I’ve never met a Caroline I couldn’t fantasize about. When someone mis-pronounces my name more than once, I tell them, “It’s like Caroline, but Emma. Emmeline.” When they ask where that name comes from, I tell them my mother read it in a book. I tell them that Emmeline is often a side character in nineteenth century novels, cousin Emmeline who died young of tuberculosis before she could get married, or something like that. I used to wish my parents had named me something simpler, something that didn’t prompt a question. But as I got older, I liked the attention.

Now, at parties, I like to drag the story out. I tell strangers that my mother wanted to name me Clementine, but my middle name is already a fruit so my father had to draw the line somewhere. I sip my drink and savor the reliable laughter, the eyes on me.

Still, I feel a strange jealousy burning the back of my throat whenever I meet a Caroline. This could be because the ones I tend to meet are tall and blonde, the types of girls who wear silk blouses and delicate gold chain necklaces with little pendants that fall right in the hollow at the base of their throat.

Popular In High School Caroline

During the first three years of high school, Caroline and I were not friends. I was one of the new students in ninth grade, while she was the ringleader of a clique that had been in charge since middle school. Her father owned one of the larger real estate companies in our town, so everyone saw her last name stamped on every other construction site, which was certainly part of her mystique. Someone told me that she lived in a house that took up a full block, a former mental hospital her father had purchased and transformed into a mansion for five people. I imagined parties there, people sneaking into wings that were off-limits, where they made out in former isolation rooms. Caroline went to a boarding school in Europe during junior year for opaque reasons that were gossiped about endlessly, plot lines we ripped out of television shows and slapped onto her life: her parents are divorcing, her older brother is in rehab, she’s modeling, and came back with an aristocratic lilt in her voice and the word queue in her vocabulary.

The year she returned, I spoke to her in the early morning dark before first bell on the first day of school. Making her laugh was a better high that I’d had in high school so far, so I set to work trying to get her to fall into friendship with me the way only teenage girls can, feverish and enjoying it. She brought me to parties, and helped orchestrate my first make out. In her mint-green bedroom, on the softest mattress I’d ever sat on, she made sure I knew I was lucky. She once told me, of her friend group: we don’t always like new people, but we like you.

I don’t know how to describe being friends with her. It was like confidence, or a benediction, or free calories. I was addicted to gossip, and her secrets were the only ones I kept. I was also addicted to bread, and pictures of us were the motivation I kept in a folder on my phone.

We lost touch during college. She does not attend our high school reunions, and rarely posts on social media. The last thing I heard about her was a rumor run through two degrees of remove, maybe misinterpreted and probably exaggerated. What I heard was that her eating habits had made having a roommate untenable, that the other girl was moving out because of a fight over a squash. She wouldn’t go pick one up for Caroline before the organic grocery store closed. I imagined the voice I’d been addicted to, bubbly but burst, now tinny through a phone speaker. I wondered what she’d said, I made up the words in my mind, you know this is the only thing I can EAT.

My Best Friend’s Girlfriend Caroline

I spent my junior year of college in a three-street town falling off a crag into the Scottish ocean. I met Caroline while walking through the tall grass to a house party. Her hair was shinier than made sense in the moonlight, her legs brittle sticks that might crack. She asked for my name, and said we rhymed.

At the party, I watched the boy I had kissed the night before put his hand on her jutting hipbone. Later, the three of us took a shot, and I told myself the jealous burn in my throat was from the vodka.

I was best friends with them both, and could not for the life of me tell who I was more in love with. He and I spent afternoons on the cold sand beach getting salt in our eyes while he almost cried. He told me about his father, and how football saved his life. Caroline and I prepared for parties in her dorm room, eating Nutella from a jar and sipping poorly made gin cocktails. She told me how he was in bed, the words he liked to hear her say.

Caroline and I were often a terrifying pair at bars, dead-eyed and still buying shots. Black out or back out, we liked to say. We put the pieces of our nights together during mornings spent clutching hot coffees in clammy hands, scrolling through our camera rolls for clues.

She never ate much on these coffee dates, save a block of chicken broth stock she would drop in a cup of hot water. Her fridge was full of carrots. Bent, her arms made unnatural angles. While I sometimes day dreamed about surviving like she did on diet soda and barely dressed salads, I had supposedly recovered from my eating disorder, and I wanted to tell her that we were allowed to walk around without being woozy from hunger, that sometimes it was boring but mostly it was like a warm bath. I brought it up once, my hot fingers on her frigid, tiny wrist. She did not seem interested in changing, and I didn’t feel like I had enough to offer her on the other side. I had a stomach that didn’t gnaw at me all day, but it wasn’t flat, and I didn’t have her boyfriend or her instagram following.

Sometimes her boyfriend, my friend, got aggressive when he drank too much. His insecurity and his rage, kept meticulously separate in daylight, mixed with liquor and sparked. Across the room, I saw him grab Caroline’s arm and shout something in her ear. He pushed her against the wall and the confusion on her face rapidly became fear. I pulled him off of her and dragged him outside, what the fuck are you doing.

His suit was too big for him, and my dress was too small. He balled his hands into fists and rubbed his eyes like a child while he cried in the spitting rain, and I couldn’t go back inside. I walked him home, my breath and my heels catching on the uneven cobblestones until I took off my shoes and started crying too. I tucked him into bed and slept on the couch in his living room.

In the morning, he wrote her an apology letter, and I begged her to forgive me over text. She told him not to contact her again, and met me in one of our coffee shops. We were supposed to go to Budapest the next day with a few other girls. I thought she was going to ream me out for helping him get home, but instead she brushed it off, dropped her cube of chicken stock into a paper cup of hot water and murmured ‘I’m scared to go to Budapest’ so softly I barely heard her. She shivered as she told me the prospect of only eating meat and potatoes terrified her. She kept her coat on throughout the conversation, because she was cold or because she wanted to keep it brief or both, and told me she had cancelled her flight already. She said she hated that she canceled social plans because of food, but it was an anxiety thing, and that she didn’t want to talk about it. I told her we could find things she could eat, that I had been like that too, that she could tell me more. I offered to stay in town, to buy her a pastry, to buy dinner.

She told me to go, so I went to Budapest, and when I came back she swerved my invitations to hang out, feigned sick and busy. We still hugged emphatically at parties. She clutched me momentarily in her skeleton frame as her ribs strained against her crop top. I don’t know whether she really was angry about that night or whether she couldn’t maintain a friendship with someone who might ask about her eating, or someone who simply knew her limbs did not refuse flesh naturally. I wonder whether she told me only once I had betrayed her, so she would have an alternate excuse. I still follow her on instagram, where she shrinks into the Instagram square, grows increasingly bony to a steady stream of comments reading “omg so beautiful” “fire emoji fire emoji fire emoji,” and “teeny tiny skinny legend.”

Dead Author Caroline

After college, I worked in a corporate fashion job I hated and recommitted myself to my eating disorder. I lost twenty pounds and collected compliments and coffee shop loyalty cards, both bittersweet and addictive. Eventually, like my high school friend Caroline, my selfish antics drove my roommate not out of the apartment but into slamming her door the minute she got home. I couldn’t drink as much on an empty stomach, and kept needing to be taken home.

My mother’s friend, a recovered alcoholic, recommended a book: Drinking, A Love Story, by Caroline Knapp. I devoured it, and ordered her other book, Appetites: Why Women Want, about her anorexia. For her as for many of us, these issues are deeply entwined. But she was the first author to overtly tell me so: saying her “starving gave way to drinking,” one denial “gradually mutating into a more all-encompassing denial of self, alcohol displacing food as the substance of choice.” Both disorders have extremely high relapse rates, a euphemism for the truth, which is that they are lifelong conditions, and both are on the rise among women.

I finished both books, and on a hunch typed ‘alcoholism anorexia hysteria’ into google. I read Melinda Kanner, who contended that alcoholism and anorexia were the twentieth century’s answers to the nineteenth century’s hysteria, “women’s diseases” with no discernible organic basis that are very resistant to treatment. I couldn’t decide how the word hysteria fit around my neck, whether it was a necklace or a noose.

Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English wrote about the nineteenth century ‘cult of female invalidism,’ the trendy exhaustion that male doctors diagnosed wealthy women with basically whenever they evinced a desire to have a thought, prescribing them a rest cure that was simply their existing lifestyles, distilled to a fine cognac and meant to be drunk in bed. Under a medical surveillance system that interpreted dissatisfaction with a life of leisure as indicative of imminent physical breakdown, a new disease began festering in the bedpans under women’s sickbeds.

Some of the lounging ladies began shaking the bars of their gilded cages, seizing and fainting, going mute and refusing to eat. The doctors called this hysteria. Ehrenreich and English wrote about the doctors who, because their treatments had little to no effect on the disease, accused women of pretending, and began outlining a “hysterical type” in their medical treatises: she was a “petty tyrant” with a “taste for power.” Carrol Smith-Rosenberg understands hysterical fits as revolutionary outbursts: women expressing rage, despair, or even just pent-up energy within the language their doctors had given them, fucking up the master’s house with his prescription pad, if you will. Ehrenreich and English wrote about women “both accepting their inherent sickness and finding a way to rebel against their intolerable social role.”

After her multiple recoveries, Knapp refused to give up cigarettes, and died in her early 40s of lung cancer. Honestly, I get it. We all need a barrier between our rushing, bloody insides and the bracing cold of living in society, and replacing the warm fur jacket of alcohol with a layer of flesh between your skin and your bones is exhausting, especially without the warmth of nicotine coursing through your veins. I want to have been in her diagnosis room, and have seen her laugh or cry.

Joe Biden’s Niece Caroline

At the peak of hot girl summer, my friend kept seeing the same woman outside a bodega in Tribeca. Eventually, she spoke to her, an interaction she recounted to me days later. The girl was wearing massive, face-obscuring sunglasses and a huge black knee-length coat in eighty-degree weather. I wanted to know where she gets her hair dyed, because it was the perfect blonde, my friend says, so I went up to her and said hey, you look so good, can I ask where you get your hair dyed?

She rips her sunglasses off and grabs my arm like we’re friends and says, in one breath, oh my god no I don’t I literally spent all morning throwing up. I ate a STEAK last night. Anyway, the salon is like three blocks away, tell them Caroline Biden sent you.

On swiveling seats in a dimly lit bar, my friend instructed me to google Caroline Biden. I did, and the results included a New York Post article titled “Joe Biden’s Niece Remorseful After Avoiding Jail in Credit Card Scam” and a New York Daily News article titled “Joe Biden’s Bad-Girl Niece Gets Probation For $110G Credit Card Theft.” I quickly learned that Caroline Biden borrowed someone’s credit card with permission to spend $600 at the luxury cosmetic store C.O. Bigelow, and instead spent $110,000. Caroline Knapp, in Appetites, wrote not just about women’s appetite for food and drink, but also for things. A hysterical consumption: many privileged white girls dabble in kleptomania. She wrote about “the ravenous displaced need” fueling addictive behaviors, from alcoholism to shopping addiction. She wrote about women falling into thousands of dollars of credit card debt, their “deflection of hunger writ large and etched in plastic.”

She wrote that “consumerism thrives on emotional voids,” and anorexic and alcoholic women have those in spades. The language of madness, the hysterical tendency, creeps into her analysis of the allure a new belonging can hold in a society where women feel constricted in so many ways: “there is abundance in shopping instead of taboo, and so it’s no wonder a woman can go mad with acquisitiveness.”

To her hearing for the C.O. Bigelow larceny in Manhattan Criminal Court, Caroline wore a huge brown fur coat over a plaid schoolgirl skirt, a tight black tank top, sunglasses, and a crucifix necklace. In the photos of her in the courthouse, her dye job is objectively impeccable. She is a 26-year-old woman dressed like a schoolgirl. Every ligament in her upper arms is visible when she shrugs off the fur. I want to know which pocket of her coat is hiding a flask.

I would love to hate her (spoiled brat, .01% wealthy and stealing), but honestly, I hate that I kind of love her instead. She is Serena Van Der Woodsen shimmying into her school uniform after leaving the scene of the crime, still drunk, or Caroline Kennedy on Ketamine. She is the petty tyrant those condescending nineteenth century doctors wrote about, throwing a fit in the language she was raised speaking (luxury) and wasting the court’s time. Heiress fucking with her fortune, political scion lighting the revered patriarch’s reputation on fire. Girl, interrupting. I can’t stop scrolling.

Another article, titled ‘Biden’s Niece Booked by NYPD’ is only four brief sentences, which describe Caroline slapping a cop who tried to break up a fight she was in with her roommate. This is accompanied by a photo of her wrapped in a white sheet and strapped to a chair, her small frame concave. The only visible part of her body is a slim wrist poking out of the sheet, pulling it over her face. A policeman is pushing the chair across the street as paparazzi jostle to photograph her.

Someone who purports to be her friend describes her as a “hot mess” addicted to alcohol and Adderall. From a rehab center, this source tells the New York Post her antics are “a desire for attention, a cry for help. She’s a very complicated girl who has a lot of feelings and a lot of issues.”

The female hysteric throwing a fit, communicating the only way she knows how.

Famous on Instagram Caroline

But the hot blonde addict who really captured our attention last summer was Caroline Calloway. As a narrative genre, her dramatic friend breakup with the girl who used to ghostwrite her Instagram captions might be Elena Ferrante for coked out girls with disposable income.

We received the story in chapters, like the equally overwrought serials about private school girls we used to buy at suburban Barnes & Noble, but now we waited over our phones with breath caught in our throats, reading the story in Instagram captions. We gasped and retweeted when we read Caroline’s proposed title for her memoir, And We Were Like, “as in the way girls tell stories.” This might be the vocal fry feminist manifesto of the century, we wrote in our group texts, unsure whether we were mocking her or ourselves, but aware that someone needed to be mocked.

I read the essay while biting my lip until it bled. I met a girl who was everything I wasn’t, wrote Natalie Beach, now estranged from that girl after a tumultuous, obsessive friendship.

Soon after meeting Caroline, she became her “conspirator and confidante,” a role I knew well from my own obsessive relationships with girls named Caroline. She listened raptly whenever Caroline opened her mouth, standing in the streetlight glow of her attention, balanced on one foot to stay in its thin band of light. She craned her neck to see into Caroline’s closet and hoarded her compliments like heirlooms, running her finger over their gilt lining until it wore down, showed the nickel underneath. But then she took it one step further, offered to write her Instagram captions, and became her voice.

She did what I never could with either of my own Carolines. She came right out and said what she wanted, can I step into your mind, and Caroline said sure, unlocked the door and let her into a room painted tiffany blue. “What happens to me next?” Caroline asked her, and Natalie forgot all about her own life and began writing in a tense she calls “first person beautiful.”

This is a tense many girls dream and journal in. Watching my Carolines live in it was harrowing, a fact Natalie’s jealousy prevents her from seeing. When Caroline leaves a restaurant abruptly after a group of men in suits sends free shots to their table, Natalie does not consider the possibility that she might have been afraid of their intentions.

Natalie and Caroline spent nights getting high and writing pages of memoir, speaking fast until their voices grew hoarse, and then they opened their laptops and spoke with one voice. Together, they created “the Caroline character,” a “fantastic YA protagonist” who “looked good crying.”

When they cried, I thought my Carolines were so beautiful it made me dizzy. In retrospect, I can see that this was console them. I was Natalie offering to write Instagram captions, desperate to become indispensable. I read them love letters I’d written in my head, in the tense I’ll call second person beautiful, and when they sniffed and asked if I really meant it I nodded so zealously I could have given myself whiplash.

In my relationships, I was Natalie with Caroline’s addictions. While I was starving for affection and anxious to please, the only thing I wanted more than the approval of a girl who was everything I wasn’t was to be her, and since I couldn’t do that being in the void of a substance high could at least get me out of my own mind (a more all-encompassing denial of self).

Natalie mentions Caroline’s struggles with substances only obliquely, too distracted by her ability to attract men, her blonde hair and expensive shoes, to notice that living in the first person beautiful has become unsustainable. At the tail end of their friendship, when everything is going awry, Natalie visits Caroline in Cambridge, where she has ripped the carpeting off her dorm room floor with her bare hands, and where she stays up all night online shopping in a fur coat. At first, Natalie attributes the destroyed floorboards to Caroline’s superficial desire for hardwood floors. And then, she tells us, I saw a trash can full of daffodils beside a trash can full of prosecco corks, and empty Adderall capsules in a drawer.

When Natalie was watching it unfurl on Instagram, a filtered stream of European boyfriends and sundresses in Roman ruins, Caroline’s mirage shimmered. Then Natalie crossed the Atlantic and watched it crack, saw not “someone I wanted to be but a girl living with one fork, no friends, and multiple copies of Prozac nation…a person in need of help that I didn’t know how to give.” This became clear when they traveled to Amsterdam together, and one night Caroline returned to their rented apartment with the only set of keys, and for unexplained reasons that probably include alcohol and sleeping pills, did not answer any of Natalie’s calls until the following morning.

Caroline Calloway ignoring her best friend’s calls, getting high in her room alone. Caroline Biden eating pills and screaming at her roommate until she calls the police. One Caroline alone, instagramming her way to fame and fortune. Another Caroline also alone, on the street, being pushed around by a male security professional. Or in court, surrounded by her lawyers.

Ehrenreich and English’s final judgment of hysteria acknowledges that hysterical fits worked decently well as temporary power plays, giving women “brief psychological advantages over a husband or a doctor” but points out their fatal flaw as a form of revolutionary guerrilla warfare: “hysterics don’t unite and fight.” Instead, they usually end up ensnared in a web of male professionals, policemen or doctors or reporters and paparazzi.

I know my own hysterics isolated me, left me alone even in crowded rooms. My college friend Caroline and I, each mired in our own quicksand’s, could not hold hands tightly enough to pull each other out. I imagine Caroline Biden and Caroline Calloway meeting in the halls of a rehab center someday and wait with bated breath for one of their memoirs.

Notes:

Barbara Ehrenreich & Deirdre English, Complaints & Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness, 1971

Caroline Knapp, Drinking: A Love Story, 1996

Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want, 2003

Natalie Beach, “I Was Caroline Calloway,” The Cut, 2019

@carolinecalloway, Instagram, 2019

BF Grant et. al., “Prevalence of 12-Month Alcohol Use, High-Risk Drinking, and DSM-IV Alcohol Use Disorder in the United States, 2001-2002 to 2012-2013,” JAMA Psychiatry, 2019 Marie Galmiche, Pierre Dechelotte, Gregory Lambert, and Marie Pierre Tavolacci, “Prevalence of Eating Disorders Over the 2000-2018 Period: a Systematic Literature Review,” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2019

I BUY A BASIL plant for the summer. The plant had stood alone, perched on a barren shelf at Trader Joe’s—lush, a tempting canopy cloud of green. I do not expect it to last the summer, not weeks of leading hiking and camping trips for middle-schoolers throughout the High Sierras of California. But my heart had leapt so involuntarily when I first spotted it, sparkling from a recent watering, blooming happily below a tray of yellowing mangos, that I couldn’t resist. I didn’t care if the basil eventually died. It was my first time leading children into the wilderness, and I had spent the previous day on the plane to San Francisco, journaling frantically.

What does it mean to be a good leader? What is most important to embody? I want my kids to love the world, to see how beauty and connections thrum in the air, soil, and water—I want my kids to love each other.

I wanted badly to do it right, the leading of the next generation, and seeing the basil with its leaves so large and tight together, made me think of my mother taking a pot of basil from the windowsill above our kitchen sink. Pinch the top leaves gently, she had said to me, her shoulder-length dark hair falling across her cheek as she brought the basil down to my eye-level. Right at the stem. My young fingers fumbling along the tender stalks. There, yes. A curling leaf snapping off between my thumb and forefinger.  It’s good to take the leaves, she said, standing up and carefully placing the pot back on the sill. It promotes healthy growth.

In the grocery aisle, bright visions swarm—gathering around the basil every morning with the kids, watching them pour a gentle stream of water from their Nalgenes, teaching them to pinch the minuscule flowers, helping them pluck a few choice leaves to dazzle our spaghetti night. We care for this plant, I imagine proclaiming to a cluster of entranced 11-year-olds, all who had fought valiantly for the privilege of watering the basil.  And in return, it takes care of us. I imagine connecting the lesson to how our group would care for one other on the trail when we were all we had for miles and to our responsibility to the earth—with its glacial lakes, red-rooted sequoias, billions of squirming microbes dying and birthing and eating each other in thick fertile soil— which gave us life and breath, so freely.

“Sure,” my co-leader Lewis says, blue eyes amused. He has tight brown-gold curls and reminds me vaguely of a bear. “Why not?” I cup the basil with two hands, the warmth of the knotted roots soaking through the thin plastic pot. On the ride back to our hotel, I hold it on my lap for fear it will get crushed.

A four-thousand-year-old herb with a golden lineage tracing back to India, Egypt, and China settles on the vibrating dash of our fifteen-passenger white van as we drive shouting children through the California dust. Ociumum basilicum—sweet basil, a member of the great mint family, famed for its extensive culinary uses, and twisted in its own tempestuous, clashing mythology. In a lengthy introduction to the basil literature within different cultures, Basil: An Herb Society of America Guide proclaims: “In terms of legend and symbolism, basil has been both loved and feared. Its associations include love and hate, danger and protection, life and death.”

On our first night near the summit of Mt. Diablo, I hold the basil up to the cluster of kids waiting in headlamps around the picnic table for their dessert. This was after an eternal, exhausting evening. After a dimpled Boy-Scout of a kid told me that he was Knife-Certified (by whom? I should have asked) and proceeded to stab his palm five-minutes into cutting red peppers. After a quiet boy with neat blonde hair hid among vines of poison oak. After a swarm of raccoons covered our food cooler and their leader—a scraggly fellow with glinting green eyes—crawled menacingly towards the children and Lewis gave everyone permission to throw rocks to keep him at bay. After a dinner in pitch darkness. After a tiny girl from the Hamptons taught me to star-spin—wheeling in circles upon circles and falling to gaze at careening specks in the sky.

“This is our Power Object,” I say to the kids, extending the basil like an offering. Its leaves flutter darkly, a picture of health. “It’s incredible because whoever’s holding Basil has the floor to speak. The person with Basil has our full respect, our full attention. Everyone here has important things to say.”

The kids murmur, giggle, peering at the strange, shadowy faces of each other. I pass Basil to the girl next to me so that we can start sharing our Highs and Lows of the day. It is difficult for the kids to control their excitement, their nerves—laughter breaks, shouts pointing out new raccoons creeping in the trees.

“Hey,” Lewis says in his gentle voice. “Who has Basil now? Who are we listening to?”

Their eyes turn, searching.

Dioscorides, a Greek physician whose classical botanical works were referenced for over sixteen centuries, warned that too much basil can “dulleth the sight…and is of hard digestion,” but John Gerad—who became one of the most prevalent English botanists in the 1500s—applauded basil as a remedy for melancholy.

A kid, sobbing of homesickness, hugs her knees under the pines while the other kids spread mayonnaise on turkey sandwiches. She doesn’t eat for the first day and a half, takes small bites of plain yogurt, throws up in the bathroom while I rub her back. On our afternoon hike to a waterfall, she lags. Another taller girl—known for the stuffed otter she packed inside her sleeping bag—falls in step beside her. “I was sad too, at the airport,” the taller girl says softly. “I didn’t want to let go of my mom.” That night, the homesick kid holds Basil, a borrowed stuffed otter tucked into her lap, and says to the group: “I want to thank my new friend for making me feel at home.”

For a few blissful days, we leave Basil outside on sunny stumps while we go hiking. But in the Yosemite, we return to tragedy—Basil torn and bitten, clawed to pieces, a handful of straggling leaves remaining of his once full canopy. After that, we put Basil in the bear box whenever we leave camp—long times of darkness, squeezed in stale metal-air between our cooler and the trash bag from breakfast. I take him out as soon as we return and place him in the sunniest patch I can find, but the evening light is never enough. I glare at every fat squirrel who dares to sniff around our picnic table.

An herbalist named Chrysippus wrote of basil’s heady, intoxicating scent in pre-206 B.C.E.: “Ocimum exists only to drive men insane.”

In the moments when Lewis and I are looking away, when we are unloading bags from the trailer, boiling water, setting up tents, our wildest kid leaps on the quiet boy infected with poison oak and punches him in the jaw. Lights the hand-sanitizer that he squirted into his cupped palm on fire. Catches Knife-Certified dimpled kid in a chokehold. “Tap out,” wild kid says through gritted teeth. “Tap out!” His arm bulges around Knife-Certified kid’s neck. Knife-Certified’s face is turning red.

“Never! I’ll never surrender!” he sputters. He sees us running toward them.

‘You’re in charge of Basil,’ I say to the girl sitting behind the passenger seat. Basil is on the floor by her feet. She nods without looking at Basil and ten minutes through the drive, swings her legs enthusiastically—Basil flies and flops all over the van floor. Soil spilling, Basil limp and pathetic as a runover animal, a green goldfish out of his bowl.

“No worries, no worries,” I say to the unconcerned girl, scooping up the soil as if every second is frantic and precious. “No worries, we’ll fix him.” She nods, looks back to the friendship bracelet tied to her water bottle.

It was strongly believed in Ancient Greece and Rome that basil would only grow well under conditions of verbal abuse. During planting season, sowers would swear at the seeds.

In the Victorian Language of Flowers, giving sweet basil conveyed your best wishes. In Crete, people placed basil plants where they needed protection from the devil.

‘I don’t think you understand,’ I say, treading the clear water of Lake Tahoe, craning my neck to gaze up at the twelve kids frowning down at me from a tall rock jutting out over the lake. They want to jump from the rock into hip-deep water, and I can hear the ankles snapping, shins jutting. ‘It is my job to keep you safe.’

A boy, tall and gangly, falls off his bike and breaks his front tooth in half, scrapes running down his legs. Blood on his chin. “Don’t send me home,” he begs. First words out of his mouth. “I want to finish.” Finish biking hundreds of miles along the winding wildflower coast, steep hills rolling up to mountains, golden grass tumbling near tight drops, the ocean always roaring wetly below. I don’t want to leave either, ever. I want to curl up in the long grass until I feel like a rabbit or a mountain lion, until I cannot remember who I love. We put the shattered tooth in a Ziploc bag, and when the grey-haired dentist with the German accent tells us that the fragments aren’t needed and that the boy is fine to keep riding, I offer to throw the bag away. The skinny boy grabs my arm, grins skeletally in relief. “No, I want to keep it.”

“Basil has bugs in him.” Lewis shows me the tiny critters, grey and crawling around the thinning stalks. Tiny holes in the remaining leaves. “And a mold problem.” Baby-blue mold, pale and fine and furry, tenderly covering the damp soil. It’s almost cute—Basil hosting other life.

I wish I would have known that a French doctor named Hilarius in the 1500s claimed that basil caused the “spontaneous generation of scorpions” and could prompt scorpions to grow in the brain. After I had made an urgent announcement that Basil was too weak to give any more of his leaves, a punk kid looked me dead in the eye, plucked the biggest curled leaf, and put it in his mouth. I wish I could have told him that his brain would soon fester with nests of scorpions.

When did it become more than basil?

It triggers a vulnerability, some hope deep inside of me, memories of past basil plants I cannot hold back. The basil that I had bought in Dublin to spice up the loneliness of my single room while I was studying abroad. I woke each morning to the basil outlined in the faint sun from the tiny window that faced the bricks of the Guinness Factory. It was the first time that I was cooking for myself—I bought exotic, real-adult foods like avocados with pride— and I used the basil sparingly in my consistent meals of chewy angel hair pasta.

The basil that I bought the August of my senior year at a farmer’s market, the North Carolina air hot and humid, oaks and dogwoods sweltering. I put the pot on the windowsill of my first-floor room in between a row of books. My first love of four years, a boy with dark hair and long eyelashes, adored the basil. Before he would leave my room in the morning, he would often walk over to the windowsill and bring the plant close to his face, as if he was kissing it.

“Basil reminds me of my mother,” he would say. “She made the best pizza when we were little.” When I broke up with him after graduation, I couldn’t look at basil without thinking of him, of his mother’s hands kneading dough to feed a young son.

Then the basil of Italy, only a few months back, growing in a thick bush in the terrace garden. I did not have to care for it because it grew so well. When rain swept through in curtains, bright red poppies sprouted around it like hearts, like lips. In the evenings, I would go down to the garden with a beautiful girl whose black curls sprung like ringing bells in the wind, and we would pick basil leaves to crush for pesto. We kissed for the first time in an old stone room where the fattoria stored their lemon trees in winter. We painted a poem in rainbow colors on the white wall—there are enough ballrooms in you to dance with anyone you’ll ever love.

“They say nothing lasts forever,” Ocean Vuong writes in his novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. “But they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.” I’m reading Ocean’s novel on the shore, and Lewis stretches out above me on a bone-white tree trunk, tanning his already golden skin. His curls shine when drenched in salt-water.

In parts of Italy, sweet basil is thought to influence attraction, and some call it “bacia-nicola”—or “kiss me Nicholas.” A basil pot on a windowsill is meant to signal a lover.

Sometimes, it seems that Lewis’ body is mine, and mine is his. When I move to take down tents, he moves to clean dishes. I don’t have to look to know he is crouching with the kids around a map, showing them the blue lines of the rivers, the steepness of the slopes. He shaves the side of my head, fingers slow and careful, while I sit in the bright sun on the edge of a cliff, watching pale moths flutter to flowers.

The thoughtless way we share. He hands me his sandwich; I give him my coffee. We pass toothpaste and deodorant back and forth. He buys two different flavors of ice teas and stands in front of me, pouring tea from bottle to bottle, until the swirl of black and lemon is smooth and perfect. When the kids ask questions that we can’t answer, we repeat: “Lewis and I are going to talk about it” or “Jackie and I are going to talk about it,” until they roll their eyes. After the kids are asleep, we sit together on the ground, exhausted, and look up at the stars over the dark pines.

I forget what it is like to feel alone.

I wish that he had a girlfriend or someone he was hooking up with, so that our possibilities could continue to be nothing more than they are at this moment—I am his friend, his partner, his co-leader. I want to always stand by him, to have this easy, unquestionable loyalty remain unquestionable. If I remain his friend, I will never have to leave him.

Do you want to go grocery shopping, he says softly, our cheeks touching. We’re in between trips and without kids, huddled behind a stack of driftwood. We had walked miles down the beach in the wind, eyelashes crusted with salt. We had been thinking of buying bananas for dinner, chips and salsa, anything we didn’t have to cook. Not really, I say. Me either, he says. In the kiss, I feel grains of sand. Our lips don’t match quite right at first, and I don’t mind at all, I want his skin so badly.

The Herb Society Guide: “In his seventeenth-century herbal, Parkinson claimed basil could be used to ‘procure a cheerful and merry heart.’”

Frosty, fog-drenched beaches. Lewis and I eat fresh strawberries and chase seagulls. We build a boat out of sand and sit inside it together, looking out at the waves, squealing when the water splashes over the prow—it seems as if we are deep out at sea. We arm-wrestle on the floor of our hostel, play cards, sleep huddled under a dark bridge, under an orange moon.

He laughs once, while we’re in the tent. Whenever we’re kissing, he says, you get this look on your face. So contemplative. Like you’re torn, you’re thinking so much.

I cover my face with my hands, instinctively.

How to tell him— a boy who can lay on the shore and naturally think of nothing, like an ancient monk who has spent years perfecting the art of giving into oblivion, of losing the self to the feel of warm pebbles pressing into the back—that my thoughts haven’t been this still in years? That in this summer brimming with Band-Aids, snow-capped peaks, and massive unfolding paper maps, I haven’t had the energy to tear into my doubts about the future and life-purpose and so I have been entirely happy?

Until there aren’t any children around and I realize—I want him. And the wanting brings my shivering, hibernating self to life—it stumbles out of its cave and into the sun, blinking, turning, confused, questions whirling around it like a swarm of crows. How far do I go? What do I give? Am I allowed to need him? Will this hurt?

The thing I most want to tell him and don’t: Lewis, if you’re happy, I’m happy.

Basil, linked to sprouting at the foot of Christ’s cross and determining chastity, is said to “wither in the hands of the impure.”

Stay alive, I think, picking off yellow, fragile leaves. Lewis’ hands in my hair, my hands pulling up his shirt. We are in each other’s arms, sun setting over white swirling water, seals diving in frothy surf. Stay alive.

The real thing I most want to tell him, that I am most afraid to tell him: I like you so much that the like slips into deep tenderness, slips into an aching desire to have your cheek against mine, slips into love like a seal swimming through underwater crevices.

Where is the narrative? Where is the thread? An invisible needle driving through us all, the first ten kids, the last twelve, Lewis and I. Basil trembling on the van dashboard, down to a scattering of ragged leaves, passed around our dessert circle every night from small hand to small hand.  Sandy coast paths lined with crimson columbines, fountain-like harebells, clusters of smoky mariposas. The Knife-Certified kid muttering, “The bus doesn’t stop in your neighborhood,” as a pigtailed girl talks about how much she adores her butler. We climb jagged ridges, up and up, kids following like ducklings until we can go no further. A baby bear trundling off the trail, kids oohing. Snowdrifts up to our waist. Days of burning blue water under a rising moon, strings of seaweed dripping off rock walls as I press myself against the bottom of a cliff, waves lapping my numb toes, huddled in a concave that the ocean tides and I managed to find. Lewis wades around the corner after a few minutes, a flowery faded pink towel draped around his neck. We stand close, flattening ourselves against the seaweed hanging like tinsel, as the tides rise higher.

Somehow, through everything, Basil survives the summer, straggly leaves thrusting, the blue mold and grey bugs vanished.

But in the chaos of packing and cleaning, it isn’t till we’re flying back to Massachusetts that I realize we left Basil alone in the Holiday Inn parking lot, tucked under a small tree.  Part of me thinks—better that we forgot him. Better that we didn’t deliberately choose to leave him behind. Better that the decision of abandonment was made for us, that we didn’t have to watch him while he died.

And then the other part of me hopes—Basil is free. He is wild. Unlocked from bear boxes, he grows unstoppable in the fresh air, in shifting sunlight and shadows, untamable by human hands. He is bursting into bloom, sending green tendrils and baby scorpions racing through the parking lot, wrecking love among the hotel staff, unbeholden to the end of summer.

Clinton, New Jersey

She’s really beautiful. Can you find some I Love You Cards and send them to her and just sign my name? I have a teddy bear being made and a matching ring earring and necklace set.

–Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387

&

Seen from the air, the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women (EMCF) appears like a wheel-shaped medieval city, its modular units the beige color of the inmates’ uniforms surrounding the century-old Warden’s Hall. Instead of a moat guarding the fortified walls, double strands of razor wire coil between watchtowers to isolate the beings inside. The violent offenders.

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In Maximum Compound, the holiday that captures the barbed wire universe’s essence isn’t Thanksgiving or Christmas; those nostalgia holidays subtract you to zero. Turkey and yams that you bastardize in the microwave. When you bow your head and give thanks, it might be the microwave you’re most thankful for. Thanksgiving belongs to the free world, a leftover like the sweet potatoes saved from Mess Hall to be doctored with brown sugar and syrup. Voila, glazed yams. No Cubano sandwiches on Christmas morning, the meats piled so high between slabs of French bread that you need double mouths to take a bite. As for the wild party of New Years, noisemakers and drunken cheers are against the rules, so the inmates toast their off-brand vintage soda to that yardstick of time served.

&

Valentine’s Day is the Maximum Compound’s signature holiday. The love day celebration that topples the walls made of rules: DO NOT TOUCH ANOTHER INMATE, DO NOT REACH FOR AN OFFICER, DO NOT LEAVE YOUR AREA, DO NOT SPEAK DURING COUNT. This day the flicker between eyes is celebrated, this day, girlfriends are made to feel special. This day, the inside expels the cold and rain an animal coming in from the wild shakes over a room. Girl love is celebrated, and even the officers can’t spoil it. Outside in the world, I know the space between people grows; we live in digital capsules, three-screen universes, and our lovers receive the least of us. The opposite is true in Maximum Compound among the murderers, the father killers, the kidnappers, and armed robbers.

&

Valentine of Terni became installed in legend as the priest who bequeathed his name to the holiday of lovers. He is said to have performed baptisms and marriage ceremonies for Roman soldiers during the reign of Emperor Aurelian in 273. Medieval texts speak of his decapitation. Valentine of Rome, another priest swept up in the reign of persecutions, too was executed on February 14th. Hearsay has Saint Valentine cutting parchment hearts and giving them to soldiers. The Basilica of Saint Maria displays his ancient, flower-scented skull.

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I’m going to make Natacha a chocolate cake and dinner. I think you would really like her.

–Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387

KRYSTAL

Google Krystal Riordan and her name alone suffices, and news article after news article comes up. AT PROSTITUTE’S SENTENCING, MURDER VICTIM’S MOTHER READS STATEMENT DETAILING HORRIFIC CRIME. The reader learns that Krystal Riordan, age 20, a New York City prostitute witnessed Draymond Coleman, her pimp/boyfriend, rape and strangle Jennifer Moore, age 18, in their rent-by-the-week room. A kind of duel was played out in the shabby hotel between the 265 lb. rage-fueled attacker and a 100-pound soccer player, fighting to breathe. Krystal froze, fearing for her own life. Surrounding them–Weehawken’s geography, exits, and billboards, green signs sprouting up like trees in a lightning-struck forest. After four years in custody and facing the death penalty, Draymond accepted a plea bargain that required he implicate Krystal. The Internet twilights hold the 20-year-old Krystal, and the 24-year old Krystal, 5’9” and taller than her public defender. She’s gained 40 pounds in her four years in Hudson County jail, her tear-stained face delicate as a lilac in the rain as she, at last, speaks for herself. “I’m not a bad person,” she answers in what I imagine is a trembling voice. The judge has asked her if she has anything to say before he pronounces the sentence. He listens, then says, “There’s only one victim here.” He sentences her to the maximum. FORMER ORANGE WOMAN SENTENCED TO 30 YEARS.

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Yet there is more than one victim here. Eva, Krystal’s birth mother, stares at the camera with anthracite eyes that glitter as if they could withstand a miner’s pick. Her black hair, too, gives off a costume gem’s gleam. A striking woman on whose olive-complexed face I recognize Krystal’s petal lips but little else. The birth mother, a short woman, appears chiseled from rock while her daughter seems soft in comparison, the cream-puff skin and sometimes blue and sometimes hazel eyes. The reasons for Eva’s neglect of her children, unknowable. She worked as a prostitute. Krystal holds onto few memories of her earliest years before she was taken and put into foster care—joining a children’s crusade of the blighted. How did she learn to speak? She remembers there weren’t any toys. Eva bequeathed to Krystal her old crack pipes, and her daughter played with them, pretending the pipe stems were bridges over the maroon rivers of spilled wine. When she crossed the river, she’d find herself in a forest. Birds whistled, and she understood their every word, no matter the pitch. She smelled the dreams of the leaves. Or she held Eva’s hand mirror under her nose and waded into the ceiling. As an adult, she searched for her birth mother, and saw her twice. “I looked for her and found her. I wish I hadn’t. She stole my money,” Krystal says. Disappointment settles between her shoulder blades and trickles down her back like a desecrated childhood.

&

After her birth father’s arrest for selling drugs, Child Services removes Krystal and severs parental rights. After spending two years in foster care, she’s adopted. Who are these strangers prominent in Connecticut politics, the adoptive father, a founding partner in the accounting firm that bears his name? Who is the sharp-featured adoptive mother also an accountant and quick to criticize? In a dress with puffy sleeves and wide sashes, Krystal tries to smile at her first Easter, but there’s a bewildered look on her face. The night is dark for six-year-old Krystal. She hardly knows how to speak. Her adoptive father later will describe how she screams in her sleep. She will bear their surname Riordan.

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She grows tall and plays basketball, dribbling balls, and shooting baskets. Called a natural by her basketball coaches, she pleases her new parents, but upon reaching adolescence, she rebels. The adoptive parents become her persecutors. Staying out all night and running the streets, she tests them as someday Dray will her. Krystal is sent to Élan in Poland Springs, Maine, the now notorious and shuttered facility for troubled teens. “It was a lockdown, therapeutic boarding school. I was there for three years. If I’d never been sent there, I might have had a full basketball scholarship,” says Krystal. Tuition of $42,000 – $56,000 a year purchased a student to teacher ratio of 40 to 1. Therapy consists of a teen standing alone in a corner while hundreds of students yell, curse, and call him or her names.

&

Her adoptive parents will pay for her to go to college, but after the regime she’s lived under, she wants her freedom. How can anyone graduate from years of Attack Therapy and be ready for college? Freedom is a suspect word. Krystal calls Keri-Ann, a girl she knows from Élan, who shares an apartment in Manhattan with her boyfriend/pimp. Yes, Krystal can stay with them under the condition she’ll work as a prostitute for the girl’s boyfriend, too. Krystal agrees, and in the beginning, it’s easy as beginnings often are. The sex work draws her. She and Keri-Ann from Élan, go shopping for clothes and purses and shoes. Real labels, not knockoff brands. She pierces her nose and loves the feel of money, and she’s generous to others and always buying gifts.  One of Keri-Ann’s friends stops over. Draymond Coleman, fifteen years older than Krystal, is tall, muscular, and seething with the righteous anger of an unwanted foster care child. Although Krystal perceives him as a gentle giant, funny and attentive, he’s violent. Dray’s eyes, like Eva’s, hold the resurrection of a mine shaft.

Dray was funny and liked to laugh. He was really attentive when it came to me. It was like I was brain-washed. I thought I couldn’t live without him.

— Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387

&

At first, he showers her with attention. They talk outside the apartment where they go to smoke cigarettes. Her friend’s boyfriend decides to sell her to another pimp. “That’s when Dray stepped in,” Krystal says. “He fought for me.” They leave together, and she begins working to support them. “Dray was a pimp, and I was his moneymaker,” says Krystal. “He would bring girls over on a regular basis for threesomes. I always did what I was told by him.”  Her love for Draymond will lead to low-rent hotels with shared bathrooms where they will stay for the sex work. Her love will lead to shambles of sheets and stained mattresses, sagging drapes and chicken bones scattered under beds.

The guys were mostly okay. There were a few jerks, but the police were the worst. I had a gun put to my head. A knife to my throat. They demanded free sex, usually weird stuff.

— Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387

&

The police officer already has his zipper down, and a thumb hooked in her mouth. Work it. His pinkish meat threaded with blue veins like those movie rivers she’d always wanted to visit, like the Mekong, the Volga, the Seine. She pictures herself as one of the floating flower sellers. A long-haired girl, oaring her canoe carrying a white sea of orchids.

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And always doing what she was told by Draymond leads to tragedy and murder. The men blur—white, black, Hispanic. Most come to the room, and some rush, and others like to be coddled. “Baby, hey,” she whispers, “feeling any better?” She reaches over and cups the man-baby’s forehead. She runs her hand down his chest, offering him her mouth, her vagina, her ass, just as she offered all she had to the basketball court—her biceps and calves, especially the skin of her hands.

The baby wasn’t real to me until she was born. Being pregnant only meant my clothes’ size changed.

— Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387

&

Krystal uses condoms with strangers but not with Draymond, so when she misses her period for the second month, she takes the pregnancy test. A positive. She tells him the news, and he’s happy, but he insists she keeps on working. Her belly incubating life means little to her except a change in her clothing size. She makes more money pregnant than not as her dates pay extra in tips. Some men find pregnant women irresistible. We don’t see Krystal, her hair a thicket, kneeling, blowing a man, another, and another. The clam chowder of semen growing a fishy mucous, sex filling her mind, the little nymphs swimming to her ample hips.

&

She’s not a druggie, although she likes to smoke weed. Draymond keeps her on a short leash, which means he loves her. He must. He never loses his thirst for more women in the circles of midnight, in the hangover of morning turning to the afternoon. Her clothes chaff her pregnant belly like cardboard. Her dreams feel green, and things keep budding. Ants build humongous castles, and ferns grow fleshy and their heavy breathing disturbs her sleep-turn on your side. Inside, separated by a thicket of blood vessels, the old miracle takes place, sperm and egg meeting, carrying the double helix, the chromosomes for sex, eye color and skin, height, bone structure, potential, and possibility. The fetus absorbing its mother, the womb-trance.

&

She gives birth to a healthy girl. The past doesn’t say hello or goodbye either; it expects you to do all the work of bringing it back. It requires curiosity. The baby becomes real when she leaves the hospital. How long before she’s working again? Is she still bleeding, still stitched up? She hardly has her baby long. One night she returns from work to find her daughter gone. Draymond has called Child Services, telling them to come for the ‘unwanted’ infant. There’s not enough strength in her to fight for her daughter. The nineteen-year-old is under Draymond’s control. Friends have questioned this story, telling me her signature would be required in a closed adoption case. Krystal was never mothered. What a sensation it is to hold a baby. When the newborn is your own child, can there be anything like it? But could Krystal feel the wonder? It will be years later when she asks me to look for her daughter on Facebook. The daughter of Krystal and Draymond is white, black, and Hispanic. A beauty. She’s inherited her mother’s long legs and expressive lips—lips like eyes. Her daughter is a teen now and distant from the baby Krystal gave birth to.  When Krystal thinks of Trinity it is as if her daughter has become a waking dream.

&

Now Krystal is thirteen years into her sentence. Love’s an obstacle course that sometimes ends in blood. Girlfriends come and go, and relationships flame only to turn to cinder. In Maximum Compound when fights erupt, they are usually about the cheating of a girlfriend. Couples bond and then break apart, and yet love is celebrated on Valentine’s Day like no other.

I’m doing a redo Valentine’s Day because we were in Lock on February 14th.

–Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387

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Perhaps Krystal meets the beautiful Natacha in the dog cage. When you are in  Isolation the officers stop by each cell in the morning, asking who wants to go outside. Time outside lasts two hours. Many cells are occupied by women locked in solitary for 100 days, and most stay in. Isolation’s haunting of the mind works its evil. Handcuffed, inmates are marched to the enclosures. Four women fit inside each roofless cage where they’re uncuffed. If it rains, they must still sit for the scheduled two hours, no exceptions. No matter if rain clouds darken the sky to a stormy green. If not rain, the hours spent in the unshaded sun make your head beat.

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Or, the two met in Lock, not in the same cell but neighboring ones. Thirty cells side by side, two women in each, and the noise never subsides. You’re allowed your tablet and headphones, but you’ll need batteries, and they’re $4 a pack. Isolated inmates are permitted to spend only $12 on Commissary per month. The yelling from cell to cell, and the shouting to get the guards’ attention goes on around the clock. If your girlfriend’s also here, then you’re afraid she’s having sex with her cellmate. You’re on half-rations and irritable. Every third day you rise again from the stink of Isolation and are brought out in handcuffs and escorted by two officers to the shower. You’re carrying shampoo and soap and clean underwear. The rain you lift your face into cleanses body and soul.

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And so, for my inmate friend, Valentine’s Day is the awaited for day. Even if she must create it from her almost bare Commissary trunk and State pay, she’ll give her girlfriend a Valentine’s Day to treasure. Krystal tells me Natacha soothes her. Is her voice like smoking a cigarette when you’re lying in bed, and it’s a cool morning? Bare, peaceful, explaining things lips. Krystal marches to Mess Hall, and breakfast is a cup of grim coffee, two boiled eggs, three pieces of bread, a spoon of margarine. She’s spreading margarine on her second piece of bread when the Officers tell her to get moving. Maximum Compound is all about the undertow of love dragging your feet out from under you.

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Chaucer spoke of the mating season of birds, and men and women. Or Valentine’s Day could be pagan. Lupercalia, a Roman festival of fertility and coupling. A priest would cut the throats of a goat and dog near the sacred cave of the she-wolf.  The mythological she-wolf who nursed the abandoned twins, Romulus and Remus. The good lupus mother. The hide of the goat was then sliced into strips that were soaked in blood. Half-naked young men would dance through the streets of drunkenness, flicking pregnant women with blood to safeguard the mother and ensure the live birth of the child.

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Krystal wants desperately to care and be cared for by this woman, this Natacha arrested for attempted homicide. Like Krystal’s crime, Natacha’s homicide occurred on a hot July day. It involved a male friend who had been staying in Natacha’s apartment. The town is Tinton Falls; once called the Iron Plantation, where slaves were brought to labor in the ironworks. The ruins of the grist mill seem the town’s only tourist attraction. Natacha becomes angry at the man, shouting for him to leave. He packs and carries his gear out. On either side of the street, milkweed and red cedar grow from the silty-clay soil. She rummages in the drawers, finds two large butcher knives, and then chases him down the sidewalk. After throwing one knife, she stabs him in the chest with the other. Not far away, wild turkey and woodpeckers wander the marshlands. The police are called, and an ambulance rushes the bleeding man into the red dusk. And now, Natacha experiences the hunger of Krystal’s love.

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What drives Natacha to assault someone she invited into her apartment? There are her daughter and her dog Charlie, whose head likely breaks through the skin of canine sleep when he hears the knife clatter and shouting. Did Natacha’s ex beat the hell out of her? Did the idiot think she’d squirreled that money away in her stomach, and that’s why he kept hitting it? No boyfriend was going to go through her body drawer by drawer, swinging his fists.

NATACHA

When Krystal asks me to go to Facebook and print some photos of her new girlfriend, I already know the process of elimination. It won’t be Natacha from Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aries, not the news editor for the New York Yankees, not the IT consultant Natacha with a multi-national. It will be another Natacha whose on-line life stopped in 2015. Yet this Natacha is beautiful, and her apartment looks airy as if a flutter of ship’s sail has passed through it. In short black strapless club dress, she blows wasp-stung kisses. One of her admirers lingers in the social media bushes wowed by her legs. Natacha’s daughter and dog are shown sleeping in her bed. “Two babies,” she comments in her post. She exudes late night drives when the stars are bright as magnolia blossoms, and you want to reach up and pull them out of the sky and eat them. There are more photos of nightclubs, darkening places, padded leather doors, deep booths, smoke-polished maroon wood. Billie Holiday crooning through the murderous hip hop. Hoop earrings, gold-flake eyeshadow.

&

The she-wolf who exemplifies instinct and loyalty, the unselfish she-wolf mother who suckles abandoned children can become the she-wolf, devourer. Women who have been wounded horribly sometimes wound others. Lethally.

Me and Natacha broke up. Yesterday she told me the real reason is because she got a crush on someone else. The lady she’s got a crush on looks like Shrek. I don’t get it. She said everything she told me she meant and she really loves me. This is the reason I always feel like I’m not good enough and ugly.

–Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387

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The thirst of this place is going to drink Krystal into it. The imprisoned body is the chapel or the toilet to be adored or shat on. Imagine the joy with which Krystal told me of Natacha, then the crashing disappointment of seeing her girlfriend with hickeys on her neck. Krystal is sure those love bites are aimed at her heart. Idiot. She must be ugly; she must be unlovable. She pictures herself as a lizard. In actuality Krystal is beautiful.

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Krystal needs to talk to her Natacha. She needs to be comforted. They’ve moved Natacha to a different unit. It is 1 a.m. at the correctional facility when the fire alarm goes off, and all the Units march outside into the Yard where the inmates are supposed to stand in silent lines. The inmates are talking guessing who pulled the alarm or started a fire. Maybe the moon shines, and at midnight it’s a fat scoop ice cream you want to climb into the sky and lick. Everyone talks, someone yells Natacha! And Krystal is waving her arms, crazily. The moon is filling their bodies with love. The mermaids of after midnight are swimming. Natacha turns away.

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There are three counts a day at 8 a.m. – 8:30 a.m., 11 a.m. – 11:30 a.m., and 4 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. Mid-afternoon, Krystal goes into the bathroom with her Bic razor filed away. What does she see in the mirror? The mucky walls, her time? A summer girl shrinking into winter, a 20-year-old when she was arrested, she’ll be 40 upon release. Where is the way out, the way away? She wants motion; she wants to flow. Madly heading somewhere. First the nick and then the trickling begins. If she’s brave, the shimmering red taillights of her veins will open. Have to do this. Have to struggle the blade in, no stopping. No creeping. Claustrophobic nearness of the walls. Her heart pulses where her bunkmate Lucy’s name is tattooed. They inked each other’s name on their left wrists, the arteries that run directly to the heart.

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She cuts her left wrist, deep, the deeper the cut, the better she feels. Nearness of music. Blood is streaking her hands and thighs. The cuts are forgiving her for the I Love You cards and the necklace set; the teddy bear. Krystal remembers touching the mole on Natacha’s back. Pressing her thumb into the mole’s blue softness. The last endorphin rush feels like a gentle, loving mother. An inmate finds her and runs to tell an officer to check on Krystal in the bathroom. She’s on the floor and lying in a pool of red running from her left wrist. An inmate stretcher crew arrives, and they carry Krystal to the Medical Unit. She receives both internal stitches to tendons, as well as numerous external stitches. Her history of cutting and depression go untreated.

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In the outside world, there is Valentine’s Day as well. Tepid, well-dressed couples get in and out of taxi’s and Uber cars, and they walk on the sidewalks lined with bursts of bergamot and jasmine. Restaurants fill with musk-fragrant suited men, and young women dressed in sheaths, the smooth silver of an ice shaker. Hair, heels, electricity. Credit cards. Couples with cheeks like glowing shots of amaretto. The inhabitants living on the continent of freedom celebrate romantic love.

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Inside Maximum Compound, Valentine’s Day celebrates love of the she-wolf. What the officers learn of the inmates is nothing compared to what the inmates have learned of each other. Strange things lie on the bottom of us all, things we are ashamed of, and yet most inmates believe that what love embodies reigns supreme even in the barbed-wire world.

It’s easy enough to find, sadness, for there are so many stories of it disseminated on social media we might all stay quivering in our small rooms for as much time as we have left. In only the last week, besides the politics and polemics, the pipe bombs and opioid epidemic, I’ve learned that we live on a world where sunlight causes cancer, and a large number of Australian koalas have an STD. I’ve read that several times in our long and polluted history we’ve managed to catch water on fire, and everyone you see today is someone who just hasn’t died yet.

I know there are enough nuclear weapons in our arsenals to keep the earth burning for a thousand years, long after all the time capsules we’ve buried to speak to our future selves should have been opened, and there’s a thought, how often we record ourselves, through pages or pictures, for posterity, afraid as we are of endings.

The nearest any other planet ever gets to Earth is around 160 million miles, and no one knows how big the universe really is, nor how it began or where it ends. No one knows if the voices we spoke back when we were crawling out of caves are still rebounding into space, still hoping someone hears us.

Most laugh tracks were recorded in the 50s, which means you’re hearing dead people laugh when you watch a sitcom to ease the tension of your life or political leanings. That star you saw last night is likely dead too, and out of all the sweeping of the universe we’ve never found a sign we’re not alone: not a signal or song from any planet, and despite the vastness of space it’s a little depressing to think how alone we are as we careen through the void.

One day your mother put you down and never picked you up again, and your children will never again be as young as they are right now. The smell of fresh cut grass is the grass trying to heal itself after you’ve cut it, and that smell after a rain is the way the world really smells, which makes me wonder why it can’t always be like that, why we have to wait and wait for what we really want and afterward wish it were still that way.

There’s a whale in the Pacific Ocean that sings at such a high frequency no other whales can hear it. Scientists have been monitoring it for over twenty years, and for all that time it’s been alone, still hoping someone is listening. Speaking of singing, every year on the anniversary of its arrival the Mars Rover sings Happy Birthday to itself, millions of miles from anyone, and if that doesn’t send some wind sweeping across the ocean of your insides, I don’t know how to reach you.

It seems every day there’s a new loneliness loose in the world. Last week I read about a turtle whose shell had been fractured so the zoo made a wheelchair out of Legos, and watching it crawl around I cried like a child, that here was something so beautiful it hurt, like my grandmother in the days before she died saying she didn’t like the color of the curtains in her hospital room.

There’s also the unbearable sadness of school shootings, the systemic violence and oppression, the men who grease the wheels of government with their greed, but even without the wars and the worry and all the horrors we hear every day, we carry too much weight with us. Our thin skins can’t even keep out the weather, much less the changes in our atmospheres. I try to remember the last time I picked up my grown daughters and I might as well be searching the vastness of space.

Still, the search is worth it. Out there, past the bright unbroken stars of what we remember, is what we do not know. And somewhere in the asteroid belts of our lives lie the fragments we are forever trying to piece together, to understand what it means to walk around on this good earth.

There’s the warmth of your mother’s hand on your forehead, the coolness of the other side of the pillow. The fresh spill of snow that means no school today, the brightness of the world when we get just a minute to look at it. The tickle of carbonation on your upper lip from the Sprite right after a swim the year you turned eleven and learned about girls. Or boys. Or football or music or whatever you learned that year, still skipping across the hot summer cement, before acne and awkwardness set in.

And even that wasn’t so bad, remembering the way your date looked at Prom your junior year. Or the way your whole small town stood and cheered when your basketball team ran onto the court to the tune of whatever song was popular then or the way on summer nights you circled town like the stars spinning in the night sky or the way everyone told you to stay cool when they signed your yearbook.

At the end, I bet you’ll remember the sound of the garbage truck on the street in the morning with something like nostalgia. You’ll remember your first wife putting on her make-up, mirror still steamed from the shower, before all the growing apart began. You’ll see again your father, and I’ll remember the last time I held my daughter, the time I put her down and never picked her again, except to say, when she was overwhelmed by all the anger in the world, that I was still here, that whatever happens my voice will still be searching for her through space.

I’m trying to see stars the same as when I was a child, wondering not what’s out there for me, but just what’s out there. I’m trying not to imagine dead solar systems but that light still leaks from them long after they are gone. I want to smell the air after the rain and be thankful for that moment, no matter how long we have to wait for it. For every injustice in the world there is a spider crawling up a waterspout. For every anger, an echo. For every wrong, a right now.

You’ll never be as young as you are right now, which makes right now the best now. If our parents put us down and never picked us up again it’s because the weight of their worry grew too much, the same as we’ll be unable to carry our children to completion, the same as we’ll be unable to walk with them into the wherever.

But what beauty it will be to hear those long dead live again, not the pre-canned laughter of some stupid show but what waits for us in the wherever. I hope if we do end up burning the earth aliens will see the smoke from the fire and perhaps make different mistakes than ours. Or none. Or all of them, and learn, before they begin the burning, and when the light of our fire gets to them, they’ll see only a night sky, our planet perhaps a little brighter against the darkness.

And sometimes I think of that whale and realize he’s still singing, even if no one else is listening. It’s beautiful, that song, the way it moves through the water of our bodies, where we are all alone. And the Mars Rover, singing to itself as well—someone programmed that. Someone marked the milestones in its metric or electric or whatever it is the Rover runs on, years maybe, or lines drawn in the Martian soil to measure its days so far from home, so far from where it came into being. I don’t know what the song sounds like, but I know it is good. It is sad and slow and sweet, and it echoes all through the universe of our small hearts.

Turtle, Senator and I sat at a table at the Beachcomber on Wollaston Beach while the redheaded guitar player, billed as The President of Rock ‘n’ Roll, roared:

There’s a riot goin’ on!

Down in cellblock number nine.

I was in the slammer with Albert DiSalvo, shouted Senator over the music. He nodded his head at the bandleader. And Myles too. This didn’t sound right. Albert DiSalvo, known as the Boston Strangler, confessed to raping and killing a dozen women. I couldn’t picture Senator, real name Jim White, doing anything that might land him in prison. In Cu Chi he had kept a low profile. A college graduate, he was about 26 to our 19 or 20. Balding. He looked like a Senator so we called him Senator. Turned out he wasn’t actually locked up in Walpole, just a teacher. Now he worked as a security guard at a construction site, making good money reading dirty magazines in a trailer on the overnight shift. Turtle, chubby, slow talking, slow moving, pink skinned, blond crewcut Turtle, hailed from Thomaston, Georgia. After Vietnam he worked a shit job in T-Town for three years, bought a new car cash, and headed north. Stopped to see Hagey in North Carolina. Hagey was doin’ awright. Got hisself enrolled in college. In Philadelphia, Dave Winton was doing awright too. He was an exec-u-tive now, drivin’ a Mazda RX-7. In New York State Spanky was fixin’ to reenlist and head for Germany where the frauleins were waiting with open arms. Me? I was killing time in the post office and going to school now and then. While we waited for the grand reunion, the reunion came to us. A reunion on wheels: Turtle. Myles Connor, the fiery rock ‘n’ roller, stopped by our table between sets. Senator told him I played piano and Myles urged me to try out with his band. We need a keyboard player, he said making it sound like a done deal. An exciting opportunity, but I could barely play so the tryout never happened. A good thing, perhaps. Myles was said to have a genius level IQ but was a notorious criminal who once wounded a cop in a shootout with police on a Back Bay rooftop and later beat a double murder charge. Less than a year after the Beachcomber gig he stole a Rembrandt from the Museum of Fine Arts in broad daylight. A fucking Rembrandt!

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The First Day of Our Second Year Without You

We visited your grave on Christmas Eve. Elliott helped me find you like we were playing hide and seek. Is Granny over here? No… Is Granny over there? We found you surrounded by poinsettias and candy canes. Elliott picked up a small branch and traced your last name on the headstone, slowly announcing each letter. At age 3, he believes that you’re dead like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. He tells me you woke up in heaven and you live there now, but you will come back. When I am really, really old, he says daily now, I will go to heaven. Sometimes he adds, Mommy, I don’t want to go to heaven. 

How to Use Vanilla

You told me that when you were young, poor girls used vanilla extract as perfume. I imagine you rising, your scent growing stronger in the sunbaked fields. A young woman picking cotton or blueberries and adding something new—but, of course, a poor girl wouldn’t waste vanilla on the fields. You’d save it for secret dates, for sneaking off to carnivals. One drop for an older boy, two drops if Daddy disapproved of him for driving too fast. You’d touch the small space behind each ear, hoping that your chosen boy might pick up the scent and find you delicious. A few years later, you would bake dessert for your husband—baby balanced on your hip—and recall those warm evenings, the thrill of a field boy’s rough palm. I suddenly understand why, whenever you made simple syrup for waffles, you always replaced the maple with vanilla.  

I Was Afraid It Would Be Empty

Do you remember the notebook I gave you as a Mother’s Day gift five years ago? I asked you to write to me about your life: how you didn’t learn about periods until you thought your sister was bleeding to death, how you snuck out with grandpa for a carnival date. You are one of the few people I can—could—sit with for hours on a couch, TV off, only our stories and us. When we knew you were close to death, I thought about asking if you’d written in the notebook for me, but I didn’t ask. I didn’t want you to feel guilty if you hadn’t found the time or the words to write. When we went through your bedroom after Christmas, I found the notebook in your dresser drawer. I opened it quickly. It was blank, but there was a jagged edge in front. The first page was torn away. 

After Your Strokes, I Ask If You Found Your Clitoris

I read about a woman who was 70 before she realized she had a clit, and I became concerned that you might not know about yours. What if you’d never had an orgasm? With Grandpa gone, I wasn’t sure I should ask, but the mini-strokes had shaken off your shyness. I knew your wedding night story—how you knew nothing about sex until that day, how two kids in the early fifties couldn’t quite make it work, how you went to bed crying instead. I’d heard stories of Grandpa patting you on the bottom when he thought no one was looking. One time he bought you a black leather jumpsuit like Olivia Newton John wore at the end of Grease, but you were too embarrassed to wear it for him. Even in the recovery room after his heart surgery, Grandpa playfully brushed his fingertips across your palm, an old signal that he wanted you. Did these actions add up to your pleasure? “Granny, I’ve been reading this book,” I began. “It talks about how our culture is so focused on men’s bodies and we aren’t supposed to talk about women’s bodies. A lot of women don’t even know about their clitoris! Did you and Grandpa find yours?” “Yeah,” you said quietly, as if someone on your end of the phone line might hear you. “So you did orgasm too?” “Yeah,” you said with a little chuckle, as if it were obvious. 

Your Death Explained in Birds

Death is the great egret at the swamp, picking newly hatched green herons from their cypress nest. I am the pregnant woman on land looking for something to throw. I am the mother heron, too small to fight back, and the runt deep in the nest. Death is the egret dropping fresh young birds into the swamp with barely a ripple. I am the pregnant woman standing horrified and helpless. I am the mother heron shrieking and snapping on the branch below. I am the smallest green heron in the nest. I stick my head out in the stillness after everyone else has gone. 

He was dissecting a cat when I arrived for the interview. The lab-coated doctor sat hunched over the splayed legs of an immobilized gray kitty. I looked away. This wasn’t what I had signed up for. He was supposed to be a neurologist, not a vet.

“You the gal they sent to take Mary’s place?” He spun his stool around to face me, the sharp instrument still in his hand. His words were broken by a slight accent. I glanced toward him, relieved to find that his long torso blocked all but the cat’s tail. 

“Yes, Mary, your secretary,” making clear that the typewriter was my tool, not the scalpel. Whatever would I do if he asked me to assist him? I was an English major, for goodness sake. “You need a typist while she’s on maternity leave, right?” 

The doctor tossed his lab gloves into a bin and shut the door between lab and lobby, leaving the dead cat and the smell of formaldehyde behind. A Swede with thinning gray hair, glasses, and a narrow face, he was tall in an awkward, gangly kind of way—like an adolescent boy whose trousers, no matter how new, always land inches above his ankle. His name was embroidered in red script above a pocket stuffed with pens. My eyes passed over his bulging Adam’s apple and landed on a grin. 

“She’s part of my research project.” The doctor nodded toward the closed door. 

I’d just finished my college freshman year and was working Saturday mornings as a receptionist at the EEG lab of the university’s medical complex. Filling in for the doctor’s secretary was a fulltime summer post with a much-needed salary increase. As far as I could tell, my older sister Sandy was the sole breadwinner in our family, and how much could a twenty-two-year-old secretary earn? 

Mother was enjoying the single life in Miami Beach where she’d gone to reclaim her runaway second husband. Any jobs Mom held during her four-year-and-counting stay barely covered her own living expenses. Our father had left a decade ago. His ten-dollar weekly child support checks disappeared on the stroke of our eighteenth birthdays without even a goodbye note… kind of like his earlier departure. My full scholarship covered tuition, but we’d turned down a student loan meant to cover the rest. Debt wasn’t something our family did. Luckily, I was able to live at home.

“I’ll show you around,” he beckoned, walking ahead in his size big shoes. I followed, wobbling in my two-inch heels. It was the mid-sixties and young women in the Midwest didn’t sport jeans or pants yet, but wore skirts, blouses, and even stockings if it wasn’t too hot. 

The quick tour revealed a reception area offering a desk, file cabinets, and one cracked leather armless chair for the random visitor. Patients were seen at the medical school’s clinic. A worn, brown carpet led into a tiny office that boasted a narrow window offering an encapsulated view of the high-rise buildings that made up the venerable medical complex. The desk was populated with stacks of paper, journals, and books. A credenza stood similarly cluttered, but for a framed photograph peeking out from the piles as though vying for the doctor’s attention. It showed a younger man, one arm circling the shoulders of a curly-haired woman, and the other holding a gap-toothed little boy. 

“My wife and son. He’s 14 now,” he offered, pausing to acknowledge his family. “They’re in Stockholm all summer.” Looking back at me, he waved his hands around the space. “And this is where I do all my great thinking and writing. Your job is to keep me organized and type up my notes.” Would he be joining them? This was to be a summer-long position. And I needed to get all those paid weeks in. A muffled siren from outside signaled the arrival of an ambulance.

“When can you start?”

* * *

I soon settled into a routine. Each morning I’d leave the apartment my sister and I shared and walked the few blocks to the Delmar bus, my brown-bag lunch in hand. A written assignment in the doctor’s scrawl would welcome me to my desk. I’d start pecking away on the IBM Selectric, stopping to take an occasional phone call. During my lunch hour, I’d roam the gentrified neighborhood shops, landing at the local Left Bank bookstore—browsing but not buying. Libraries were my go-to place for books.

I missed the camaraderie of the EEG lab: Laughing with the young female technicians, or greeting apprehensive patients who were about to have their scalps treated like pin cushions to map brain activity for migraines, epilepsy, or worse. Here it was just the doctor and I. He’d be in the clinic most mornings and in the afternoons, he holed up behind closed doors reading. As I had been forewarned, the doctor was not much of a conversationalist. “Hello,” “goodbye,” or explanations of assignments were his offerings. So, I was surprised when I returned from a lunch stroll to be welcomed by his loud greeting and a vase of yellow roses. 

“Your boyfriend dropped those off,” he announced from his desk chair as I entered, as if he had been waiting for me to return. Wow. Billy had never given me flowers. We’d met early during my freshman fall semester. With oval brown eyes, dark hair, and olive skin, he was a Jewish Omar Sharif who came equipped with still-married-to-each-other parents, a three-bedroom ranch house, and membership at the local synagogue. By that summer we’d begun our journey skipping down the yellow brick road to happily ever after. We’d made it past holding hands to making out in the vinyl-clad front seat of his car. And now he’d sent me flowers.

“Uh, I didn’t bring you flowers, Renee,” Billy declared on the phone when I called to thank him that evening. “I mean, not that I wouldn’t have liked to. Why would that guy tell you that?” 

That guy with the M.D., PhD? 

“Must be his weird sense of humor,” I puzzled. What was I to do? Scold the doctor? Laugh with him at his prank? Relax and enjoy the flowers? Should I feel flattered? Other than high school dance corsages that always pricked when pinned on, no one had ever given me flowers. Much less a dozen roses. I said nothing. Over the next few days I‘d watch the buds stretch and bloom, petals open wide to embrace a brief life, their perfume filling the office. Later when hardened, curled leaves dropped onto the patient notes I was typing, I tossed the flowers, washed the vase, and placed it on top of the file drawer. An arrangement of pink roses arrived the next week and I was greeted with the same story. Should I ask Billy again? Maybe he actually had sent these, not wanting to be outdone by the doctor? 

“No Renee, I did not get you flowers this time either. I’m sorry. I love you, but I don’t have money for roses right now. I’ll pick you some from my mom’s garden if you want. You sure you want to work for this guy? What’s with him?” 

“Oh, he’s harmless. Just having fun. Likes to joke. The work’s easy; the pay is good. Should cover all my textbooks and supplies.”  

I didn’t add that I loved getting roses and enjoyed the attention. After the second dozen roses had died, I found a collection of Winnie the Pooh books on my desk, still wrapped in their original cellophane. The day before I’d completely missed the doctor’s reference to Eeyore when describing a patient. 

“What, you don’t know Pooh and Tigger and Christopher Robin?” This gift the doctor acknowledged. I read the entire four-volume collection of charming stories that night. Years later I would read them to my young daughters.

The surprises continued. One morning I walked out of my apartment building and the doctor was out front in his ‘60s Chevy sedan, waiting to drive me to work. He lived in a nearby suburb where many professionals owned homes because of the good public schools. My sister and I were in the apartments clustered on the fringes—many populated by medical students on a budget. 

“I got a late start, so I decided to save you some bus money,” he explained, leaning over to open the passenger door. Had he gotten my address from my job application? No matter. Maybe I wouldn’t mention the ride to Billy. He might not have understood how nice it was to be driven somewhere without having to ask. Our family had never owned a car, unless you counted the few months we lived with our stepfather before he too walked out. Sandy had just started saving for a Chevy Nova. 

Growing up, destinations had been limited to those on bus, or streetcar lines, or within walking distance. My attendance at social events or club meetings was dependent upon begging a ride from friends, knowing I couldn’t reciprocate. My surprise at seeing the doctor’s car, despite its mud-splattered tires and scratchy seat covers, turned into delight, not skepticism. I was reminded of those long-ago Sunday afternoons when my father pulled up to the curb in his ‘50s lime green Plymouth, with the rounded roof, for one of his twice monthly custodial visits. I’d dash out and jump into the front seat eager for the fun adventure to begin. Until the day he stopped coming.

“Thanks!” I slid in. The doctor didn’t say much on the short trip, but it didn’t matter. The car ride was much better than the crowded bus where I’d stand, hanging onto an overhead strap, bouncing off other passengers at every jolt. 

My longest conversation with him occurred when he invited me to lunch midway into the summer. 

“Do you like Miss Hulling’s Café?” he asked as he popped out of his office, another unanticipated gesture. His morning pick-up hadn’t recurred, though I’d still paused and looked. 

“Sure!” I could easily abandon the American cheese sandwich and banana I’d packed that morning. We walked the few blocks; I had to hustle to keep up with the long strides of this man who was at least a foot taller than I. Grabbing our trays—mine piled with roast beef, mashed potatoes, and a chunk of corn bread; his with bratwurst and sauerkraut—we sat down at one of the Formica tables. The red plastic chair squeaked as I pulled it close. 

“So, is Billy a good boyfriend?” 

Luckily the potatoes slid down my throat, silencing my gasp.

“Um, yeah.” Not really sure if we shared the same definition of good boyfriend. “Yes!” deciding to sound more enthused as I buttered the bread. “We like the same things. Movies. The Muny opera.” Did the doctor even know about the summer musical troupe?

“Do you go to the Muny?” I asked, trying to redirect the conversation. 

He shook his head. Should I ask him about his wife? His son? 

“Tell me about Sweden,” I cut up the roast beef, ignoring the unfamiliar smell of pork from his plate. 

“Oh, it’s lovely. You should go,” gripping his knife and fork in the reversed manner Europeans use. He popped a chunk of meat into his mouth. 

I stirred the mashed potatoes with my fork feeling their hot steam on my face. 

“So, is Billy romantic? Does he send you love letters?” He reached for the salt shaker. 

Love letters? Did a Valentine’s card count? Billy sent as many letters as flowers. “Uh…no.” Was Billy romantic? We kissed often. He said he loved me.

“Love letters are beautiful.” He attacked his sauerkraut. “You know Swedes believe in free love.” 

Free love? This was a few years before the 1968 summer of love, and flowers in your hair. I was an eighteen-year-old virgin sipping lemonade. 

“You finished? Let’s get some ice cream.” He scraped his chair back. I followed through the revolving door.

As we launched onto the sidewalk toward the local Velvet Freeze, the doctor took my hand. His large fingers wrapped around mine with an unexpected gentleness. I hesitated and looked up. He was staring straight ahead and hadn’t missed a step. Should I drop his hand? Would he be angry? Did I want to? I wasn’t frightened, just surprised. Sexual harassment wasn’t in anyone’s vocabulary back then. Rape wasn’t mentioned out loud. The words weren’t screamed on headlines or TV; social media didn’t exist. Doctors were educated professionals. I felt safe. The summer sunshine offered comfortable warmth, not the usual sizzling, unbearable heat common to the Midwest. Orange day lilies in full glory lined the curb. Men, women, and children strolled the wide sidewalk. What did they think of us? A graying suited-up man holding the hand of a teenage girl? Or did they even notice? Were we such an oddity? For a doctor and his employee, the behavior was an anomaly. But a father out with his daughter? How sweet. 

I ordered a chocolate nut fudge ice cream cone; he had chocolate mint. 

The next morning, I arrived at 9:00 as usual, called hello to the doctor, who grunted a good morning. An envelope with “Renee” on it, written in his familiar script was on my desk. I opened it. 

“Dearest, 

‘Each morning I listen for the sound of your footsteps coming down the hall toward the office. I eagerly await the moment you open the door. Your arrival fills me with such joy and tenderness. I so love your blue eyes, your soft blonde hair. I long to kiss your pink lips.’”

The letter dropped from my trembling hands landing next to that day’s stack of patient notes and the doctor’s instructions. I grabbed my purse and yanked open the office door, heard it click shut behind me. My heels clattered on the hardwood floors as I ran to the elevator and rode down to the first floor, relieved to find the red and white city bus still at the curb, promising me a ride home. I displayed my student pass to the driver, turned down the aisle, and collapsed into one of the empty seats before me. As the bus groaned away, I looked out the front panoramic window at the giant buildings comprising the complex: a consortium of hospitals, clinics, and one of the most revered medical schools in the country. I was a mere speck in that landscape. Leaning my head against the cracked black leather seat, I cried. For the money? For the roses? For me? 

Prose is a trap, my professor looks up from her computer when she says this.  She has a tendency to hit realizations so simply— it doesn’t feel like a realization.  Prose is inherently patriarchal, and I will never be able to escape it as long as I continue to rely on this demand, on these ordered sentences.  My hands— they are unsure— as Emily would say— differently.  But I am good at manipulating the patriarchy, I am good at writing these sentences even if they have set me up to fail.  It will be a beautiful failure.

In a different class people keep insisting on prose being indulgent or sparse but it all feels like indulgent prose to me, in comparison, to Emily— and I am sorry for being so informal.  I don’t know if I would do the same if writing about a man.  Maybe I am failing. 

Our relationship has failed to transcend gender roles.  We acknowledge this and it feels heavy.  Beyza has their handon my calf.  I have my hand in my hair.  The conversation keeps switching but I am trying to figure out why I want to dress for them, why this is important to me after three years of dating.  Why I don’t want to be Cute all the time, but something else, Sexy.  Why I get upset when they do not want to eat the food I have made for us.  Why they want me to be the one who has the kids, when they want the kids more.  Or do they?  I am not sure anymore.

______________________

/ in one week three of my friends ask me about squirting & suddenly i am an expert on something i can barely define for myself.  i shrug & say, it makes me worry i’m peeing.  but maybe it is just this acknowledgement because i am suddenly very zen about it & later, during the fucking, i just let it happen.  beyza laughs at me & at first i am embarrassed but then they kiss my neck.  we move our bodies.  later they pull at my hair & i think i am going to ascend to some place better, i tell them, harder.

/i am trying to remember what it’s like to be a little body &

________________________

My pain tolerance is higher, don’t I remember when we got tattoos?  I only cried because the artist asked me about my grandmother.

These poems break all the rules by existing.  But they still follow a lot of rules, even self imposed ones: rhyme schemes, meter, etc.  These are not—usually— blank verse.  They follow a pattern of something that came before, even while building something new and remember: that is okay.

I want to write but that is not how people make money.  Beyza has figured this out by working at a feminist bookstore, by working at a literal foundation for poetry.  They have navigated this but.  I have found myself in big houses, in apartments.  I have found myself walking children home from school and reading them bedtime stories.  This type of work is referred to as Domestic.  I am constantly reminding people that nannying is different from babysitting, but it is different because the children are becoming partly mine.  Not quite Motherhood, but something along those lines.  Something serious.

If this was a different story, I would begin with my grandmother giving me Molly, the American Girl Doll.  I screamed so loudly my mom thought I had hurt myself.  Excitement.  And then.  Boredom.  

________________________

/willa has me lay down on the carpet.  she wants to turn my stomach into a bridge that leads to the interstate.  she calls it the high road.  her favorite car is bright red & it is her favorite because when she pulls it backwards until it makes clicking noises & then lets go it races faster than all the other cars.  the mechanics don’t work so well on fabric, on my body, so she directs it slowly over me.

/i don’t want to play princesses with her & i loved cinderella.  i used to rewrite versions of that story.  at first in my head, then on paper.  how these were my first stories & they were basically smut.  i tell alexis, i tell beyza, that’s in me now, there’s no point in hating it.  but i don’t want to play princesses with willa.

_________________________

 I didn’t want to create a voice for her or dress her, really.  I didn’t want to create a life for her.  She spent months at the back of my closet and my mom rolled her eyes at the waste of a hundred dollars.

I am good at watching Alexis’ daughter.  I am not creating a life for her but helping her live one well.  I know how to perform this way.  I know how to make it enjoyable and this, this is what scares me.

Katie tweets, I like to clean up after people’s children when they are off at work.  When they are making their lives happen.  It gives me a sense of purpose in the world.  I wish I was kidding.

And we are always wishing that we are kidding.  That we had not learned how to straighten a room, how to make a dinner for people besides ourselves, how to thrive off of these things.  We worry that this means we cannot do other things, we cannot be fulfilled without this side of Us.  That in attempting to fulfill the domestic, we will let the other parts of ourselves fall away.  We remember our mothers before us, who slowly stopped retreating to studies, who worked part time, who made us dinner every night.  We are so thankful for this, but we want a way to avoid this for ourselves.

I am trying to remember the moment I realized my parents– in love, wonderful, happy— had a heteronormative marriage.  On a walk after dinner— my mom told me herself.  It had to be spelled out to me and even then.  But then, does it matter?   They are happy.  More specifically, since my mom is happy, does it matter?  That my dad makes the money, that she makes the food?  I come home for a night and I lay next to her in their bed, Modern Family is on in the background and I avoid talking about how much I hate the show, but I cannot avoid it entirely.  Then she says, Sometimes I wish we had had a third kid.  She says, Sometimes I wish I could have one now.  My sister is fifteen, almost grown.  I am twenty.  I

____________________________

/the problem with pain is, it’s impossible to remember.  our brains refuse to keep the feeling in us.  we call that: evolution.  i have only read about this in the context of giving birth and torture.

/I’ve finished threading—too—

____________________________

think, What would it mean, to start that process again, at almost 50, to forfeit the independence she was just about to gain, for another helpless human, to guide through this world, to create more helpless humans.  I think, How awful.  But then.  Not for her.  Wonderful.

Alexis can’t decide how to put it— she glances at the television as she talks.  I like to live with someone, in a partnership, taking care of her together— domestic— but I hate what that says about me.  And the rest of it, of what it means.  I don’t like that.

In all these essays about all these poems— the queer ones, the ones in which we insist on seeing Emily as opposed to any other narrator (and for this I am especially guilty, reading is to insert yourself, I suppose)— the word subversion is used again and again.  As though by writing Might I moor— tonight—/ In thee! Emily’s conjuring of penetration in a relationship with no penis is her upending heteronormativity.  But I can’t stop asking myself if it isn’t just a failure, like mine, to overcome heteronormativity.  And then I wonder why it matters.  Why does the most talented writer of her time, arguably of any time, need to subvert, and why do I?  Why do queer women feel the pressure to become something that society has not yet allowed room for and why do people keep insisting Emily Dickinson was a lesbian when she has piles of love and fuck poems written for and about men too?  And why is that a failure as well?  Is it not enough of an upending— enough of a subversion— to have written these poems, to have fallen in love with her sister in law, to have fallen in love with men as well, and to have told these stories in her own way.  

__________________________________

/on the brown line i worry that people will think i am a bad mother.  she keeps asking me if she can watch alvin & the chipmunks when we get home & the answer is yes but i try to say it quietly because an older woman is staring at us, willa & i— the smallest shake of her head.  it takes me minutes to remember: i am not a mother.

/the only time she ever tattles on me: alexis arrives home from work & willa tugs on her shirt sleeve, she whispers loud enough so she knows i can hear, she whispers, isabelle did something really mean.  she whispers, isabelle ate my pretzel sticks.

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She allowed space in her mind for a world beyond binaries— sexuality and gender.  She did not, Subvert the cult of domesticity by obeying its letter but defying it’s spirit.  She lived in a way that allowed her to pick parts of that cult, of that life that every woman was compelled to live and that they may have liked living, & she got to let go of some other parts.  She let her sister take care of the house & wrote.  

Before the mooring in another woman, Emily writes, Done with the Compass— / Done with the Chart!  Done with following a path set out for her, set out for anyone.  Done with doing anything but spending time with her lover.  And though, in reality, it seems her lover existed in the space between her pen and her paper, she still managed to do exactly what she wanted.  She lived how she wanted.  Which is to say, outside of expectations.

Emily kept up a friendship, one people presume to call an editorial relationship, with Thomas Higginson.  But to call it that would be to overlook the way she ignored every piece of writing advice he ever gave her.  She asked for criticism again and again, sending poem after poem, but I can only imagine an eye roll at Higginson’s responses from her.  In her most famous letter to him, you can almost feel her exaggeration with him, this man who she respected only to a point.  You think my gait “spasmodic.”  I am in danger sir.  In danger of what?  Mediocrity, I suppose, if she was to listen.  Her signature of, YOUR SCHOLAR, a joke more than anything.

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/in rugrats in paris chuckie cries on the airplane thinking about his mom—he sees in the clouds.  willa wants to know if she’s dead because willa knows all about death, the first time i met her she told me, it’s when you lay down and you never come back. she told me, you just can’t.  & i think chuckie’s mom is probably dead but i can’t be sure & willa has to get on a plane to see her dad & when she comes back from those trips something about her has gotten a little tougher.

/i tell beyza my favorite pets are fish because they are so low maintenance & they tell me i probably shouldn’t tell any potential employers about that.  but something in me has started to melt.  when i see fluffy dogs i bend down to pet them now.  my googling has not revealed if this is caused by love or hormones.

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After her death Higginson took her poems.  He edited them.  People later called this, a destruction.

We play pretend for an hour and a half before I suggest putting on the TV.  I know, I shouldn’t have suggested it first, but being a King can become exhausting because I have to keep telling Willa that women, Princesses, cannot be bought and sold into marriage.  That I wouldn’t want to do that.  She says okay and then comes up with a different way of saying the same thing.  She wants to play all the princesses, but then she wants to play the Bad Witch too.  The bad witch freezes me in my sleep, she turns Sleeping Beauty into soup.  I understand the need to be more than one thing.  The need to perform multiple roles.  Willa isn’t allowed to watch princess shows anymore, we put on Rugrats again.

And that’s it, Performance.  How I am doing that all the time.  How it has become impossible for me to tell what things I actually like and what things have been ingrained into me.  Aesthetics.  I love them.  At the Forever 21 my sister tells me I am going for a Twin Peaks Aesthetic and she is totally right.  I want to be Audrey Horne but I buy a diner girl dress.  From the dressing room I snap a picture to Beyza and they send back so many starry emojis.

Maybe, Alexis is sick and we are drinking wine anyway.  We want Willa to sleep through the night so we sit in the living room with all the lights off.  Maybe the problem isn’t that you’re not subverting whatever, but that we’ve decided that taking care of children and making food are intrinsically feminine.

Alexis is so tired but she cannot sleep until the kitchen is clean.  My mother is like this too and I know one day, I will wake up, and I will feel that pull.  I tell Alexis to go to sleep, I tell her I will do the dishes— but I am wine drunk & my Uber arrives before I can finish.

My dad fails to notice the clutter that surround him until my mom is falling into a tailspin.  We call this an example of nurture verses nature.  He grew up watching his mother clean and his father leave things lying around in separate houses.  My mom’s parents were both unbelievably messy, and so was she until she wasn’t.  The wasn’t is the question, when asked she references my birth.

But then, Emily was supposed to clean up after her family.  Emily was supposed to take off her white dress every once and a while, put on something darker so she could dig into the floors.  But she chose— decided— not to, to leave her white dress on and close her door. We have one picture of her and in it she has been transformed.  They put makeup on her retroactively.  Other things.  She was not something simple, and They don’t forget, just cover up.  Her bigness, her complexities, fit best into small spaces.  A poem, a room— you know— we or They, put her in something pretty, later.

When she writes, I’m wife— I’ve finished that— we know that Emily is not the narrator of the poem.  She never got married, she never entered a safer space and in turn, never allowed herself to be eclipsed— however softly.  This narrator cannot decide if it is better to be safe and accepted in society, but not quite reaching her own potential.  She, at the end says, I’m Wife!  Stop there!  As though it could ever be so simple.  To become a wife, specifically in this time, but still now for some people, was to trade in a freedom for a sure place in society.  A trade that results in both pain and comfort.

____________________________

/the winters create something in us that is not god.   on the red line a man sits next to me.  he is the type of person where it isn’t clear to me if he’s a man or a boy, but i think he likes to ride that line.  we aren’t god but we both wear heavy jackets & this creates something different in our dynamic.  his elbow rests on my side.  in a month this will not be acceptable but right now we have a closeness i haven’t had with a stranger in a year.  more.  we don’t look at each other, but we allow the other person to get comfortable.  in the summer he might be sweaty & i would be wearing a crop top & this would never fly.  but here.  in february.  it is okay.  it is a comfort we both need to get through this maddening darkness.

___________________________

And then, later, she writes, I’m ceded— I’ve stopped being Theirs.  That capital They, so present in her work.  That insistence on freedom, another meaning of ceded, within everything oppressing her, the They, the needle that she says she has put down.  It’s all here, in this poem, being let go of, but still being.  Still as important as what she builds to— that diadem.  And I choose, just a Crown—  Emily has never been more self assured than she is here, every analysis I read insists on this, and yet in choosing greatness, she is deliberately opaque about what that means for her, for anyone.

So often Emily allows herself to be a volcano, but one that lives, as Rich points out so vitally, at home.  Emily has constantly been pigeonholed into either the demure, small girl who wrote about nature, or the dark, subverting woman who ignored all expectations, who lived a completely original life.  The patriarchy and second wave feminism, just like in real life, are both incorrect, even if one is less wrong than the other.  She lived in her head— & it was a brilliant one— but it stayed on her father’s estate for decades.  Poetry is power, language is power, my professor tells us.  She had so much power, & she used it in the way that she felt comfortable, which is to say, often very domestically.  Can my prose do this?  Can any woman’s?

Willa wants to know if I have any children, if she can meet them.  I tell her no, I don’t, and she asks me why not.  At first I think, because I am twenty, but there is more to it than that.  Don’t you want to be a mom?  I remember every conversation I have had about not wanting motherhood & then being in love.

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/she wants me to sing her a song, but a new one.  a song she has never heard before.  i scan my mind for something simple, something pretty.  every song pretty enough to sing to her has the word love in the chorus, a romantic love i try to skew into a platonic love, into something understandable for a four year old.  i tell her okay, but she has to close her eyes during the song.  she thinks this means it is time to play peekaboo, or.  i’m not sure what she really thinks, but this is the most enjoyable thing for her.

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Staring at paint samples with Beyza, picking the one yellow that would look perfect in a baby’s bedroom.  And then, loving.  Willa.  I imagine my stomach expanding.  The hormones, the crying.  I imagine how I would have to stop working for a while.  How Beyza would rub my back at nights but it would never be enough.  Carmen Gimenez Smith, the way she loves her children, regrets the time they take away from her writing, her teaching.  I don’t know, kid.

In Her sweet Weight on my Heart a Night— Emily dreams for something incredibly domestic.  Or her narrator does.  My bride had slipped away—.  My bride.  Not just another woman, a fling, but a deep love—a word which could have implied an elect lady, an immortal soul at most, and at least, a partner in nature, a human being.  Either way this human, this immortal soul, she slipped away or never existed, or always existed.  The speaker cannot be sure, and doesn’t want the reader to be either.  And it doubles in on itself when the speaker offers up the confirmation of a God we know Emily did not believe in.  If ‘twas a dream—made solid— just/ The Heaven to confirm— She offers us a Schrodinger’s love.  She offers us an unknowable queerness.  A queerness steeped in the traditions of the heteropatriarchy— yes, of course, this poem was written in 1863.  

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/ she is trying to put off sleep again.  she has developed new stratagies.  will i tickle her?  just for like… two minutes!  & who am i to say no?  she has a tummy like mine, we are both small but that flatness alludes us.  & on willa, who is four, that is adorable, it is perfect.  i think on me it can also be adorable.

 /katie lies in my bed with me, wine resting between us—the kind of red that looks nothing like blood— almost empty.  we both have our fingers in front of our faces, counting.  she has just started dating someone new & i have been in the same relationship for years, but still. we are trying to figure out how many days it will before we have sex.  the answer is not soon enough.  we have both masturbated while the kids we nanny watch TV or slept or did whatever else.  she asks me, what other job are you going to have that kind of freedom?  & i fall into myself, laughing but— knowing the needing of it.  to own something erotic as i allow myself to help raise a child.  as i allow myself to take care.

/ A still— Volcano— Life—

That flickered in the night—

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But a queerness that does not even need to have the trappings of reality to exist.  A Fiction superseding Faith—/ By so much— as ‘twas real— Faith, at one point, meant truth.  Of course.  We—humans, Dickinson, the speaker— have the ability to imagine so well, to love so largely, that it goes beyond truth.  These imaginings are more important than whatever reality has to offer.  And that is what this moment with her love her was to the speaker.  More important.

And this prose, it’s trying so hard to not play into the patriarchy, by being mine.  These comas are all in the wrong places and that wasn’t intentional but it feels like the best failure— good.  Not like being touched feels good, but maybe that’s in the dashes.  

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/ she wants to know what boys are made of.  if there is something different there.  us against them.  she sees a picture of a sumo wrestler & she knows nothing about her body would allow that.  willa turns to me— an answer required.  the only answer i can provide, i worry later she will apply to all boys, i worry she will forget the other things i’ve ever whispered to her, remembering only, the same stuff as your or i, only more of it.  more.

/ she makes her little feet dance, at just the right distance from the door.  i am lying on the ground on the other side of it because she asked me to.  i am positioned so i can see her feet, but i also have two fingers pushed underneath the crack of the door, so she knows i haven’t gone anywhere.  in this way i have entered an inbetween space, i am not on the other side of the door but i’m not on this side either. the floor is hardwood, my back cracks when i push into it.  willa is all, can you see my feet now?  yes.  what about now?  no!  now?

Books are gentle companions. Generally.

I was only just about murdered by books on one occasion.

That was fifteen years ago…

*

I wasn’t sure what to do with my life. I had no prospects. I had an arts degree.

I started reading a fair bit. More than usual. I read for ten to twelve hours a day. I’m not sure if I was deeply depressed or just really loved short stories.

I read a lot of Hawthorne, Poe. Wodehouse—he’s pretty good.

I bought a couple thousand books. Not all at once. I was only an aspiring writer back then, so I could still afford to buy books. 

I still lived at home (I had an arts degree).

When I ran out of shelf space, I filled my closet with books. My dresser. My bed.

You can fit about a hundred books in an upright piano.

One bookcase in particular, the big oak one (I called it Big Oak), was so loaded with books that it swayed away from the wall day and night like a drunken professor of English Literature. 

My mother said this three times a week, at least:

“That big oak bookcase is going to tip over one of these days and break every bone in your body. Even your metacarpals.” (My mother was a schoolteacher.)

I’d just shrug. And keep reading. And reading…

I read for three years.

*

For every book I read, I bought ten. A sound, metric plan. 

Things didn’t really get out of hand until books started colonizing other rooms of the house. Crawlspaces. A dormant fireplace. 

You can fit about fifty books in a dormant fireplace.

Soon the halls were piled high, like catacombs.

If my parents were unimpressed, they didn’t show it. Not really.

“If you buy another book, I’m going to watch you eat it, page by page.” My father did mention that. Three times a week, at least.

Only when I couldn’t think of anywhere else to put them (there was nowhere else) did I stop buying books. And diverted all my energy, such as it was, into reading them. 

I lay down on my bedroom floor (I’d replaced the bed with six filing cabinets crammed with books) and opened up—I can’t remember what book. It doesn’t matter.

Something by Hemingway, maybe.

Possibly Faulkner.

“You can get an aneurism from reading too much,” my mother remarked, walking by.

“Last week it was meningitis,” I said.

“That too,” I heard her say. My mother is a severe hypochondriac.

I shook my head—and kept reading.

I’d still be reading, I’m sure. In a beautiful institution. If it weren’t for the incident.

*

Routine is critical to unbalanced people. It becomes a habit. 

Every day, I read from nine to two, had a late lunch, then walked for several hours. Mostly out-of-doors.

“What are you up to these days?” some smiling person would always ask me, always in front of the post office.

“Reading books,” I’d always say.

I’d watch the keystone drop out of their smile, and the whole thing collapse. Always.

After my walk, I’d resume reading, on the floor, from six till midnight. Then fall asleep reading. And wake at dawn with a book on my chest, or under it, or neatly shelved between ribs.

That’s just what happened, the one night. With a slight variation.

I don’t remember what I was reading. Something by Jackson, perhaps. Or Welty—she’s pretty good. It doesn’t matter. Not really.

It might’ve been de Maupassant.

I fell asleep reading.

I woke abruptly, in incredible pain. My head was pounding, my nose. I couldn’t move. 

I was having an aneurism. I was sure of it. I’m a severe hypochondriac.

I tried crying out but my voice sounded muffled and frail. I pictured a frail man, in some kind of muffle, lying at the bottom of a steep hill, dying.

I’ll be dead any minute, I remember thinking.

A few minutes passed. 

A few more.

There was a knock on the door.

“Are you alright?” said a voice. My mother’s.

I mumbled something. 

“Could you enunciate?”

(My mother was a schoolteacher.)

“I heard a relatively big bang a while back. Did you?”

“No,” I tried to say. It sounded muffled.

“Did you say ‘help’?”

“No,” I mumbled, a little louder.

“Oh,” said my mother.

“Help,” I tried to say, now.

“Yes—goodnight,” she said.

I heard her walk away.

I must’ve either passed out of fallen asleep because my next memory is of my father lifting something incredibly heavy off of me.

It was Big Oak.

And about four hundred books.

The last book, the opened one lying on my chest, right over my heart, the one I’d presumably been reading… It saved my life. That’s what I tell people, anyway. 

I’m not sure what book it was. It doesn’t matter.

Something by Salinger, perhaps.

Or O’Connor. 

Whatever it was, my mother picked it up—then dropped down, sobbing. She put her arms around me.

“You should’ve said something,” she said. 

*

When they let me out of the hospital, I packed up all but five hundred books, my favorites, and gave them away. I gave a box of books to anyone I could think of. People always took them with a sigh. I’m not sure if they were depressed or abhorred short stories.

My parents were proud. They were ecstatic. Optimistic, even.

Then I started writing poetry.

I’ve been writing ever since. Not poetry, though, not really. That was a worrisome phase. I write short stories, mostly. That’s a permanent worry. My mother is seventy-five years old but looks a hundred.

I do still read. Sparingly. Writers can’t afford new books. So they make their own.

When telling people about my scrape with death, I’ll point out my crooked nose, by way of corroboration. Then I’ll tell them that if they look closely, they can just barely make out the front cover of The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury branded into my abdomen. When I lift my shirt, one in three people lean closer. 

I think that tells you something about humanity. 

I haven’t decided what.