. “Your poor parents,” people would say to me when I was older and I told them the story. But no one seemed to understand that I felt the loss, too. My sister was in heaven, my mother said, with my mother’s parents, who also died too young for me to meet them. I mourned the sister I didn’t get to know. I longed to share secrets and clothes. I wanted a co-conspirator. I was jealous of the kids with siblings, who rolled their eyes at each other behind their parents’ backs, who counted on the unconditional loyalty only a sister or a brother can provide.

I loved watching that film of my sister. My parents had bought the camera right before that beach trip, so there is no earlier footage of her. There are some photographs, of course, but it was a thrill for me to see her move. Her right hand ebbed and flowed through the air, replicating the motion of the waves behind her. Her body language was like a tide pulling me in; I recognized it somewhere deep inside myself. If she had lived, I know that we would be the kind of adult siblings about whom people say, “Their mannerisms are the same.”

My mother liked to watch our home movies every Saturday night, but screening them was a labor-intensive process. You had to set up the projector on the end table we used as a base, thread the reel through the machine—”Careful, careful!” my mother would say to my father—and sometimes, when the projector overheated, the film would burn and darkness would spread across the image on the living-room wall. It was terrifying to watch the dark blot fill the screen, as if our past were being annihilated right in front of us. It happened so quickly: one moment bright with life and then, suddenly, nothing but darkness. We lost many precious moments in this way—”Stop it, stop it, turn it off!” my mother would cry as my father fumbled with the projector, trying to save the rest of the reel from being fried—including the establishing shots of Izzy on the beach. A zoom into her cherubic face and then we watched that face melt. “My baby girl!” my mother whimpered while the loose strand of film flapped hysterically and my father struggled to turn off the machine. The manic whirring stopped, and then we were all quiet as my father put the reel away in its gray steel case.

“Sometimes I think we should just let it burn,” he said one evening.

“It’s the only one we have of her,” said my mother.

“But we’ve got to let go, Alice. We’ve got to look forward.”

She launched her iciest stare at him. “Is there something better on the horizon?”

I could tell he wanted to erupt. I don’t know if he locked up his rage because I was in the room or because he had already given up on my mom.

We didn’t watch the Izzy footage again after that—my mother was afraid the rest of the reel would be destroyed, so she hid it inside a hatbox in her closet. But when I was old enough to operate the projector, I sneaked late-night viewings of my sister. I would wait until I was sure my mother was asleep and then creep into her dressing room. She kept the hatbox on the top shelf, and as I reached for it, my hand would graze the silks of the dresses my mother had long ago stopped wearing. She retired her glamour when my sister died. (“You may not believe this,” my father said, “but at Radcliffe your mother was always the life of the party.”)

In the dark of the living room, where I set up the projector in the same place we always watched home movies, Izzy’s sequence of movements—turn, turn, fall, kneel—became a sort of meditation. I realize that I see all my memories this way. Everything I remember unspools in the flickering silence of Super 8 film. Each scene begins with the trembling red stripe of the Kodak logo and ends with the sound of the reel spinning, spinning, spinning until someone shuts it down.

From You Are One of Them by Elliott Holt. Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Elliott Holt, 2013.

First Chapters: ‘White Oleander,’ by Janet Fitch

Janet Fitch | White Oleander, Little, Brown and Company | 1999 | 19 minutes (4,640 words)

 

Our latest first chapter comes from Longreads contributing editor Julia Wick, who has chosen Janet Fitch’s 1999 novel White Oleander. If you want to recommend a First Chapter, let us know and we’ll feature you and your pick: hello@longreads.com. Read more…