Things I Don't Remember

Memory is an interesting thing, no matter how hard you try to remember specific episodes from your life, some will inevitably be forgotten with time; this is especially true of childhood memories. While concrete details will often be forgotten, feelings seem to linger.

*****

I remember being scared.

            I remember standing on the second-floor landing and trying to yell for help, but not finding the words.

“MO–," and then I threw up on the stairs. 

            Before that, I remember a week of feeling sick, not going to school, and wetting the bed. I was six and had long since outgrown that embarrassing phase of my life, but my bladder was trying to tell me something. I remember, on the first night of that week, waking up, realizing what I’d done, and rushing to the bathroom to try and sop up of the quickly cooling urine with toilet paper. I slept on the top bunk above my brother. It didn’t go unnoticed.

            I remember riding in the car to the doctor’s office after I puked on the stairs. His name was Dr. Jay; he was a very kind, bear of a man, with a low, throaty voice.

I don’t remember the visit.

I don’t remember getting my blood tested and I don’t remember being weighed, although I do remember sporting a new, slim figure, having lost close to 15 pounds in the previous week alone.

I remember Dr. Jay pulling my parents aside while I sat on the examination table after the tests, and saying something to the effect of, “We can’t say for sure, but we’re going to send you to the Barbara Davis Center, where they’ll run some more tests.” The room was well lit, and the morning so sunny that I couldn’t see anything but silhouettes.

I don’t remember anything after my visit with Dr. Jay other than meeting Dr. Peter Chase, whom I would visit every three months for the next 12 years, who said, definitively, “It’s diabetes.”

I don’t remember whether or not I knew what that meant, and I don’t remember Dr. Chase promising my mom that I would play in my soccer game that next Saturday, but I remember the changes that came with the diagnosis.  

*****

I have never liked needles. I’ve been afraid of injections, IVs, and even pokes as small as finger pricks for as long as I can remember. Something about the image of skin resisting the initial puncture only to inevitably succumb to the syringe has always made me writhe, even now, as I write this after 15 years with my disease.

I’m better about it now – thank god – but during my first few months, and maybe even my first few years as a diabetic, I was a nightmare for my parents. After meals when I would need a shot of insulin to bring my blood sugar down, I would run away as fast as I could around the house. I pretended it was a game and that I wasn’t scared, but really I ran as though it was for my life; that’s how much I dreaded shots.

We had a circular, wooden table where we would normally eat dinner. Around this table I was at my best when it came to injection avoidance and escaping the pain. Eventually, the game turned to hide and seek; I tried to figure out how I could avoid the injection for the longest period of time.

The lunchtime shots were unavoidable, especially during the school week when I would be lucky enough to pick a friend – usually, that was my best friend and next-door neighbor, Connor – who would escort me to the nurse’s office at the other end of the school. I would have to check my blood, tell the nurse how much food I was planning on eating, and get a shot anticipating that amount of carbohydrates in the food. If I was given too much, I had a stash of juice boxes in one of the drawers of my classroom, but I was always embarrassed to drink from it because I didn’t want my classmates to see and think I was somehow being given special treatment.

Other than that, I don’t remember life at school being all that different. On my first day back after being sick for so long Ms. Weins, my first grade teacher, asked me to say something to the class. I remember her asking me to show the class what I had brought in that day. Unfortunately, diabetes still hadn’t registered in my system, and instead of showing off my new, stainless steel bracelet that said “Jack Todd, Type I Diabetic, Insulin Dependent,” I showed off the National Geographic animal explanation clippings I had happened to bring to school that day. I remember getting as far as explaining the clipping about polar bears before Ms. Weins stopped me and told me what she really wanted me to talk about.

I don’t remember telling my classmates “I’m a diabetic;” I don’t remember them asking me what that meant, or even actually explaining it to them. I do know, though, that it had been described to me as “my pancreas, the organ that creates insulin in my body, got shot and died,” and that’s likely how I related it to them as well. The image accompanying that description was a pancreas – which, thinking about it now, looked suspiciously like a kidney – wearing a cowboy hat, boots with spurs, and a pistol on its hip. I don’t remember whether or not there were tumbleweeds blowing in the background, but for some reason I think there were. It was all very dramatic.

*****

I remember meeting Tavia. It was my second visit to the Barbara Davis Center.

“Heyyy JT!” she said with a high five and no previous introduction. That was all the introduction I needed. “How we doin’ today?”

Every three months, after the initial onslaught of visits to the Center, I remember Tavia greeting me in the same way.

I don’t remember how I responded, at least not the first time. “Uhm, hey,” followed by clutching my mother’s hand and nuzzling my shy face into her hip is a good guess.

Tavia was warm – something that I needed, however removed from the situation I may have been. When she saw that I was afraid of needles, she, and she alone, could talk me down, reassuring me that “this won’t hurt one bit.” Or when my bloodsugar would plummet, she would greet me in her office with graham crackers, peanut butter, and a can of apple juice with the tinny aftertaste.

I remember one time when I visited the center with my grandmother; my bloodsugar was the lowest it has ever been, 22 mg/dl – a meaningless number, even, in some ways, to me, but a diabetic’s bloodsugar should hover around 100. My grandmother had no idea what to do or how to react; Tavia was the only resolution. I don’t remember her saying “Heyyy JT!” as I walked in asking for sugar, but I have no doubt it happened.

*****

            I remember – mostly because my family will never let me forget – waiting for my sister, Sony, to finish a piano lesson as my bloodsugar plummeted. I wailed, “Mom, I feel flimsy.”

            My mother swears that’s when the reality of my diabetes hit her. “None of my children have ever used the word ‘flimsy,’ other than on that day,” she says. We went to the 7-Eleven down the street and got a Slurpee. I hardly remember drinking it on the front doorstep of her piano teacher’s house as Sony finished her lesson.

*****

            Apart from my diagnosis, I remember relatively few concrete details from my childhood. I remember many of my adventures with Connor, some of them only vaguely, but couldn’t possibly put them in context.

I vividly remember random days like those spent playing Hi-Ho! Cherry-O in Connor’s basement. In one such memory, I can still see the horrible bowl-cut Connor was sporting at the time and the black and white striped turtleneck he was wearing that was stained with red juice.  Apart from times like these, though, much of my childhood is hazy to me now.

I don’t remember why Connor or I thought it was a good idea to go climbing around on his roof or “tire-tapping” each other as we biked to and from school; I don’t remember how we discovered an enormous sink hole in his back yard or why his sister, Bailey, thought it was a good idea to run around my house with an open Sharpie; I don’t remember our parents passing us over the chain-link fence connecting our backyards. I do remember being happy, though. I don’t remember diabetes changing that, and I’m satisfied knowing it all could have ended a lot worse than it did. 

"I'm Fine."

I remember the first time I lied and told someone I was “fine.”  I was five and sitting in the back of car on the way home, having just embarrassed my mother by responding to an acquaintance’s, “how are you, Emily?” with, “I am having a bad day.”

Up until that moment, and it might have been the first moment the question had ever been directed at me in a conversation, I had never realized that the phrase was in fact a question, presented to illicit a response. As if the person, however distant an acquaintance, was genuinely interested in my physiological well-being.

            My mother struggled to get me to understand that the people who ask, “How are you?” do not want a textured response depending on my mood of the moment; that as a child, unless I am being maimed, I am fine. That while trying to be polite by showing interest in my life beyond a passing greeting, they did not require an in depth analysis of the grievances of my day, but just to make sure no one had died, or that I wasn’t being kidnapped. I do not need to share my personal problems with the world. This was before Facebook – clearly.

I was five and had a very minimal understanding of nuance, let alone socially rhetorical questions, so all I gathered at that young age was the appropriate response to people’s poking and prodding into my personal life was to inform them that I am “fine,” and not to let them linger in their concern for me.

To clarify, this was by no means my mother being heartless by implying that no one was concerned about my negative observations on life (though at such a young age, I am not sure anyone should have been,) but instead her providing insight into the way in which social interactions were conducted in my family and where I am from. People did not, as a general rule stop on Main Street and have discussions with strangers about their day, and unless close friends or long lost acquaintances, grocery store interactions stopped at a polite head nod. While most of the 136,225 people of Merrimack County were in some way or another closely acquainted, social graces were quite proper, and the grocery store remained a place of anonymity.  

So when my mother said “N’est ce pas?” the little pig French I knew in our family to mean, “do you understand?” I dutifully replied, “Nass pa: I am fine.”

            For the thirteen years that followed, I lived quite contently within the rules of social engagement; only those closest to me being privileged to my personal insights, pursuits, and later transgressions. There were side effects of sorts; despite having a class size in the low 60’s for most of high school (and having known most of that 60 for at least three years prior in the adjoining middle school,) longtime fellow classmates were usually the last to find out when someone’s parents got divorced, grandparent died, or heart broken. Most often, the news would trickle down through the ranks through an intricate web of personal connections that anyone else outside the school (or town, depending on the setting of the subject,) would be referred to as violent gossip. It was simply impolite to confront an individual’s hardship face to face.

            Without the blatant social opportunity to cry for help, those who were truly concerned about your well-being learned to see the signs elsewhere: the physical signals that everyone has when they are in one form of distress or another.  There is the obvious and often embarrassing flood of tears, or bloody gash, but before trouble crescendos in such a harsh direction there are more subtle indications.  The cardinal example was in April of my sophomore year. 

I had just finished working sound on the school musical; Anything Goes, (I remember because on this particular day, I was wearing our production’s shirt.) I walked out of a particularly unpleasant 45 minutes in Mr. Cole’s English class to find my father standing in the middle of the Sophomore hallway amongst all my classmates looking incredibly lost, likely because he had only been to my high school a handful of times, and had clearly yet to see a familiar face.

“Dad?” He seemed immeasurably pleased to have found me, but the relief faded far too fast, to a look of unbearable discomfort.  “Why are you here? You’re not supposed to come and get me for another… six hours?” My father’s awkward presence quickly began to be a source of embarrassment, and panic welled in my gut.

“Emily... Emily we have to go. I came to get you. Something has happened.” I have rarely been tested, but somehow I have always handled terrible situation with all the grace I can muster, what little that may be. I calmly blew past him, dumped a random handful of work and textbooks from my locker into my bag, and turned around to look at my dad, who now seemed more comfortable standing in the emptying hallway.  At that moment no one I was close to was near; no one to throw me a look of questioning concern, no one to introduce to my father to break the tension, just me and him, leaving in silence.

I knew somehow what had happened. I knew because my arms were still blessed with the lingering tan from the vacation we had all taken barely weeks before. I knew because he would have wanted to go quietly, on a bright, beautiful spring day. I knew because he would have wanted to make it as easy for everyone else as possible. Especially mom; so he waited until dad was home so she wouldn’t be alone. 

And right as the front door of my goofy, rural, private school settled into the frame behind us, and my dad was no longer burdened with his desire to not send me over the edge in front of people, “Emily, your grandfather died.”

There was no one outside. It was too early; we had only just gotten to school a few hours earlier. It was a Thursday. There was still muddy gray snow in awkward lumps throughout the yard where the plow had piled it too high. 

My dad smiled. Not a friendly smile per say, but an uncomfortable reassuring one. And I laughed. Not as if watching the Daily Show after an unpleasant Presidential Debate, but when you see all the pieces of a complicated puzzle come together and realize you’ve had the image right in front of you all along. I laughed, and my dad smiled, because even in death, my grandfather, the eternal caregiver had found a way to make sure we would all be okay. He had orchestrated an elaborate vacation, with everyone present just a few weeks before. He had been an intolerable, lecturing grump; he had railed on me about what I was eating, lectured my dad about his work, and done everything he could to make sure that our shortcomings were highlighted. Not to be a jerk it turns out, but because he did not want to leave us all here without making sure we would be alright without him. He wanted to ensure I made it out of my teens healthy and happy, that my dad spent time with his family, that we all did our best to not wallow in his loss for too long after he was gone. 

“Boo child, are you okay?” My dad asked on our way home.

I knew we were driving home to tell my mother that her favorite person in the world had died, and that she would be a horrible wreck for the foreseeable future as a result. I knew that this was the first of many moments of loss to come over the coming years, and I knew that there was very little I could do to stop them. I was terrified, but it was clearly not my turn to be upset. My turn did not really come for a long time afterword…

“yeah dad, I am fine.”

My family and Derryfield were not alone in the emotional silence. It was the way everyone seemed to work. The East Coast is stereotyped by its unending dedication to work, frigid (some would say reserved,) emotional openness and the importance of community. Some stereotypes are just that, embellishments, but within every cliché there is a grain of truth. In this case, you could fill a bag of rice with all these grains of truth.

Leah, a classmate from my first year Latin class would go on to lose her last living grandparent the next week. We had been homework buddies in the months prior since her arrival at Derryfield that Fall, but had never been close.  

The day after my grandfather died, I still had not cried. Instead, all alone in the house I decided to bake, seemingly a logical substitute. Somehow, along the way, I had forgotten I really could not cook; I had been overwhelmed with the idea that it was something someone who was grieving would do. With my hands covered in a vomit like, purple icing, I left my disastrous attempt to bake behind and called Leah to find out our quirky teacher’s response to my absence.

“Doc was too focused on Jake getting kicked out to dwell on you missing, he did get upset that no one had done the homework though… Emily, I know you said you were fine… but… how are you really doing?”

I had thought up until this moment that I had protected my shattered psyche well, dwelling on homework and the newsy dismissal of our long time classmate, but Leah did not buy it. I had said I was fine at least a dozen times, but she hadn’t been convinced. Maybe it was how meek my voice was, or maybe it was the beginning of kismet: signaling the close friendship Leah and I would develop – she could see past the socially indoctrinated, politeness.  Fine was in no way synonymous with good in our world, and so she poked and prodded until I confessed my troubling concern:

“To be honest…I haven’t cried, at all. Is that bad?”

“Emily, It’s a lot to take in. You know that just because you aren’t crying doesn’t mean you don’t care, don’t you? You are taking care of your mom and Kate. Not everyone cries.”

Somehow, even though we had not been close, Leah knew me: I cared about the loss, I cared too much about those around me to show it, and I would not break down at that moment.  She did not need to hear a cry for help to know I was in need.

Until I left my bubble to go to college, I never realized that not everyone acts in such a way. I never realized people could be so open about personal feelings, or at least do so without being branded a lunatic.  In the Pacific Northwest there is a limit to how far the social graces I was taught would reach. People here wave to strangers in the street, get into never ending conversations with cashiers about their children, and announce their troubles to the world. It is more commonly defined as, warmth. Here the surface was the warmest part of a person: to share comfort with one another, to build trust, to welcome one another into our lives. At first it felt like Wonderland; a world full of kind, good people.

            After spending a fair amount of time here, I began to notice two problems with such an attitude. The first was what I viewed as the close-minded reaction people here had to those on the East Coast (“People in New York are so cold!” or “No one smiled at me when I visiting Boston, what’s their problem?”) However, the second and more important one was, the cost of my habit of saying, “I am fine.”

            It would seem quite logical I imagine to take everyone at face value, and assume that an individual is, in fact, fine. In truth, I never noticed how my false fine’s were affecting people till someone got upset.  Friends were repeatedly saying, “Why didn’t you say something?!” and I was eternally let down by them not seeing the signs.  To them, there would have been no need to pester me about how I was doing after my initial, “I’m fine,” the way Leah had. However I would equally imagine, that those same people would struggle to understand how I could be doing fine after my first experience with loss, and subsequently would have assumed I was either insincere or heartless.

I never realized until it was too late that the problem was in our disjointed communication: because all along, I was saying something, and yet had not given them their sign for trouble. Somehow, I was still relying on them to understand mine. 

At home, we never need the question, “how are you doing,” to gage the mood of those around us. I could hear it in my friends voices, see it written all over a person’s face, know by looking at how they were carrying themselves that things simply were not okay, and because of that, the chronic white lie, “I’m fine,” became as meaningless as “Hello,” or “Good Morning.” Instead of the formulaic words, what really mattered was how the conversation progressed after that first interaction, because if the person truly cared, and saw that the other was in need, “I am fine,” was never a suitable conclusion.

Sexual Kleptomania

I used to make theft sexy.

The first thing I ever stole from a man was a muffin.  Very tame.  It was lemon poppyseed, my favorite flavor all through elementary school.  I was 16.

Jon was 45, and a very successful consumer fraud lawyer.  He worked at an absolutely lush firm in a highrise downtown.  We drove by it once on the way to our first and only real date.  Afterward I’d always remember the brown and gold giant on La Jolla Ave.  Jon was thoroughly a lawyer.  He approached our brief relationship with steely, unforgiving hands, and foreclosed on me like bad assets.

We met through a mutual acquaintance, a man through whom I cultivated an insatiable taste for older, colder, emotionally distant men with more money than they had positive things to say.  I told Jon I was 19, and he told me he had his own house. 

Our first date.  I knew from the moment he ordered something with catfish in it we were doomed.  The logistics of our relationship were just too hilarious.  He was entering middle-age with a solid career and a beautiful home in the Sierra Madre Hills, with a full head of hair and an immaculate physique.  I was 16, passing for 19, and trying to hide acne scars and a wimpy frame with bragger and bravado.  Why people like us pretended to be interested in each other clothed and in a café today still baffles me.  The first date bombed.  Our second night would be our last. 

It was the pretend winter break of my pretend Sophomore year of college.  I drove my mom’s Tahoe to Jon’s house for the date I was actually excited for.  Things went from dull to just plain awful very quickly. 

I came on too strong, without ever coming on.  My touch seemed foolish without even moving.  Jon was playing me, and I was too powerless and naïve to see it.  That night he called me a coward and a runt.  He wouldn’t kiss me on the mouth. I was frustrated, I retaliated.  After an hour of hesitant touching and recoiling, Jon let me know “we” weren’t going to happen.  I was silent, faking understanding.  I felt cheated and stolen from.  My one and only desire was sex.  But I left feeling like the pathetic newbie on the scene spurned by the much matured lover I’d foolishly fallen in love with.  Is this what he got off on?  Luring kids to his house to fuck around with but never fuck?  It was emotional manipulation.  It was theft of desire.  I felt dirty, sexualized but at the same time revolting.

He went for the shower.  Jon invited me in, to “talk it out.” God could see me in the shower, forced into a clammy, claustrophobic cell like a confessional booth – that wasn’t going to happen.  And neither were Jon and I that night.  I tugged on my jeans and wandered into the kitchen, a tacky monument of cherry-oak and stainless steel. I couldn’t accept that all was lost, and my scanning eyes found something that gave my heart hope.  He had stupidly left a succulent, lemon poppyseed muffin under an iron banana tree.  A flame ignited inside of me.  It seemed right to want it.  It was right to assume the muffin was mine.  Suddenly Jon moved his fat, wet body in front of the muffin like a beached seal and mouthed some question to me. I didn’t hear him.  I told him that I was sorry too and yes I was going to head out but of course I’d be coming back again soon and wait had I forgot my wallet on the nightstand? Would he be a dear and go get it?  God, I was damned, but I thought I at least deserved a muffin. 

It began: a sexual kleptomania.

.  .  .

When I first made my sexual debut (gay men don’t really have the privilege or biology to be talking about sex in terms of virginity, we have to be creative), I was a rotten, presumptuous bitch of a lover. 

I cheated everyone I came to know.  I didn’t come out of the closet as gay until I was 18.  While still in the closet, I lived between two different worlds.  I’d spend days at school with friends, I’d do homework and spend time with my family.  Normal high school kid stuff.  After dinner I’d put on pleather booty shorts under my ill-fitting jeans, stuff some angel wings and lube into my backpack and take the 498 into the heart of downtown Los Angeles.  My parents thought I was getting frozen yogurt.  To 98% of the world, I was straight. The only people who knew I was gay were me, and the men I slept with.  When I was gay, sex was the only name of the only game.  And lying, cheating, secrecy, and stealing were the rules.  Being openly gay was not a possibility for me; I could not afford crossover between these worlds. It was a tightly controlled lifestyle, designed to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.  Namely, maximizing the pleasures of being gay, and minimizing the pain of being too terrified to let anyone outside of a motel room know it.

The stealing developed very innocently over the following months.  I’d always assumed I’d be in more legal trouble if I got caught stealing, than  divine trouble if I got caught with a man.  Looking back, stealing little keep-sakes from each of my lovers, knowing I’d never see them again seemed like a  desperate emotional ritual - clawing at fragments of memory, identity, and acceptance.  Maybe they were secular relics I adorned with memories of sin.  Like rosary beads.  At the time, I was just trying to stay entertained.

.  .  .

The Grand Avenue 16 Motel smelled like old cigarette smoke and the gold-colored alcohol my Uncles used to drink after mass.  We were on the second floor.  I stepped into the dingy shower to clear my mind.  From the bathroom peephole of a window I could see the trailer-park my childhood best-friend Mariah grew up in.  I thought about Mariah’s very clean and curated Mormon upbringing.  If my mom could see me scrubbing my body clean in a shower as remote to her as my lover was to me, what would she have thought?  How would I explain to her that I didn’t know why I was doing it either?  It was a toss-up whether she would have been more disgusted in me or the state of the laminate. 

Mariah’s mother Missy Higgins and my mother worked at the elementary school together.  Missy thought they were great friends, and my mother loathed her.  She disapproved of the way Mormon mothers like Missy brought up their children.  She used to say that Mormon households are just like  Catholic ones, “with all the guilt but half the fun.”  My family was the “spiritual, not religious” type.  They were too resigned and skeptical to go back to church, but too guilty and afraid of what might happen if they fully turned away from it.  Catholicism was genetic.  Scripture, humility, ecstasy, and guilt were free-floating coagulants that generations of increasingly secularized children couldn’t ever get rid of.  No matter how I tried, I couldn’t kick that guilt complex.

My Catholic relatives and my Mormon friends told me that pious, humble, heterosexual Jesus was a guy I should look up to.  He cared about me, and he was always watching over me.  Was he the same guy who looked down on me from the tacky tin frame on the wall?  As far as I had seen, the only place Jesus was watching me was from the tattered walls of rest-stop motel rooms.  Like the one I was in now.

I toweled off.  I passed the damp rag to Eric, quickly stuffed my feet into oversized skate shoes and booked it.  A rosy glint caught my eye as I steered towards the door.  Eric had left a hideous pink-faced watch on the dresser, and he was now in the shower.  I would never wear it, and it would be my biggest theft yet.  After 1/10^th of a moment’s consideration I nabbed the watch and whistled down the faux-marble wrapping staircase.  On the car ride home I did my normal routine – get a large milkshake from Jack in the Box while I listen to Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” and just drive.  I wasn’t paying for the gas, didn’t pay for the watch, and I’d get away with the sex too.  I thought a lot about karma and sin and other systems that cycle around shame, guilt, and responsibility.  Perhaps damnation or karma was coming to kick my ass.  Fiona crooned about it, but I hadn’t gotten nicked yet.  The things I stole got more and more intense.  I was nowhere closer to understanding why I did it.  What kind of law was I working under where I could have no-strings-attached sex, steal from my lovers while they shower off my shame, and reward myself with buckets of calories and a self-congratulatory orgy of ambient 90’s angst?  It couldn’t be divine, so why should I pretend like I was?

.  .  .

I stole Randall Kennedy’s Nigger from a black man.  We were intimate, I don’t remember his name.

I can’t remember his name.  When I turned eighteen I stopped trying to remember names.  I realized I didn’t need to remember someone’s name to feel guiltless.  My sexual life became aggressively impersonal.  Lying, though still practical, lost its fun.  I completely checked out.  If asked, I would give a pseudonym – “Evan”.  There were no numbers, no half-assed attempts at romance, and especially no names.  Names were not articles of identity.  They wouldn’t remember a man any better than my touch could.  Professions were better markers of character.  I always remembered my lovers’ jobs.

All I remember about this man was his job.  He was a lieutenant in the marines.  This man, I don’t refer to.  He is nulled space; he is ______. 

His freshly starched uniform hung from a plastic gold light fixture in the bathroom while I took my routine shower.  I initially planned on staying over, but he turned out to be just about as much fun as his evidently “gray” themed house.  We swapped places.  I hadn’t stolen in over two years.  I was a real sophomore in college now and was trying to make my sexual life less reckless.  God had probably stopped watching me – a shower was just a shower, and the disappointment sex usually brought was my own.   I felt disappointed with myself enough at the fact that the lover I had chosen lived in a condo, when that old familiar flamed leaped up inside me.

I’m this horrible accidental neo-colonialist, racist pig and I’d worked my past two years alongside people of all races, genders and background literally trying to END this sort of shit that somehow a half worthwhile sex-act just stumbled me into? I don’t remember his name.  My eyes got greedy, and my hands responded.  “Something small,” I thought.  From off his tiny bookshelf I nabbed a book I recognized the cover art to.  It was a favorite book of one of my high school lit professor.  “Perfect,” I thought.  Some more light, intellectual reading for plane rides or park benches.

I stole from him Randall Kennedy’s Nigger.  An apparently wonderful anthropological exploration behind the etymology, history and usage of the now derisive racial slur that I will never read because I am so ashamed and confused over why of all the books in his shitty white oak Ikea half-shelf I chose NIGGER.  Book in hand and boots in the other I exploded down the staircase.  The drive back home, the rest of that day, and the rest of that year could not contain the shame I felt radiating from the glovebox in my car where I still keep the book locked up.

To this day the n-word cuts deeper than any slur that could get thrown around me.  The cut isn’t mine, and the hurt is indirect.  It hurts because I’m no stranger to identity-based slurs being hurled directly at me.  The pain I feel when I hear it must be hidden, re-packaged and shipped out as some other kind of acute physical response.  It’s a pain that comes from feeling so selfish, so immature and worst of all so young, thinking that my thievery wouldn’t catch up to me at some point.  This pain is witnessed by racism, but can never imitate the pain racial discrimination deals its’ victims.

After my incident with _____  I never stole again.  I never spoke to him again when to him I may have actually spoken again otherwise.  I was finally brought down.  My empire fell to ruin before me with the swoop of a great, mysterious hand. 

But it wasn’t God’s.

Kinsey

     We were finally on the phone and my voice was reverberating off the walls, loud, shrill, and happy. Your voice, rising and falling in the most familiar, unlyrical way, planted me firmly back home even though I was in my bare, Tacoma bedroom and you were in St. Louis, both of us far from our stomping ground. I hadn't seen you in a year and a half, and I was beginning to forget which shade of pink your cheeks turned when we laughed and how exactly your fingers moved when you flipped through the pages of my magazines. I had to muster all my powers of memory to recreate the rambunctious, grating quality of your laugh. But your drawn out “aaaa” sounds and sharply punctuated sentences brought everything sliding back into focus. I could suddenly remember your multitude of white tank tops, how each one fell against your sturdy torso. I remembered how that particular wash of jean looked stretched around your thighs. I wanted to look like that: solid and unshakable without even trying. My body was waifish and uneasy in itself, tipped over with the slightest push. I pined for the thickness, the immovability you possessed.

When Mac would lift you up by the armpits you would not give him the satisfaction of a playful shriek and enticing wiggle. You were not coy. You dodged and scolded. You were mad. When Mac did the same thing to me all I could do was laugh and grab him playfully around the neck, ultimately leading to confusion and kissing. I regretted my malleability, wishing for arms more muscled, and a mouth more determined, like yours. But you never saw me like that. Once, while we drove through the fall leaves in my car, backseat bouncing wildly, stereo crackling, you told me “You're the nice one. I am the big bitch everyone hates.” Really I knew I was just weak. You were the cool one, the one with talent and ideas and a way of speaking that no one else had. I mimicked your patterns, placing long “aaaaaaands” that moved through different pitches at the beginning of all my sentences, making my other words clipped and evenly weighted. I wanted to inhabit your voice, to make it my own, take a piece of you for me.

But we hadn't spoken in months by now, and our phone calls were irregular and not long enough. I had shed my weakness for the most part, packed pounds around my own torso. I had found my own rhythms and words, fallen out of sync with our old language. We were on the phone and you were so drunk and had to pee, but I made you stay, even though there was nothing new to talk about. It wasn't just our language that changed, every other piece of our lives had. It was frustrating re-explaining each person in my life, their weight, their role. It amounted to a lot of “How is school?” “Hard. And awful.” “Ugh. Same.”

I have five big posters on my bedroom wall, their size marking important moments and people. Three of them were made by you. The quality of their lines and color clearly announce your life as an Art Student. Each one is the same concept: a massive list of our favorite memories and jokes to incessantly repeat, a self-referential reminder of our friendship. The moment we became “best friends” figures prominently in all of them, a demarcation line between “separate” and “together.” In your posters this episode merely consists of the bare bones dialogue, a brief and abbreviated summation. But I remember exactly how we huddled in the dark front seat of my car, the night outside lightened by the reflected whiteness of crispy old snow. We were parked outside Anna's yellow house, watching her spidery legs move through the night up to her doorstep, then disappear inside. Her door shut and we faced forward, looking at the fogged up windshield and the remnants of our words and jokes carved through the condensation weeks and days ago. “Jacob Oeste,” “Love M.F.” “Mac and Cheese” and millions of other private references stood out in watery letters against the snow, another living record of our friendship. Our breath crystalized in midair for a brief moment before you whipped your face towards me and urgently demanded to know “Are we best friends?” This is the one time I remember your eyes searching me, almost pleading and apologizing, waiting for some kind of approval. I was usually the one asking, the one waiting to be corrected. “Um....YES” I bellowed, inappropriately joyous. I was genuinely taken aback by your evident need for me, but immensely relived it was finally mutual.

I met you because of our last name, a secret shared heritage that neither of us know anything about. Where do Lundquists come from? I can't say, but here we are on in the same Boise School District roster, next to each other because of an arbitrary seating chart. One day I will buy a membership to one of those ancestry websites and finally plumb the shadowy waters of our common history. We have been the “Lundquist Sisters” since tenth grade when we took history with Mr. Blackburn who refused to call his students by their first names. Instead, we were both “Ms. Lundquist,” a name that refused to differentiate us, causing endless confusion in class. Blackburn ended up always calling on both of us at once: “Okay, one of the Lundquist sisters!” After that class on Thursdays we would pile into Bridget's green Honda and listen to embarrassing Tech Nine songs. Her car smelled almost new, except for a lingering hint of McDonald's fries, chemically and stale. I always got the backseat, clambering over the passenger’s side, tangling my ponytail in the seatbelt as I heaved my enormous blue backpack through the tiny space. As we drove our familiar, well-travelled streets, your curly head would poke around the passenger seat to look back and grin at me, maybe ask me a question about Anna or Mac. You got the privilege of shotgun because you weren't afraid to screech out warnings to the inattentive Bridget. When she accidentally turned the wrong way into oncoming traffic, it was you who grabbed the wheel, wrested it from Bridget's clammy hands, and brought us bumping over a curb into the safety of a 7-11 parking lot.

    Once we went cruising through the streets of downtown Boise, even though it was wintertime again and the streets were patchy with ice leftover from the snowplows. By this time, the days of driving endlessly with Bridget were over. Her Honda had been inevitably totaled, and we didn't see her anymore after your fight by the lockers anyway. So we were in Alex's car, but still sitting in the same places, me in the back, this time with Mac, and you in front, peeking around the chair so we could exchange skeptical looks. Everything that came out of anyone's mouth was subject to your intense scrutiny. That night the Boise blocks were electrified with pink and gold signs, welcoming the Saturday night crowd in from the cold. Instead of piling into the well-lit theaters and restaurants as we first intended, we drove in Alex's gold Eldorado, winding our circular way through the knots of bundled up pedestrians, passing under the same street lights over and over. It is nearly impossible for me now to capture the giddiness that filled the car and ballooned against the cold windows. The air around us was saturated with brash jokes and sloppy flirtations. We rolled down the windows sticking our pink faces into the brisk night, boldly catcalling to strangers. Alex careened down side streets, and you scolded like always, but this time everyone laughed and scolded you back. Mac's hand kept grazing my knee. We shouted about everyone we hated and loved, talking in circles and over the end of each other's sentences. Judgments were passed about purpose and meaning that laid out our lives in understandable, mappable ways. I reached for your shoulders every time I thought of something funny, searching for approval, pressing the pads of my fingers into your coat. Pieces of your face, wide open with exuberant laughter and jokes, were softly illuminated by the shifting street lights as we drove in circles for hours.

     After we went to art school for the summer of sophomore year I thought I would never be able to see you again. Sharing a room was almost impossible, first because you were constantly stressed out about your classes, grumpy and hostile. Second because you were so much better than me at everything. Your dresser was clean, your meals always contained vegetables. My food and my closet were not good enough. And your lithograph was perfect. In that one print you captured the way a poster peels away from the wall when someone strides quickly past, and the way a telephone pole looks splintered and gray after a winter of snow and rain. There was an actual message, fun and enchanting, in the swirling hand-lettered banner: “Print ain't dead yet!” My print was my own plain handwriting, dutifully scrawling out a “personal creed” of patience and understanding over and over again. Much less profound. Much less dynamic. And it didn't even ring true because I had no patience. You were driving me absolutely insane. You spent hour upon hour holed up in the print shop, while I sat lonely on my bed, unproductively reading novels, until you came home and told me to do my dishes. You turned the level of our mini fridge up to ten, freezing my yogurts and forcing me to eat cereal with ice chips instead of milk for breakfast. Your long, curly hair clogged our shower drain until one morning it overflowed into our room, making us both late for class. I cried in my underwear, revealing that spindly, breakable body I hated so much, while we sopped up dirty shower water with our bath towels. But then, a few days later, we called Anna, and she was different. “We smoked with Alex's big sister,” she purred slyly over the phone, “We got drunk too. Mac especially.” This was at the time in our lives when we were still so naïve, in disbelief when anyone did anything illegal or even against the rules. I was still scared in class when boys talked about drinking on the weekends. I didn't even know what smoking weed entailed. All of a sudden our friends had grown up, taken a leap forward in to adulthood without us. They had waited to be rebels until we were firmly out of the picture. We were left behind together, distinctly separate and distinctly uncool. The dishes and the shower didn't matter very much anymore. I think you cried, hard tears from your strong center.

     But now it is six years later and we are on the phone and we have been drunk and we have smoked weed and we are different like Anna was. There has been more kissing and sex, and Anna and Bridget, Mac and Alex don't even matter any more. I would never drive in circles around Boise now, and I would never wish for my shirts to fit the way yours used to. I haven't seen you in years and I am afraid of how we would act. We are on the phone and I am so happy, even though we have left each other behind. Our old friends don't mean anything now, but we talk about them because it is all we have left in common. “Did you know Anna unfriended us on Facebook?” “Did you know Mac is dating a girl from his floor?” “What is Alex even doing at UBC?” There is no more camaraderie of being the last ones to grow up, of being artists, of speaking the same language. All our jokes, all our self referential bits are in a past that is becoming more remote with every day I don't call you. They are still on my walls, immortalized in the posters you diligently crafted, but now they are more like relics, saints' bones, rather than living bits of our friendship. They are reminders of what we once had and how different that is now.

You didn't come see me last time you were in Seattle, even though I was only a short drive away. I cried and called my mom after you texted me the curt “Don't think we can fit it in the plans.” You were the best friend I ever had, the best person I ever knew, but now we are on the phone and after fifteen glorious minutes there is a lull in our conversation and you confess, “I don't have anything else to say” and hang up on me.

French: My Home and My Heart by Katie Breece

253.879.323I don't know where my obsession with France came from or when it started. My family is not French, and has no connection with the country or language, but ever since I was a little girl it was my dream to speak French, wear French clothes, and travel to France. I think the only distinctly French thing I was willing to pass on was the food because I never liked trying new things- but that is a whole 'nother story.

I don’t really remember being so interested in France when I was little, but apparently I was because that is when my Nana made the promise that brought me to Paris ten years later. When I was three, Nana promised to take me to France for my 13^th birthday and much to my mother’s shock she followed through.

This first exposure to true Parisian culture sold me on my love of all things French even further. After an exhausting flight that was a blur of movies and excitement we landed and were immediately whisked into a cab that whipped and wound its way impossibly through the tiny streets of Paris. We were flying faster than I ever imagined possible until suddenly we slammed to a stop in front of an old building on a cobblestone street.

Our room was the tiniest room I had ever stayed in, but the mere inches between the beds didn’t matter because of the large view of the Eiffel Tower- the ultimate symbol of France. At the end of that week I returned home with the glowing lights of the Eiffel Tower lit up like a Christmas tree burned into my memory and a burning desire, brighter than those lights, to return as soon as possible.

***

The next year I started a new school and a new French program and began working towards realizing my dream of returning to France. When I transferred to a new district for high school I felt like I was in a whole new country. The sights may have been the same as my past school and the sounds of teenagers don’t really change wherever you go, but I didn’t know which hallway to turn down and when lunchtime came I was left looking for a place that my ham sandwich and I could fit in.

French class became the place where I fit and could begin to make connections; maybe it was because we were all lost there. Our teacher, who we simply called Madame, had a reputation that stretched across county lines. When I had told my previous French teacher the school I would be attending the next year her response, in her distinctly French accent was, “Oooh, Madame, she’s a tough one.”

On the first day of school you could see the excitement tinted by fear, or maybe it was fear tinged with excitement, in the eyes of the students filing into Madame’s room. Even those who had moved onto high school with friends and knowing which direction to turn in the halls were unsure of what to expect in the new world of our French classroom.

That first day of French class is a blur, but certain aspects of it still shine in my memories. That was the day when I met my best friend. That was the day when I began to truly learn French. And that was the day that marks my first day as a “real” student.

At Petaluma High School French, and Madame in particular, were infamous. Actually the reputation of the Petaluma High French program stretched much further than just our school and even further than our town. Madame was known for pushing her students, but she was also known for how much she cared for them. It may seem cliché to say that she pushed us because she loved us, but it’s the truth. It was not unusual for a student to call her mom by mistake and I must admit that I did so myself on multiple occasions.

The seventeen of us in that class were bonded in ways that others couldn’t understand. We didn’t all hang out when we weren’t in class, but a knowing glance in the halls or standing in line together at Kinkos the morning a project was due brought us together because we understood what we were all going through in a way that our friends who were taking Spanish or sign language could never understand.

            I remember one morning; it must have been in my junior year because I had driven to Kinkos on my own. It had been a late night finishing up yet another French project and after crashing for a few hours early in the morning I was awake again and sitting in front of Kinkos waiting for it to open so I could print my project before rushing off to my first period of the day. As I stood in line behind a business man and a suburban mom who was taking forever to print the pictures of her dog dressed up for various holidays I must have had a mix of sleep deprivation and desperation on my face as I watched the clock tick closer to the start time of my first class. As I checked my watch for the thousandth time the man standing behind me tapped my shoulder. Questioningly I turned around and the man simply said “Madame?” I was close to tears as I laughingly replied, “What gave it away?”

            The man turned out to be the father of one of the girls in my class, here to print her project. This complete stranger who I had never met, and whose daughter I had never spent time with outside of class, took my project from me and delivered it to class with his daughter’s so that I could make it to class on time. This is the type of community that French created. Even our parents understood the pressure we were under.

            Why would I stick with this you might ask? That was a question that I asked myself many times, particularly in the middle of the night when the rest of my family had been tucked into their warm beds for hours and I was still salving away at the kitchen table making sure that I had glued down the photos for my project in a perfectly straight line. Ultimately I realized that while Madame was tough, she was only making me stronger.

            In high school French I not only learned how to conjugate avoir and être or how to order a baguette from a bakery, but I also learned how to create a professional project, how to work with others, and most importantly how to put my all into everything I loved. That’s what Madame did; she put her all into her students, her team (she was the tennis coach), and her school.

***

            French class also brought me back to France. After three years of dreaming about walking down the crowded streets of Paris, panting my way up the hundreds of steps on the Eiffel Tower, and strolling along the Champs Elysée, pretending I could actually afford anything being sold there, I finally found myself back in my dream city with 12 of my French classmates. And Madame.

            This time around my trip was not nearly as much of a whirlwind, even the bus that brought us to the families we would stay with in Paris felt like it moved significantly slower than the cab I had been whisked to my hotel in the first time I visited Paris. This was most likely because the HUGE bus (probably small by American standards, but it felt huge compared to the teeny tiny cars and mopeds that the Parisiens used to get around) could barely squeeze between the parked cars. My best friend, Cyprien, and I had to drag our massive suitcases three blocks to the family we stayed with because the bus couldn’t get any closer on the tiny streets.

            This trip let me see Madame in a whole new light. She was still pushing us to be better, but maybe it was the lack of major projects keeping us up all night, or maybe it was the long plane ride and train rides around the South of France when we travelled to Nice for a week, but that trip truly allowed me to connect with Madame as a person. I began to view her more as a friend than as a teacher. I returned from France with a new appreciation for everything Madame put into us, her students, and feeling even more connected with France and the “je ne c’est quoi” that made me fall in love with the country all over again.

***

            Last Spring I walked out of class one day to find a multitude of messages from my fellow French students, many of whom I hadn’t spoken to in over a year. My heart dropped into my stomach as I read the news that took away my mentor and my friend. Madame was dead. She was gone.

            It didn’t even hit me at first. I went back to my room and just sat there in shock. How can you ever understand how to react when you lose someone who was a part of you life for so long and in such an intense way?

            This was the first and only time in my whole freshman year that I felt the separation between myself and my home. I knew that I couldn’t go home, but I still found myself researching flights late at night in the dark as my roommate slept. I wanted to be with those who would understand how I was feeling, but we were strewn all over the country and world for college.

            Over the next few days I began to realize that Madame’s spirit had not just been felt by my classmates and me, but by hundreds of other students she had taught over the years. While I was unable to return home for the memorial service many of Madame’s past students flew in from all corners of the country to share their stories.

            Madame taught not just French, but everything she had learned and experienced in her life. One girl who spoke at the memorial summed up how we felt about Madame, “She did everything for us because she knew we were capable of it all. In reality she knew us better than we knew ourselves.”

Madame’s passing coincided with the completion of my French studies, but the feeling of belonging that washed over me the first time I strolled down the cobblestone streets of Paris was the same feeling that I feel whenever I think of my days in my French classroom with Madame and the students who became my family inside of the world that only we could truly understand. French was and is and always will be my home.

***

In Memory of Sarah "Madame" Wadsworth