Search Results for: writing

B is for Bastard

Illustration by Joe Waldron

Brian Gresko | Longreads | November 2019 | 19 minutes (4,752 words)

1.

In seventh grade Ms. Applegate tells us what the word bastard means. (I have no idea now why this was relevant to the lesson, I only recall the defining of the word itself.) “A child born out of wedlock,” she says with arch authority from behind her desk. “The church doesn’t approve of such things.”

I startle in my seat, in the center row, about halfway back. She lifts a grey eyebrow and meets my gaze. “If you were born a bastard and baptized in the Catholic Church, it’s a sin. A mortal sin. For you and your parents, too. Of course, I’m sure none of you have to worry about that.”

I swear she’s speaking right to me, with a smirk on her lips. I’m sure she knows — that my reaction gave it away, or else she’d heard about it somehow. Maybe she can read minds.

Ms. Applegate is not like other teachers I’ve had at Visitation Elementary School. She cracks jokes, sometimes ones that go over our heads but which cause her to cackle. Throughout the day a small clique of the more lively teachers on the middle school floor lean in our doorway to chat or trade barbs while we silently complete pages in our workbook. When we’re done with our lessons, Ms. Applegate lines us up on opposite sides of the room for competitive spelling bees or trivia quizzes. She tells me I’m the smartest kid in the class but the worst test taker, words I take with me into high school like a prophecy, and she says I’m book smart but lack common sense. My dad says the same thing. And like him, she doesn’t pull any punches. The next year she won’t return — during the summer she’ll elope with her boyfriend, a practice which the nuns who run our Catholic school don’t approve of, and so they fire her. The church only accepts marriages conducted by the clergy.

This word, “bastard,” enthralls me. I’ve heard my dad use it, and read it in a Stephen King novel or two. I thought it referred to a bad person. But no, that’s me, I think on the bus ride home. That’s a word for what I am: a bastard.

After snack and Ducktales I hit my desk for homework. When Mom stops in to check on me I tell her. “Today the teacher told us this word,” I say. “For kids born out of wedlock.”

Like me, I almost say, but the words run the wrong way in my throat.

In a snap her whole face changes, the flesh falling toward the floor, like she’s taken off a mask and revealed her true self. Her cheeks hollow out, and spots of red blossom in their valleys. She perches on the edge of my bed, hands gripping the quilt for stability. She’s gone frail.

“And what word is that?” she says.

I’m curious about her reaction. Not the way a cat might be with a mouse, more like testing the waters, determining if they’re safe to wade into. She must know the word and why it’s significant to me, but I’m not going to say it if she doesn’t say it.

“I can’t remember. The word starts with…. a B, I think?”

Mom appears to be trying to eat the inside of her cheek. “And what did she say about this word?”

“That kids born like that, when their parents aren’t married, shouldn’t be baptized. And if they are, it’s a sin. Like, a mortal sin.”

She’s got that faraway look in her eyes; she’s on my bed in body only, I don’t know where her mind has gone. It’s clear to me now: these waters are not safe ones. They go deep and teem with monsters. Finally she asks, “Do you believe that?”

I shrug. This is well before I tell her I’m not sure I believe any of the shit they tell us at that school. “It’s what they say, I guess.”

She nods. “Well, if you think of the word, let me know.”

This word, ‘bastard,’ enthralls me. I’ve heard my dad use it, and read it in a Stephen King novel or two. I thought it referred to a bad person.

She heads across the hall to her bedroom and closes the door. I hear her murmuring on the phone with someone, as she does a few times a week. Again I shrug, this time to myself. Who she calls or what she talks about behind that closed door is a mystery to me, another secret.

At this point, I think it’s been three, maybe four years since my parents told me that my mom became pregnant with me when she was young and unmarried, and that her current husband, the man I call Dad, is not my biological dad. Aside from revealing this to me one night before bed, this is the closest we’ve ever come to talking about it.

That’s not to say I haven’t thought about it, though, over the years. And had feelings about it too.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Enjoy your Airbnb. (Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Allie Conti, Joe Sexton and Nate Schweber, Alexander Chee, Nell Scovell, and Bee Wilson.

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How to Unlearn Everything

Longreads Pick
Source: Vulture
Published: Oct 30, 2019
Length: 9 minutes (2,461 words)

Airbrushing Out the Evidence of Her Son’s Differences

For Dame, Alysia Abbott writes a personal essay about the importance of presenting her autistic son on social media — fostering inclusiveness, normalizing his differences, connecting with other parents with similar children — but also confesses her tendency to only show him in the most flattering light.

I could select which photos I would share online. I would highlight those with his eyes open, his gaze steady, maybe the rare shot where he does look at me with a smile. At the right angle, and in the right light, Finn truly is beautiful. Friends and “friends” alike have commented on how much he resembles a young Paul McCartney. He has the full cheeks the cupid bow mouth the large brown eyes and soft mop of hair. Without fail, I will share those photos where that beauty is on display.

Here’s what you won’t see: images where he looks developmentally delayed, what we used to call “mentally retarded,” or just “retarded.”

I actually remember a turning point on trip to a local apple orchard when my son was maybe 3 years old. We say we go apple-picking in order to make fresh crumbles and apple sauce but we all know it’s really about the family photo op. Sipping cider on hayrides, small children sitting in a great big pumpkin patch–what could be more quintessentially wholesome and fall-like? On this particular visit, there was a beautiful late afternoon light and I was posing Finn inside a large apple crate, where he seemed happy to sit and play in the leaves. Later that night, scrolling through photos deciding which to share, I found one that captured an expression I’d never noticed on my son before, a slightly twisted open mouth grin that looked different, that looked more autistic. At the time I had a hard time seeing Finn’s diagnosis with any clarity. This photo helped me do this, but it wasn’t a photo I wanted to share.

With social media, I was able to create an idealized version of my son, writing posts that can accurately describe our days together, but accompanying these posts with photos that make him look like any other kid his age. In this online life, I could erase those aspects of his presentation, that peculiar autistic mien, that might make others uncomfortable.

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As Impossible and Imperfect as Translation

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In this beautiful and poignant essay at Guernica, the writer Crystal Hana Kim considers how translating her grandmother’s poems from Korean to English helped her appreciate the imprecision of language not as barrier to be transversed, but as an opportunity for new connection between herself, her mother, and her grandmother.

Last month, my mother recited Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” to me on the phone. I stopped in the middle of Washington Avenue in Brooklyn as she stumbled over the word prairie. I imagined her tongue working to shape those foreign sounds. My mother immigrated to the United States more than thirty years ago, but she has always felt self-conscious about her second language, with its hard r’s and supple l’s. “My friend suggested reading poetry in English to improve my vocabulary, since I write poetry too,” she explained in Korean.

She asked me how to pronounce words she didn’t know—despair, prairie, unrelenting. I repeated them after her, slow and then fast, with definitions and without. We talked about rhythm, image, the deceptive simplicity of Mary Oliver’s lines.

I wanted to weep. My mother and I primarily communicate in Korean, and we rarely talk about literature. We have a complicated relationship, but in that moment, I felt a new closeness—rooted not in the inextricable tie of family, but in choice. I have an immediate affinity for others who have committed to the impossible act of writing.

The more I tried to translate the poems, the more intimidated I became. I wanted to be exact and precise, but inherent in translation is interpretation, the translator’s own agency. I worried. Should I adhere to the words or the rhythms, to the sound or the meaning? Should the poem feel smooth in the translated language, or retain some of the syntactical markers of its original?

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Learning from Perimenopause and a Kpop Idol

Illustration by Jackie Ferrentino

Wendy Gan | Longreads | October 2019 | 19 minutes (4,746 words)

If anyone had told me five years ago that I would become a Kpop fan, I would have laughed in their face. If anyone had told me I would be actually be learning life lessons from a Kpop idol, I would have been even more incredulous. I am in my mid-40s, 20 years into an academic career, a responsible mortgage-payer, and a survivor of a dysfunctional family. I am also in perimenopause, which might help explain why life has taken such a strange turn.

***

I had never heard of perimenopause before, but when a nexus of rather odd physical symptoms from arthritis to sleeplessness to abnormal spikes of anxiety began to plague me, I started to wonder if a new rhythm to my monthly cycle was to blame. Some research revealed potential connections, and the rather sobering piece of information that this shaky run-up to full-blown menopause could very well last up to eight years. If 52 is the average age when most women reach menopause, I would have, quite likely, a good seven years more of this hormonal instability and its physical repercussions to both endure and manage. While I am sure there are worse cases out there, I often do not feel quite myself, and it is disconcerting to say the least. The body that you used to take for granted begins to call attention to itself with various aches and pains, or with strange happenings, like a sudden rush of adrenalin that keeps you awake at night wondering why your heart is pumping with such fury. A work meeting that you would normally take in your stride begins to cause an unusual amount of consternation. Even meeting an old friend for a catch-up can leave you feeling nervous and on edge. Then there are the weeping fits. A sweet animal rescue video as you scroll through Twitter makes you keen in despair. A soppy ending to a television drama makes you sob as if it were the end of your life. And in the midst of the crying, something dislodges, sadness surges and sweeps over you, and it really does feel like the end of your life.

Did I say perimenopause was disconcerting? To be frank, it has been maddening. And hormone-induced depressions (thank you, perimenopause) that hit me unpredictably each month do little to help. Only Kpop keeps me sane.
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Learning from Perimenopause and a Kpop Idol

Longreads Pick
Author: Wendy Gan
Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 30, 2019
Length: 18 minutes (4,746 words)

I Never Wanted my Hemangioma to Define Me

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Emily Weitz | Longreads | October 2019 | 13 minutes (3,434 words)

 

Some kids spent a week of their summers at the Jersey Shore. Others went camping in the Adirondacks. I spent a week every summer of my childhood in the Children’s Ward of NYU Hospital. Muppet movie nights and a play room where children in wheelchairs piece puzzles together. The click click of high heels hurrying down hallways, the smell of cleaning supplies and anesthesia in the air.

I never wanted my hemangioma to define me. Even if it took up half my face, like a suffocating, throbbing purple blanket over the real me. I knew that it was the first thing people noticed when they looked at me. Who’s going to notice big brown eyes when they’re sitting next to a volcano that exploded on a little girl’s cheek?
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Can We Build a Better Women’s Prison?

Longreads Pick

Houston Chronicle criminal justice reporter Keri Blakinger — who once served 21 months of a 2½-year sentence for felony drug possession — visits a women’s prison near Austin, Texas, and considers the ways in which women’s prisons don’t take into consideration women’s particular needs. She speaks with those involved in planning a new $97 million building at the prison, which would be “at the vanguard of a growing focus within criminal justice reform known as gender-responsive corrections.”

This piece is included in the Washington Post Magazine‘s “The Prison Issue,” exclusively featuring writing, photography, and illustrations by those who are currently incarcerated, or were in the past.

Published: Oct 29, 2019
Length: 18 minutes (4,694 words)

Carrying Histories of Protest

Joe Raedle / Getty, Algonquin Books

Jaquira Díaz | Longreads | excerpt from Ordinary Girls: A Memoir | October 2019 | 11 minutes (3,065 words)

 

Puerto Rico, 1985

Papi and I waited in the town square of Ciales, across from Nuestra Señora del Rosario, the Catholic church. He was quiet, stern-faced, his picked-out Afro shining in the sun, his white polo shirt drenched in sweat. Papi was tall and lean-muscled, with a broad back. He’d grown up boxing and playing basketball, had a thick mustache he groomed every morning in front of the bathroom mirror. Squinting in the sun, one hand tightened around his ring finger, I pulled off Papi’s ring, slipped it onto my thumb. I was six years old and restless: I’d never seen a dead body.

My father’s hero, Puerto Rican poet and activist Juan Antonio Corretjer, had just died. People had come from all over the island and gathered outside the parish to hear his poetry while his remains were transported from San Juan. Mami and Anthony, my older brother, were lost somewhere in the crowd.

During the drive from Humacao to Ciales, I’d listened from the backseat while Papi told the story: how Corretjer had been raised in a family of independentistas, how he’d spent his entire life fighting for el pueblo, for the working class, for Puerto Rico’s freedom. How he’d been a friend of Pedro Albizu Campos, “El Maestro,” who my father adored, the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party leader who’d spent more than twenty-six years in prison for attempting to overthrow the US government. How he had spent a year in “La Princesa,” the prison where Albizu Campos was tortured with radiation. After his release, Corretjer became one of Puerto Rico’s most prominent activist writers.
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