Turkish Coffee

Mama tilts the cup to the side, rolls it around, examines each line, dot, drop. They look like black, crusty Jackson Pollock paintings. She doesn’t take it too seriously.

“Ah, habibti, it’s a man in a hat. You’ll meet him soon, and he will be very important to you,” she says to my friend Danielle.

I ask my mom to read my cup next, and she shakes her head, says no because I actually believe in it.

She says, “We’re Christians. We don’t believe in this stuff,” as she peers into the cup.

She doesn’t trust that my faith is strong enough and worries about my intrigue with the unknown. She’s suspicious of my love of astrology, tarot, and ghosts. Once, in eighth grade, she discovered that my friends and I bought a Ouija board, and she stormed into my room in the middle of the night to find it. She took it to her room and covered it with two bibles.

When we arrive at the psychic’s house, it’s tiny, and a swarm of feral cats are wandering in and around her doorway. She’s very poor –the kind of place people imagine when they see documentaries about the Middle East.

“You’ve cursed this house! You’ve cursed this family!” she shouted.

More than suspicious, she prays for my soul daily. Mama just does it for fun. Everyone in Jordan does it—a party trick. They believe it’s forbidden, harram, but they’ll excuse it for its lightheartedness. Something the girls do when they come over in the morning for coffee, where they’ll serve it with something sweet, a date cookie, perhaps fruit too. This man in a hat turns out to be Danielle’s first fiancé.

*     *     *

I believe it because my cousin Christine’s aunt says she does it for fun but really doesn’t. Seven years ago, she read Christine’s mom’s cup and predicted that Christine’s mom would get sick, Christine would find love, and there would be two deaths in the family; one an older man, and one would be a young girl. That year, Christine’s mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. Christine fell in love with a man who’d cheat on her two years into their relationship. He would later become a born-again Christian and meet his wife in church. It was also the year Dounia died. She was eight. George and I were the last ones to leave her grave; we just stared as they dumped gravel on the small, white, casket, while her mother kept praying for her daughter to find peace.

“Allah yerhamek, Mama,” she said, until all you could see was dirt.

I can’t remember the old man.

*     *     *

My cousin Riham and I visit a psychic named Um Ahmad during my last visit to Jordan. Um Ahmad meaning “mother of Ahmad,” her first-born son. All mothers go by the name of their first-born son, unless, of course, they have no son at all. We drive to the outer edges of Amman. Riham’s mom’s friend gives Aunty directions and raves about how accurate Um Ahmad is and how she’s been seeing her for over a year now. She predicted her new job, and if all goes according to plan, this year (this very year) will be when she meets her future husband. She’s just had her lips done and they’re swollen and bruised. Riham and I can’t stop giggling at her. When we arrive at the psychic’s house, it’s tiny, and a swarm of feral cats are wandering in and around her doorway. She’s very poor—the kind of place people imagine when they see documentaries about the Middle East.

“If she’s so good, why can’t she afford a better place?” my brother whispers.

I tell him that sometimes the gift is the price. She uses the masbahah to focus, moving the beads one and then two at a time with her thumb, and prays to Muhammad. She tells my brother, Aunty, and her friend to drink their coffee and she’ll read it afterwards. They all decline. They don’t trust the cleanliness of the cup.

*     *     *

Orange Blossom

Anytime I had a stomach ache, I’d be doubled over in a praying position because it was the only position that would alleviate the pain. I’d moan and wail in fits of seven-year-old theatrics. My mom humored me and allowed me to be dramatic, babying me all the way through with back rubs and sympathetic “I know, habibti.” Eventually, she would bring the orange blossom water, the mazahir, and pour a tablespoon.

“Drink this, and you’ll feel better,” she’d coo.

I’d slurp the spoonful and within twenty minutes I’d be in the toilet (or the sink, or the trash, or on the floor, or the wall, once even on the ceiling) throwing up everything.

Teary-eyed, I’d shout, “I’m never listening to you again!”

Even though I knew what was to come, I didn’t actually stop listening to her about the mazahir until years later.

“Habibti, now that you threw up, you’re going to feel so much better. Just wait, shoofee.”

I did always feel better. But, even now, I always associate the smell with sweaty pajamas and vomit.

*     *     *

My friend is Palestinian, and she said instead of the orange blossom water, her dad would rub arak on her stomach. Arak is a powerful Levantine stronger-than-vodka-proof alcohol that smells like licorice. Just the smell would be enough to elicit the same reaction the orange blossom did. I can bet this is exactly why it was so effective. My grandfather liked to have some to sip on when there was company over, or when he ate fish. The elders of the family especially enjoyed it on Easter. At church, everyone would break their Lent fast after liturgy with meat, chocolate, pies, cigarettes, booze, or anything else they abstained from for God. He also loved whiskey. Sometimes when we went out in Jordan, he’d bring a flask. He’d call it his “honey.” We visited Um Qais, the lake where Jesus walked on water, and Jido would sip from his flask, and say, “Thanks, Jesus, for honey! I can walk on water too!”

He also took it with him when we went on picnics. Occasionally, my brother, mom, aunt, grandparents, and my dad, if he happened to be in Jordan at the time, would drive and hike up the mountains for a picnic. Teta made black tea in a kettle over the fire, while Jido drank his “honey.” During one of our picnics, another boy, most likely a poor orphan, was also wandering the mountains. He began to sing an old folk song in Arabic. I didn’t know what his words meant, but his voice was velvety and rich with nostalgia. My grandfather’s eyes watered.

“Don’t stop, young one. Keep going,” he urged.

Jido wept. Velvet voice? No. The boy’s voice was honey.

*     *    *

Mint

It grew like weeds, straight through the cracks in our patio, right at the door. It was our own personal jungle of mint in our backyard. On summer nights, we’d invite my mom’s sister and my cousins, who lived next door, for tea. We would turn on the Christmas lights we’d draped around the patio and gather outside while we played Umm Kalthoum. Umm Kalthoum was an iconic Egyptian singer whose songs would famously last an hour each. My uncle told us that when she was having a concert, the shops would close early, and everyone would go home to watch her perform on TV. Umm Kalthoum was reserved for the night time, while Fairouz’s voice was one to rise to. My mom would have me pluck the mint for the tea that we all enjoyed outside. It was our way of replicating Jordanian nights in the Midwest.

*     *     *

Teta had mint leaves growing in her yard too. And parsley, cilantro, tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberries, mloukheya, oregano, boysenberries, pears, lemons, and a whole collection of herbs, fruits, and vegetables. She had a green thumb unlike any other. For her, life was about nature, herself, and God. My grandmother’s faith was strong enough to refuse locking her doors for four decades. People say I resemble her in the way that we act boldly and abruptly with the unwavering belief that God favors us. We would make tea and sit at the table with the deep purple table cloth, beneath the tree in her front yard. During the spring and summer months, she would close her eyes and enjoy the breeze as she held the cup to her lips.

I don’t know how to cook, so I make sure to add plenty of garlic, because it fixes anything. The chicken was dry. I’m paranoid about salmonella. I scrub everything down with bleach three times and my hands smell like it for the next two days.

When I told her I’d met a boy I really liked, she said, “Mmm, be careful. All men in the military have hepatitis.”

And that was that. She had been widowed over forty years. Teta tells me that after Jido died, she ran the grocery store/butchery alone. A man would come every so often to buy cigarettes and asked my uncle if he could take my grandma on a date.

“Ask her yourself,” my uncle responded.

Teta told the man to bring her a bible, which he did on his following visit to the store.

“Let me keep this for a couple days,” she told him.

The next time he came, she had his bible ready for him. She highlighted some verses for him and denied him a date. She asked him not to ask again, and to shop elsewhere.

“A few months later, he came back. He said that he was a recovering alcoholic and the verses inspired him to stop drinking. He said I was a good woman. Then I never saw him again,” she says solemnly.

Teta came to America with nothing, yet she did everything. She sipped her tea. Teta didn’t need anyone but God.

*     *     *

Apricots

Jido, my grandfather, would always get my brother and I apricots and chocolate and strawberry milk on his way back from work in Irbid. We’d visit Jordan some summers and he always made sure to have them stashed for us.

“Did you see the mish mish and haleeb? Make sure you finish it, so I can get more for you tomorrow,” he’d say.

We’d drink the milk through the straw and inhale it in forty seconds, then we’d split the apricots in half, throw away the seeds, and devour them.

Teta told us we could plant the seeds in the backyard.

“Bring everything outside. Let’s sit on the veranda,” she said.

In the back was a cement path with rose bushes and flowers on either side, and beyond the gate was a dust road that resembled nothing of the small desert paradise within their yard. We’d migrate beneath the grape leaves, and the grapes hanging would always be too tart and sour. I never had a ripe one any summer I went.

*     *     *

In Indiana, I’d sit outside on summer mornings where I didn’t have to go to work until the afternoon. The sun wouldn’t be as hot yet, and there was refuge beneath the leaves of the tree in the backyard. I’d make a cup of Nescafé, and bring a fresh plate of fruit with me, as I read Women Who Run with the Wolves and journaled. My brother might come down before I had to get ready for work to tan. I was with him in Barcelona when we had an apricot stuffed with cheese (Was it Manchego?) and honey. Revolutionary. He loved not living in Indiana. He even loved his host family more. I can’t remember a time when my brother has told me he loves me first. I know he does though because I got lost at the movie theater when we were kids seeing Madagascar for the second time. I moved to the front of the theater and, eventually, I turned around and saw the empty row my family was sitting in and then I headed towards the exit. When I opened the door, my brother was there with an employee, his face red and contorted, “Nicole, where were you? Mama called the police!” he cried.

He moved to California a couple years later during his gap year after college; all he does now is tan, work at Ross, and hurt my parents’ feelings.

*     *     *

Garlic

Teta sends Baba home with a box of garlic, and when I visit her the next day, I see there are still two other baskets filled with garlic. I comment on how much she has.

“I know. I’m planning to start growing them. I just peeled some and gave it to your dad.”

She serves me a cup of cinnamon tea with walnuts, as I sit in the fluffy chair next to her usual spot. The chair looks out of place, but then again, so does much of her decor that she buys from Goodwill. I tell her about having to go to court in Chicago for driving with an expired license plate and not having my proof of insurance. She asks who I went to Chicago with when I got in trouble, and I tell her I went to a show with my boyfriend Rico. She turns it into a sermon about how one decision can change your life forever. She alludes to my dad’s estranged first daughter. She never says it. I let her talk.

“Thank you for telling me things. It means so much to me. Don’t stop. I only say things because I love you,” she says.

“If I didn’t tell you, I’d be putting a Band-Aid on an injury, and it would be infected. My words are the rubbing alcohol that stings but cleans.”

She begins talking about her fraudulent lawyers and everyone else who’s out to swindle her. One of her tenants called the cops on her for pushing his daughter, but I pretend I don’t know. I let her talk and explain the soap opera she’s watching. There’s always someone out to get my grandmother.

*     *     *

I don’t know how to cook, so I make sure to add plenty of garlic, because it fixes anything. The chicken is dry. I’m paranoid about salmonella. I scrub everything down with bleach three times and my hands smell like it for the next two days. My mom and my grandmas are all excellent cooks, and they all somehow instinctively know how much seasoning to put in. They never use measuring cups as if it’s God that tells them when to cool it with the cardamom.

My mom is listening to Joel Osteen as she cooks. We were all baptized Orthodox, but we stopped going to the church that all the other Christian Arabs go to when I was still a kid. We quit it because my parents felt it was too much about the ritual of faith rather than the god of the faith. I agree, but I also hate Joel Osteen. I’m watching her, and she tells me to grab the garlic from the pantry.

“Put it in Tupperware and shake it,” she instructs me.

I shake it like a maraca, and it peels itself. My dad gets home from work and he’s already eaten. Junk. His diabetes is through the roof. Teta blames my mom, as if it’s just my dad, and not all her kids who have it. Mama warns me to marry someone who loves me more than he loves his mother.

*     *     *

Cinnamon

Whenever a baby has their first teething, Arabs throw a huge party and invite everyone over. This gathering is called the Snowneeya, meant to celebrate that first tooth, and everyone gathers to eat berbara. It has a consistency almost like pudding and is made with spices like anise, cinnamon, and nutmeg, and it is topped with things like coconut, walnuts, and candy-coated fennel seeds, then more cinnamon on the top. When the first boy is born, there’s another huge party to celebrate that the family now has someone to carry the name. Not just the last name. Every child would carry their dad’s first name as their middle name, so you could trace their lineage to the very beginning through the name of the father, just like when the Bible introduces Jesus for the first time. Yes, boys are a big deal.

*     *     *

A dash of cinnamon goes into nearly every dish. Nutmeg and allspice too. I ask my mom what they season the meat in grape leaves with.

“Arabic spices,” she answers.

“That’s vague, can you be more specific?”

She buys the seasoning pre-made in Jordan, or my grandma sends it with my grandpa or my aunt when they visit us in America from overseas. I went with her to the spice shop in Jordan once, where it smelled of cloves and was lined with wooden barrels filled with nuts and a museum of spices that encompassed every color of the color wheel.

My cousins and I help roll the grape leaves. There’s a technique to it, and I don’t nail it until I’m almost out of grape leaves to roll. My uncle tells us how he’s so proud of us and snaps a picture to send to the family group chat. That’s one of the only times my dad says it too—as I’m learning how to cook. He glows.

“Habibet albi! Love of my heart! Learning how to cook!” he says.

He sees it as me growing into my womanhood, and he beams.

When I first got my period, my mom made a big deal out of it. She sent me with my older cousin, and we got our nails done and went to dinner. She sees it as me growing into my womanhood, and she beams. My dad looks disappointed. He’s afraid of what happens when a girl grows into her womanhood. But are either of these things what make me a woman?

*     *     *

Rose

Roses and oud. Staples of every perfume I’ve smelled between my aunts, my mom, and my grandmother. My grandmother is more of a rose and jasmine type of woman. I feel like a stereotypical Arab woman when I wear some fragrances and I chock it up to something in our chemistry. Maybe something that reminds us of home. Perhaps the pink roses in my grandmothers’ gardens. Both of them. My mother’s pashminas smell of rose and their soft smell lingers on them through the winter. It is my favorite perfume, and when I wear her scarf, my boyfriend says it smells like me. I must be my mother’s daughter.

*     *     *

Knafeh, warbat, awamat, qatayif—all sweets that wouldn’t be sweet without either a drizzle or a drowning of rose water syrup. We rarely have sweets at the house because they take too long to make and because my father is diabetic with no self-control. When I visit Detroit with Rico, my mother sends me a grocery list and a hefty request of items from the famous Middle Eastern bakery in Dearborn, Shatila. Rico waits in the car while I go inside. The place is buzzing with people; it reminds me of Wall Street, the way everyone is lined at the cases of sweets and shouting what they want at the employees. Another customer, about the age of my father, asks me where I’m from in Arabic, and introduces himself; I forget his name. He asks about my tattoo that’s written in Arabic script. He lives in either Columbus or near Chicago and asks where I live.

“I am always there to help if you ever need anything,” he says to me.

Sometimes Arabs are especially nice to other Arabs. He doesn’t talk to anyone else inside the bakery except his son and the employee taking his order. My midriff is showing, amidst women dressed conservatively. I doubt it’s because we’re both Arab.

*     *     *

My maternal grandmother is a beauty queen. She’s barely aged and hasn’t seen the sun in over thirty years. She’s the type to carry around an umbrella to block the sun and wear floppy hats, but I suspect the expensive eye creams that line her vanity help. She is much different than my dad’s mom, who was raised humbly in a small village in Jordan. That Teta talks to herself, doesn’t wear shoes, and hasn’t slept in a bed since the eighties. This Teta is a diva who wanted to major in English and always keeps a coral lipstick handy. Teta tells me that rose oil is good for my skin, and luckily, I can afford rose oil. At home, I boil the rosebuds in water, and put them in a mesh holder as if I were making a tea. I strain and refrigerate it—add it to the beauty regiment as a toner and use rosehip oil as my moisturizer. I’ll learn how to age gracefully like my grandmother, but I’ll never insist on dodging the sun. I let the oil seep into my skin, while I read Rumi. He writes, “What was said to the rose to make it open was said here in my heart.” I open. I write this. I write without a responsibility to anyone but myself and God. I create, and I see this as my growing into my womanhood. Somehow, it feels lighter.

Special Guest Judge, Terry Wolverton:

“Secret Ingredients” uses an inventive structure to explore themes of culture, diaspora, family and gender expectations. By focusing on traditional foods, the author brings us into the intimate customs and rituals of this Jordanian family living in the U.S., what is preserved of the homeland and what shifts, morphs, or is left behind altogether. The essayist makes her larger points without ever growing didactic; rather, she allows the reader to discover them in the tastes and smells, the activities within the family kitchen.

—Terry Wolverton is author of eleven books of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, including Embers, a novel in poems, and Insurgent Muse: art and life at the Woman’s Building, a memoir. Her most recent poetry collection is Ruin Porn. She has edited fourteen literary compilations, including the Lambda Literary Award winning His: brilliant new fiction by gay men and Hers: brilliant new fiction by lesbians. Terry also collaborated with composer David Ornette Cherry to adapt Embers as a jazz opera.
Terry has received a COLA Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles, a Fellowship in Poetry from the California Arts Council, and the Judy Grahn Award from the Publishing Triangle, among other honors. She is the founder of Writers At Work, a creative writing studio in Los Angeles, and affiliate faculty in the MFA Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. http://terrywolverton.com

Nicole Nimri is a Jordanian-American writer hailing from the Midwest. She received her bachelors in creative writing from IUPUI. This is her first published essay.

Folks, it’s a beautiful, clear day here on the Florida coast. We have just been given a go for today’s space shuttle launch.

*     *     *

I grew up in south Florida not too far from Cape Canaveral when the shuttle program was active in the eighties. The heady days of the space race were not yet a distant memory, and Reagan wanted to beat the Russians at star wars. I remember watching morning shuttle launches from my front yard, and I once saw a night launch from a friend’s back patio. It looked like a shooting star momentarily blazing with light, before disappearing into the clouds beyond human sight.

I rode with my parents to Columbia, South Carolina, the day before the competition. After arriving, we got a surprising call in our hotel room: my English teacher was there to attend the contest. I was mortified, but I tried to put her out of my mind. By getting to state, I had already proven that my speech “would fly.”

There was a buzz at my elementary school about the Challenger mission in 1986. It was to be a late morning launch, and everyone in my grade was going outside to view it from our playground field. Even more exciting was the plan for us to take science classes (from outer space!) with Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher to join a shuttle mission. Sadly, those lessons never occurred. Seventy-three seconds after liftoff, Challenger did something no one had ever seen. There was a look of shock and confusion on my classmates’ faces when we witnessed that disastrous launch. Everyone was oddly silent and I—usually a very quiet kid—blurted out: “It’s just the rocket boosters dropping off.” I glanced at my teacher for confirmation. The concern in her eyes told a different story.

*     *     *

T minus nine minutes and counting. Start automatic ground launch sequencer.

*     *     *

My family moved to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1990. One day in tenth grade English class, my teacher announced that we could enter an annual speech contest sponsored by the Optimist Club. My ears perked up. The winner, if one made it to the state competition, would receive a college scholarship. The theme that year was: “I can make a difference.” I felt immediately that I wanted to enter the contest. I went home and talked to my Pop. He was a preacher and had recently helped me prepare an oral book report on The Red Badge of Courage. It had been so well received that the students spontaneously clapped when I stepped from the podium. I wondered aloud to Pop, “What could I do that would be unique for this speech competition?” We came up with the idea of doing something on Christa McAuliffe because I had been inspired by her bravery and the story of the Challenger was close to my heart.

Excitedly, the next day I told my teacher about the idea. She thought it was far too unconventional that I wanted to weave together the shuttle liftoff within the narrative of the speech. Her words, “It will never fly,” echoed in my ears. I cried silently at my seat in class that day as we discussed Shakespeare. My aspirations crushed, I told Pop that night how my teacher had responded. “Write the speech the way you want to,” Pop counseled me. Even if I lost, I would enjoy the process of writing about something meaningful to me.

*     *     *

T minus two minutes. Crew members close and lock their visors.

*     *     *

I soon girded myself for the school-wide contest. Clutching my speech on the podium and reading it word for word, I was constantly aware of my teacher’s glare from the back of the room. She was one of the judges. Because he was a preacher and active in the local Toastmaster’s club, Pop had also been recruited as a judge. It was comforting to see a friendly face in the crowd.

I paced outside the classroom where the judges convened after I delivered that first speech. All of the students were gone for the day and the hallway was unusually quiet and dim. Suddenly one of the judges came out. Putting on her sunglasses to go home, she called out as she briskly strode toward the door: “You won, Lindsey.” My heart raced. I knew I had a lot of work to do on the speech. And I knew my teacher was not going to help me because I had defied her. That night, Pop told me he would be my coach for the rest of the competition.

*     *     *

T minus fifty seconds. Orbiter transfers from ground to internal power.

*     *     *

Pop and I only had a couple of weeks to revise the speech for the city contest. On a road trip to one of his church lectures, I pulled out the speech and we chopped it up. Pop called it: “Cutting the dead wood.” We were relentless. Every word had to convey something vital. Nothing extraneous was left on the page. We started going to his church at night when it was empty. I rehearsed from the stage and he patiently directed me. Timing was crucial: a few seconds over time and I would be immediately disqualified.

The city contest was held in the banquet hall of a local restaurant. There were about fifteen kids in the contest and I was pretty tense. Only the top male and female competitors would advance to the next round. Pop was busy that night and could not attend the event, but my English teacher had come which only heightened my consternation. I stared at my shrimp and baked potato as they got cold because I was far too anxious about hearing the results to enjoy the free dinner. Winning that round was more of a relief than anything else. I felt that my speech had been vindicated and my teacher proven incorrect (in person).

*     *     *

T minus thirty-one seconds. Ground launch sequencer is go for auto sequence start.

*     *     *

The county contest was held at The Citadel, the storied military university. That location was more than a little intimidating to me. There were armed security checkpoints at every entrance. Cadets in uniform looked stern as they marched across campus. The local Optimist Club leaders were at the event to arrange travel for the winners to the state capital for the final round. The stakes were high. However, I was feeling more comfortable with the speech. Pop had continued to coach me, and I was heartened to learn that there were only a few competitors in this round. Thankfully, my teacher decided to stay home. As I delivered the speech, I felt like my speech might be going against the grain. I could not read the judges’ faces as I meandered through each phrase. Standing stiffly as the winners were named, I was exceedingly proud to make my way to the finals. My whole family had attended this round, and the Optimist Club was going to pay for our hotel stay in Columbia, South Carolina. It felt significant that I was representing my school and my city in the upstate.

*     *     *

T minus sixteen seconds and counting. Activate launch pad sound suppression system.

*     *     *

As the state competition neared, Pop and I were in full rehearsal mode. Every night that it was available, we went to the church to practice. The speech narrative was trimmed and honed. Only a single page of notes could be carried onstage during the seven-minute speech. I could not fit the entire speech on a single page, so I made sure the speech was totally committed to memory. Using scotch tape, I affixed a picture of the Challenger that I had cut from a magazine to my page of notes for inspiration. Pop directed me to move from behind the lectern at two pivotal moments in the speech. He advised, “You should only move for emphasis of specific words. Don’t move around just for the sake of it.” We timed the speech relentlessly and plugged in moments of pause to underscore important phrases. Christa McAuliffe’s quote, “I touch the future, I teach,” was the idea I wanted to leave with the audience.

When the shuttle Challenger exploded, the elevated expectations for NASA were temporarily grounded. The shuttle program would never again invoke the kind of hopeful anticipation that it did in its heyday.

As we worked, Pop and I became like a single entity. In between recitations, he told me stories about speeches of his that won trophies and times when he was “in the zone.” “What does that mean?” I asked. “You want to be so familiar with your speech that it becomes part of you,” he clarified. “It’s like watching Dan Marino on the football field. It’s fourth down and the Dolphins must score to win. He knows precisely where to throw the ball before Mark Duper even gets there.” Sports metaphors were a favorite of his. “Watch Marino drop back. Those seconds right before he heaves the ball are crucial. The nights when he can’t miss: he’s in the zone. Everything—the ball, the receiver, the timing—flows together flawlessly,” Pop explained. “Could I ever achieve that?” I wondered. Could I be like Dan Marino in the Orange Bowl: oblivious to the noise, moving through time and space in a harmonious energy?

*     *     *

T minus ten seconds. Activate main engine hydrogen burn off system.

*     *     *

I rode with my parents to Columbia, South Carolina, the day before the competition. After arriving, we got a surprising call in our hotel room: my English teacher was there to attend the contest. I was mortified, but I tried to put her out of my mind. By getting to state, I had already proven that my speech “would fly.” She had never had a student get this far in the competition, and she was being suspiciously friendly. She tried slyly to praise the speech even though she had not initially supported it.

The morning of the competition, I woke up early to shower and dress. I was wearing a suit with pumps for the first time. Too anxious to eat breakfast, I walked down to the main ballroom after only a cup of coffee. Shockingly, there were hundreds of people gathering, and I saw that there were ten women and ten men competing. The room was much larger than I had anticipated. Most of the seats were filling quickly, and the trophies were prominently placed on a table in the front of the room. The stage was set. My eyes were wide as I left Pop’s side to join the other speakers.

We drew from a bowl for our speaking order. I would compete last! A rush of excitement surged in my chest. Pop had told me that going last was a gift because you got to see the other competitors, and the judges would remember your speech when they convened. I turned around and scanned the crowd for Pop. We locked eyes and I mouthed the words: “I go last.” He nodded and gave me a thumbs-up. I watched the other speakers carefully and calmly. When my name was called, I approached the stage unhurriedly, with confidence. My heart was full and ready to breathe life into this story.

*     *     *

T minus six seconds. Main engines start. 5-4-3-2-1-0. Solid rocket booster ignition. We have liftoff!

*     *     *

When I placed my page of notes onto the podium, I breathed in deeply and looked at the photo of the Challenger taking off. When I began to speak, it was as if time stopped. Immediately, I gained the full attention of the audience. They were visibly moved by the story I was telling! My speech was different from everyone else’s and they were hungry to hear each word. Every time I paused, it was calculated. Each word was stressed with precision. The crowd was like clay in my hands. I moved around the stage with complete ease. No phrase fell flat. Every pass I hurled was caught. I was Dan Marino throwing perfect spirals to Mark Duper and Mark Clayton on a Monday night in the Orange Bowl. I couldn’t miss. The energy inside of me was electric and I was in perfect sync with the universe. My conviction was powerful: I was doing what I was born to do.

*     *     *

When the shuttle Challenger exploded, the elevated expectations for NASA were temporarily grounded. The shuttle program would never again invoke the kind of hopeful anticipation that it did in its heyday. But a little girl in south Florida had been inspired to become an educator and to “make a difference” the way Christa McAuliffe did for her students and school children around the country.

I have long since spent that college scholarship money, and the trophy was lost in a move years ago. But this is what was eternal from that day: When I stepped down off that stage, there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that I had won the competition. And yet, strangely, the contest did not matter at all to me anymore. I had been in the zone, and it was the most exhilarating moment of my life. The huge crowd was standing, applauding loudly, and everyone seemed to be surging toward the front of the room. I was searching in the commotion for one person. There was only one person who would understand what I had just experienced. I pushed through the shaking hands and pats on the back. Then my Pop’s face appeared above the people in the aisle. There were tears streaming down from his eyes and a huge smile on his face. He knew. We embraced but said nothing. We just held that moment and laughed joyfully. I had been Marino. The words had flowed and I had been in complete harmony with the story, the audience, the moment. There was nothing more to say.

Lindsey R. Swindall, PhD teaches US history and the freshman colloquium at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ. She has written numerous books and articles in the field of African American history. Working with actor Grant Cooper, she has developed a dramatization of her biography of Paul Robeson for middle and high school students. She also co-facilitates public discussions about race and US history through the New Jersey Council for the Humanities Public Scholars Project.

Call me Ismail, not Ishmael, which rhymes with wish fail, or Tom, Dick, or Harry, which rhyme with nothing that rings true to me, just because you cannot be bothered to learn to pronounce my name. It goes like this, three separate syllables: Is—like the prolonged break of a wave; ma—half of Mama; il—like a sea snake, or the French word for island. IS-MA-IL, stress on the island.

Now that you have been properly introduced to Ismail, and know how to pronounce his name properly, allow him to tell you a short fairy tale.

Once upon a time, there was a sunny country whose long coast was bathed by a turquoise sea, where a barefoot boy had an important job, of which he was proud, and which he performed with both pleasure and ceremony. Every morning except one, the one designated as a rest day, he was entrusted with a gleaming tray dotted with soft, doughy, fragrant pastries and bread protected by dust and dirt by a tea towel, which he balanced on other clean towels coiled atop his dark, curly head, as it was heavy and his walk to the village bakery some distance.

This fairy tale is a grim, modern one. It does not end with the proper restoration of position or property or future. Does not end with reconciliation or love or fortune.

His step was joyous and his eyes bright as he glanced at his ample, color-wrapped grandmother seated on their kitchen step and humming her habitual, unrecognizable tune, sifting dried grain rhythmically through the round, wood-bound sieve resembling a large tambourine. The busy, cheerful, chatter of his mother and sisters wafted up on wisps of smoke, while he stepped lithe and sure from one orange grove through the next, inhaling the perfume of spring as his birthright while receiving casual smiles and nods of approving recognition from his neighbors in passing.

Turning toward the village, he glanced up the hill, whence had vanished the baby Rhim gazelle he had thought he’d domesticated until it grew old enough to object, impaling his forearm with a perfectly spiraled, long, slender horn. He rubbed the scar; to the hill where his father sometimes took him to buy honey and Geminus mint for their tea from the old German lady who kept bees. While the bread was being baked, he would drop by his uncle Saleh’s house, where sometimes men gathered to smoke, drink tea or whiskey, and recite the formal Italian poetry they had learned while in school, educated by convent nuns, some of whom had stayed on after the Italian colonization gave way to the British occupation. Soon, his grandfather would gather them together for an annual feast, the high point of which was Grandfather’s recitation of the Al-Hilali epic, the 1,000 year-old oral poem recounting the heroic feats of Bedouin ancestors during their migration from Arabia to North Africa. If they were lucky, and harvests prosperous that year, they would find musicians to accompany the performance with rababa, tampura, or tabla. Not many men were left who could perform the epic. It was an honor to attend.

The boy thought that growing up in this, his land, was as sweet as halwa.

 *     *    *

Then came hard times, the trials and tribulations that must be surmounted in every fairy tale, when his family and neighbors, the people he loved and trusted, were suddenly and inexplicably crushed like sesame seeds. First came the earthquake on his part of the eastern coast, which flattened his village and damaged much of the nearby city of Benghazi. The boy’s mother and sisters had run quickly out of the house as soon as pictures began to fall off the walls, calling for him to get out. He had been reading in his room that evening and slow to shift consciousness, was trapped in the corridor when the ceiling began to crumble. Recalling a story his mother had told about sheltering under tables during World War II bombing raids, the still slight boy recovered his wits enough to dive under a nearby table. When the world ceased roaring and trembling, the women’s wails slipped into cries of relief and gratitude upon sight of the boy’s dusty apparition emerging from the rubble that had been their home only minutes before. Witnesses said that the tower clock in town stopped at 9:20 p.m., just as in an Agatha Christie mystery. The family moved to Tripoli.

The capital city was daunting at first, though, by degrees, the boy became accustomed to their greater prosperity, two-story house, and American television reception. This marvel was accessible because of the American military bases nearby. Once, after watching I Love Lucy, the teenaged boy impudently chided his parents for their primitive custom of sleeping in one large bed together. Lucy and Desi, if they had observed, slept in twin beds, both in primly buttoned pajamas, which must be the way civilized people behaved. Dad and Mom were less than amused.

That was already after Nestlé baby formula exports and Italian tomato paste had inundated their shops and brains and habits, causing the Underdeveloped local population to stop breast-feeding, and throw their bumper crops of tomatoes into the sea, prefiguring its transformation from turquoise to iron red. Though, still before the dictator paved the seaside promenade, painted rocks green, imprisoned the boy’s father, uncles, cousins, and hanged his friends from lampposts.

Before the boy had grown into a man, before the American buffoon actor-president issued a decree forbidding the man to rejoin his American wife and child in relative safety. You think the anti-Muslim travel ban is new? You think there is anything new under the scorching sun? But that is another story.

No, this was still when the boy was enamored of Rembrandt’s etchings, Impressionist painters, Brecht plays, and bell-bottomed jeans. When he tried to practice his English with American girls on the fashionable, white Tripoli shopping streets. Tapping a blonde one on her shoulder, and politely asking if he might help her translate, she had brushed off her skin where his finger had touched it, saying “Ooh, cooties!” The teenaged boy had mistaken the word for “cuties” at first, and had smiled shyly, pleased at what he thought was flirtation. Then she had flicked him away with her pale-pink painted nails, giggling derisively with her light brown-haired girlfriend. He made it his business to learn what cooties were.

The shriveled, ancient one calls my name faintly, swathing it in soft appeal from her room down the hall, “Ismail.” Three polished, worn, caressing syllables.

When the pockmarked, square-headed young Demon seized power in a military coup, the usual suspects were rounded up and imprisoned, among them the boy’s father. The only son, the boy left high school in order to devote all his time to waiting in the lines of bureaucrats who might be able to pull strings, if the bribe and connections were sufficient, or waiting at the prison gates to try to gain visitor’s access or news about his father, or deliver the man’s much needed Insulin. When the heat pushed the overdressed soldiers over the edge, or their appetite for brutal sport hadn’t been satisfied, the boy endured their taunts and “roughing up” in prudent silence. It was a full time job for about a year and a half, until his father’s remand to house arrest, whereupon the boy returned to his formal studies.

Five years of channeled engineering study, in which the boy had scant interest, might have earned the young man a degree and marketable profession had he completed the final semester and taken the required exams. However, when his father saw members of his son’s university circle, his friends, brutally murdered and hung up to dry like prosciutto in the sun along the city’s straight, modern boulevards, unmistakable warnings to all who opposed the Demon’s oppressive regime, he shipped the young man off to study in the United States of America, where the young man tasted some elusive freedom and license, as well as some more discrimination and insult. There, he studied art instead of engineering, painting pictures, taking pictures, making love among pictures, memorizing pictures.

Some years later, those men who had remained in other countries, with jobs, with new families, with new habits, were publicly and privately recalled home to the no longer sweet, fertile Mediterranean land become awash with oil and grimy oil money, threatened with assassination on foreign soil if their duty was ignored. And the family arrests had begun again in earnest. A cousin appeared as an emissary one day, and shortly thereafter, another, on the beautiful hill in San Francisco, to shatter the crystal idyll where the young man had been amassing pictures. These pictures, too, trembled and fell off the wall when the cousin told him with firsthand knowledge and frank description of torture, show trials, the condition of his own now blind father in his cell, as he awaited, without his Insulin, his military trial. For what? For being a journalist. A dangerous profession to be avoided, truth telling.

The emotional blackmail practiced with a twilit, lilac view of repetitive ocean spray proved far more hypnotic, and eventually, effective than dictatorial edicts and threats had done. The image of the young man’s pleading mother was invoked. He took a leave of absence from his pregnant American wife, with the promise that he would return in three weeks, after his uncle’s trial. Her pleas had been more easily set aside, as his guilt toward her had not yet sought its spirit level. The young man was, of course, arrested upon arrival in the land no longer cleansed by the turquoise sea, transforming his odyssey into absence without leave.

Months turned into years, during which a few attempts had been made to reknit the rent in life’s rich fabric, including appealing to the steely American powers that be. Rather like trying to give a hollow, tin man a heart. In the end, our hero, no longer so young, acquiesced to his stronger, more numerous, more powerful, more present family, settling into decades of dreary, unartistic routine, where he scarcely noticed the iron red, or then the battleship gray of the sea. We could speak of bombings, when his small apartment windows rattled, were dislodged, and splintered on the floor of a blacked-out kitchen, while his present children and current wife pretended to sleep in the next room. Of more bombings, when they were able to borrow enough money to flee the worst for a time. Of the torching of his sister’s house by black clad criminals, who succeeded in killing her husband and son, and severely burning her and her other children. Of the rape of certain of his nieces, and shooting of his nephews. Of the crucifixion of… But why prolong the trials and tribulations? This fairy tale is a grim, modern one. It does not end with the proper restoration of position or property or future. Does not end with reconciliation or love or fortune. Let the tale end there, hanging by a tail. Now old, and too defeated to flee anymore, our prince will not live happily ever after.

 *     *    *

The shriveled, ancient one calls my name faintly, swathing it in soft appeal from her room down the hall, “Ismail.” Three polished, worn, caressing syllables. In the darkened house, she may not know what time it is, that it is only evening. As soon as the terrifying commotion, the barking shouts and hammering on doors began down the street some minutes ago, all of the buildings in our neighborhood went instantly dark, as if on cue. As if we could hide from evil, like children, by turning off the lights or closing our eyes and holding our breath. There is nowhere to hide, no place to escape. Some time ago, I read some jokes about human smugglers posted on the Net. There were even cartoons showing hijabbed women clutching swaddled infants, crammed in leaky boats. Even if I could raise the money to get into one, would I rather spend it entertaining the Developed nations, watching my family drown in sham lifejackets, or wait here at home for my head to be chopped off? At least the Worldwide Web has been disconnected. That’s some consolation. I sit in my immovable chair facing a black, rectangular picture window like a darkened screen, waiting soundlessly, and smoking, dragging the nicotine poison deep into my scarred lungs. Anyway, what would we do with the ancient one?

“Ismail,” she repeats, she who suckled and protected me, once upon a time before Nestlé. I can do nothing for her now except guard her bed.

“Don’t worry, Mama. Everyone will be back soon. They’ve just gone out.” I lie soothingly, softly, adding, “There’s been a power cut.”

My stalwart, intrepid wife has gone to the city center looking for the kids, no longer kids, who failed to come home as expected, putting on a headscarf in hope of anonymity, or slight protection. About as useful as a white flag in our present situation. I must not leave the house. “Mama, if strangers come to the door, don’t say anything. I’ll take care of it, all right? Be patient.” Don’t give yourself away.

Someone from another house entreats Allah. Then I hear a shout. “Libya!” Libya. Long ago, I used to feel the word on my cheek, as if it were a warm kiss blown from the desert, a promise. Later, it resounded like a slap, or a wail, down the blood stained lanes, where a young boy’s spirit had been sensed, wafting aimlessly, humming a bygone tune, blowing soothingly on sweaty, fearful foreheads. I wish I could remember at least one stanza from the Al Hilali epic. Not a line. I am not the man my grandfather was, and this debacle is not his heritage.

Staring blankly past the balcony, through the black window, I try to conjure a slideshow: the low fog rolling across the mauve Golden Gate like a fluffy bolster; my first ever snowflakes cloaking in white feathers, the wings of the storks in a fountain on a square in Copenhagen, golden Prosecco bubbles flickering like fireflies on Lake Como. I see nothing. Blackness. All that is left is a distant, beckoning whiff of Geminus mint and the eternal aroma of freshly baked bread.

Special Guest Judge, Gayle Brandeis:

“Arabian Night” implicates the reader from the very first sentence—“you cannot be bothered to learn to pronounce my name”—yet also takes us by the hand, invites us deeply into the writer’s lost world. This essay-meets-fairy-tale holds so much pain—the anguish of atrocity, of displacement, of layer upon layer of injustice—yet it also leaves space for tenderness, for remembrance of how the word “Libya” had once felt like “a warm kiss blown from the desert” before it became “a slap, or a wail.” A stunning, necessary, gut punch of an essay.

—Gayle Brandeis is the author of the poetry collections The Selfless Bliss of the Body and Dictionary Poems, novels The Book of Dead Birds, Delta Girls: A Novel, Self Storage, and My Life with the Lincolns, and a recent memoir The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother’s Suicide.

Diane G. Martin, Russian literature specialist, Willamette University graduate, has published work in numerous literary journals including New London Writers, Vine Leaves Literary Review, Poetry Circle, Open:JAL, Breath and Shadow, the Willamette Review, Portland Review of Art, Pentimento, Twisted Vine Leaves, The Examined Life, Wordgathering, Dodging the Rain, Antiphon, Dark Ink, Gyroscope, Poor Yorick, Rhino, Conclave, Slipstream, Stonecoast Review, Steam Ticket, Pigeonholes, Shantih, Zingara, and The Grief Diaries.

Long-time resident of San Francisco, CA; Maine, USA; St. Petersburg, Russia; and Sansepolcro, Italy; Diane has traveled throughout much of the world. The themes of exile, disability, and displacement pervade her work.

Photo Credit: Ricardo Mendez Pastrana

If you ask me now, I could still do it. Not all of it, of course—not now, not anymore. The more esoteric things—the notes for B minor, the exactitude between allegro and allegretto—those have long since been forgotten, faded with time and disuse. But hand me the sheet music, my bent Bach primers and blue Schumann workbooks, and I could play you a sonatina, a minuet, an arabesque, any of the carefully-annotated pieces I once knew by heart. The mechanics, after all these years, are still there: how to read treble and bass clefs, which sharps to match with which scales, the proper way to properly hold my hands (fingertips on the keys, wrist loose but high, fingers rounded as if clutching a tennis ball)—that is all it would take.

And if you were to ask me to play, I could still remember, still try. Für Elise, The Doll’s Dream, Minuet in G Major—though it has been years since I last touched a keyboard, I still find myself humming at odd moments, in class suddenly, unconsciously tapping out snatches of song.

*    *     *

I was a good student. Your typical Asian student, really: straight As, math club, 4.0 and AP tests—everything a good stereotype requires. I took BC Calculus and SAT subject tests, did quiz bowl and National Honor Society, dutifully attended ACT prep classes, where seventy dollars an hour helped improve my score by two points.

Years later, a teacher would tell me that she admired that in her Asian students, this tendency to take academics so seriously and settle for nothing less than perfection. Out of politeness, I would smile, say nothing in response.

And then there was, of course, the piano.

Here is how the rest would go if this were a proper story. The curtains, drawing back; the lights, overhead, shining down on a lone figure, the protagonist of this play. A girl, the sole daughter of Chinese peasants born during Mao’s Revolution and now come to the New World—you’ve heard the script; you know how it goes. The childhoods of hunger and uphill both ways; the struggle, long and laborious, to overcome them; the victories; the PhDs; and then America, the promised land that gave both more and less than what it had promised. Classic underdog story, in other words. But remember—that’s all backstory, all lead-up to the grand finale that will make it all pay off. Our protagonist, she remembers: remembers and knows they are important, holds her parents’ stories as close as Narnia and Harry Potter. Knows the stories, and knows she must top them, finish this quest they have begun.

And one-two-three, lights-camera-action—here it is, the first real task on our hero’s journey. Not poverty or politics, but no less daunting: the piano, dark and glossy with its many, many keys. It looms over her, high and proud and oh-so-very complex, but her parents’ memories reassure her, give her back her strength—compared to their pains, this was not so bad, not so hard. They had done what they had, so she could do this. And so she perseveres, and so she practices, plays scales ten times each and practices each song ten times more—until one day it is done, she has done it! And as she sits on the stage, the song she plays so sweet the birds outside quiet, the audience inside weeps at its loveliness—

And when she finishes, she stands up and curtsies to them—accomplished at last, a pianist against all the odds.

*     *     *

Which would have been nice, if I had been able to actually play.

Part of it was natural, I suppose: I had no sense of rhythm, no intuitive sense to tell me the difference between allegro and larghissimo or how to play in 4/4 time. Notes were as long or as short as I felt they were, holistic as opposed to ordered time. I distinctly remember, once, attending a church retreat and clapping along to the hymns out of time.

The other part, though, was practice. My parents started me at eight—late, compared to my friends, but still young enough to chafe at sitting in a chair for forty-five minutes each day, drilling the same scales over and over again. One day without practice, my mother would chide me, shuffling flashcards in the dim light of our apartment, and you know the difference. One day.

At eight, these are the things you smile at, nod at without quite hearing, ignore as easily as your grandmother’s admonishments to wash before and after meals. At eight, these are the things you can let slide away, that you can forget.

At eighteen, these are the things you remember, dredge up through the years as you retreat into an armchair curled up and away, tea growing cold on the cream-colored coffee table nearby. The woman across from you leaning back, smiling as she asks, well, and how did that make you feel?

Funny, the difference a few years can make.

Because you see, at eight, it has not happened yet; at eight, none of what will plague you at eighteen has yet bothered you. Your mother tells you to do your summer homework, and you do it; your father calls you in to practice piano, and you, grumbling, obey. But these are just things you do; they affect nothing of what you feel, who you are. At eight, you have a self, a center.

But just jump five years ahead—and, well. At thirteen, things get muddier. Boys you played tag with begin ignoring you; girls you’d climbed trees with begin wearing makeup and talking about calories and waistlines. All around you, your friends finding niches, taking places as easily as seats in musical chairs—the pretty one, the sporty one, the good one—

And you? You, you get stuck with, “Gifted.”

*     *     *

And there’s the thing, about being thirteen and being “Gifted.” When you are twelve or thirteen, and you’ve demonstrated an aptitude in math or science or English or best of all, all three, then the world narrows. Suddenly, it is just you, you and the four or five other students whose test scores have proven equally high, sitting in the front row of Honors English and eyeing each other across chess club—wary, suspicious.

Or perhaps that was just me, my personal paranoia and neuroses painting sixth-grade friendships in Darwinian shades. Perhaps.

It certainly felt that way, around my parents. At parties with the other Chinese families, while the kids sat in the basement playing Mario or idly browsing through their phones. The adults would all stay upstairs, playing cards late into the night and gossiping like tabloid reporters about their children, who got what grades and who got into Stanford or Harvard. At thirteen, you begin to enter into these conversations; at thirteen, you begin to become relevant, another variable in the bell curve of who would Make It—

One moment, you were eight. The next, you are thirteen, and your parents are buying you ACT prep books and taking you to talks by Harvard freshmen on how to apply to college, and no one is questioning the absurdity of it, the fact that you are taking sixth-graders, fucking sixth-graders, kids who still watch Hannah Montana and blush at French kissing—taking them and sitting down in all seriousness to tell them what AP classes to take, what sports to play, and what tests to take and and and—

*     *     *

And look. I like to think, in my better moments, that I’m not that myopically bitter—that somewhere over the course of overpriced medications and specialists, I have gained some degree of self-knowledge. And so I know—I do!—that I am being unfair. That there were other parts to it, social and historical factors that led my parents and their friends to the values they hold—Mao and deprivation and Confucius, tradition and cultural values so deeply entrenched that to reject them would be to reject identity itself. That higher test grades equaled higher income equaled higher quality of life and hence greater happiness—I can still do enough math to understand that. That I am speaking in stereotypes, and stereotypes are not life: do not have the kindness and love that go into them, soften the tropes into something livable. That parents, in the end, are people, too.

I think of that: of being barely sixteen or seventeen and already knowing fear, the helpless guilt of lying in a hospital bed and listening to parents, angry and terrified and confused, demand why?

But, well. I was thirteen, then, and higher reasoning is less pertinent when you are entering puberty and a pronounced hating-the-world phase. Thirteen-fourteen, lurking in the enclaves at parties with my diet Pepsi and iceberg salad, I began to despise it all: the constant comparing and critiquing, whose kids are going where and got what grades. Yes, there may have been utility behind it—higher grades, higher income, correlation/causation et cetera—but at some point, listening to it all, aunts telling cousins to follow in the steps of more studious friends, fathers lecturing sixth-graders on the importance of community service not on grounds of altruism, but because it would look good on a college resume—well. At some point, it gets to you.

Maybe I wouldn’t have put it in those words, not then—thirteen, remember, fresh out of three weeks in the hospital and still tearing up over Bs in gym—and maybe I wouldn’t have said it until I was Well and Truly into therapy, but that was how I felt then. That was what I thought.

*     *     *

And like summer vacation, and like community service, music became another casualty, another part of the daily march towards Making It. From the time your parents were putting you through chess club and hiring math tutors, they were taking you to your piano or violin teacher’s house to learn petals and positions. It did not matter if you actually liked the instrument; if you were smart and wanted to get into a good school (a real school), then you played the piano or the violin. And if you were not good at it, then it could not be because you had no musical talent—it was because you were simply not trying hard enough.It was a very Asian belief, that, but also a very American one: self-cultivation and Horatio Alger, the American dream and Mao’s voluntarism mixing in a red-red-white-blue combination that would have made your revolutionary ancestors roll over in their graves. “The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step;” “genius is one percent inspiration, and ninety-nine percent perspiration;” et cetera, et cetera. If you wish upon a star and try, try, and try again, then you too can be talented; then you, too, can be special.

Years later, a teacher would tell me that she admired that in her Asian students, this tendency to take academics so seriously and settle for nothing less than perfection. Out of politeness, I would smile, say nothing in response.

*     *     *

A curious thing, about fifteen-sixteen-year-old Amber and standardized tests. I did well on exams generally, had few logical reasons to worry about failing all my classes and forced to attend community college. But I used to work myself up anyways, talking myself into hyper-awareness before tests, rehearsing every wrong thing that could happen—a ball player, winding herself up before a game. After all, if I let my guard down, if I let myself relax for only one second, then that was it, that was the path of stupid errors and bubbling in the wrong answers. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back; stop being smart, and you’ll break her heart.

I suppose, beyond the superstitious hyperbole of the feeling, it made an odd sense. God knows I’d made plenty of careless mistakes by not paying enough attention to the placement of a decimal or the insertion of a “NOT” before “all of the above”—by not paying attention, my mother said; by being complacent, I thought. And hell, maybe it did work—I did pretty well in high school, took all the right tests and got all the right test scores. When the time came, even made it to University of Chicago, which on the nerd ladder is pretty good.

But. But but but but but.

But there were things, other places where winding yourself so tight-tight-tight is not good, does not work. Try talking to people like that—see how well it works. I did that, for a while. Would walk out of AP Chemistry after a quiz, head aching too much to focus on anything other than the tiles immediately before me—only to start, nearly jumping as someone said, “Hi, Amber!” Turning around, heart jumping a beat as I forced out, “Hi”—hating the way my voice went up an octave when I was nervous, dear God what was wrong with you, Amber, so stupid so ridiculous, couldn’t even talk to people without freezing up—and God, God, those had been popular kids, hadn’t they? Cheerleaders and prom queens, oh you knew, Amber that they only smiled at you because they felt sorry for you, because you were so, so very pathetic and they all knew—

Try that. Try that with talking, with writing or drawing or eating or anything else, really. Try that with piano.

At fifteen, I had finally done it—at fifteen, finally achieved the discipline I had lacked at eight and thirteen. Like clockwork, I dutifully played my forty minutes each day—not as much as other students, I was well aware, but an achievement for me. A small victory.

But even then, even with all that, I was still no better than before. My piano teacher, after years of clucking at my lack of precision, now told me I played too rigidly, too mechanically. Relax, she told me, watching the rigid claw of my hand upon the keys, don’t slam them down—let your hands fall on the keys, naturally. And I had tried, tried all the exercises and techniques she suggested, but how could I? How could I, when she there, always a watching eye, always ready to tell me what I did wrong and how? How could I relax, how could I relax when I knew (knew oh so well, familiar lump in my throat, my chest, my lungs) that once I did, once I let my guard down for the slightest, slightest second, it would all come crumbling, crumbling down—

I cried in front of her a few times, I remember. I cried in front of a lot of people. It seemed to be a thing I did.

*     *     *

Like all things, I talked with my therapist about this. I was, what, fourteen?—eighth or ninth grade, a year after I’d done the essentially thirteen-year-old thing of taking a crash course in fad dieting. In any other subject, I would have gotten a gold star; here, all my self-discipline had gotten me was three weeks in the hospital and a doctor’s ultimatum that unless I followed up with a therapist, I could not be medically discharged.

Despite the whiff of coercion hanging over our beginning, I like to think we had an amiable relationship, Cassie and me. There was always plenty of coffee, which I pretended to like without cream, and even more silence, which I actually did like and now did my best to maintain. Occasionally, Cassie would speak—a handful of observations, a few questions to fish out replies—and even more occasionally, I would answer, cool and monosyllabic as a John Wayne character. Mostly, I kept silent.

And then, one day—in response to a journal, a passing comment, some art therapy collage I’d made at her request, I don’t remember what—she said something so radically heretical that I had stared at her for a moment, gaping at the sheer temerity to even think such a thing:

Well, Cassie said, is it really that bad if you get a B?

Later, when she came to pick me up, I told my mother about it. In the foyer of the glass building, we shared the same startled, almost offended stare of disbelief—she had said what? That it didn’t matter if I let myself get poor grades, that it didn’t matter if I had no standards, if I didn’t try?

It must have been a culture thing, my mother concluded, back in our gray Honda, and I agreed. And that, coupled with my extreme distaste for sitting in a chair and talking about my feelings, meant that not long after, I stopped going to therapy.

It has been seven years since then. These days, it is my mother—conscious of my anxieties, as careful around me as if already teetering towards a third hospitalization—it is she who reassures me, reminds me that a B on my transcript will not doom me to a life of mediocrity and trailer park alcoholism. Half an adolescence spent in doctor’s offices, and it is she who has learned more from it. And I—self-dramatizing, self-eulogizing, ninety-eight percent cured and thirteen after all this time—I, I have never quite been able to let it go.

*     *     *

In the end, I stopped playing piano. I was sixteen; college was on the horizon, ACTs and SATs and the roulette of other acronyms I had been preparing for since age thirteen. Forty minutes a day were now a luxury, and my mother—after years of insisting that putting aside an hour each day was not that difficult, not really—seemed to have finally realized that I took to the piano like a lead duck to water—i.e., not at all. Quitting, I was surprised not to be elated. I’d never had any talent, but I had grown used to the structure, thought I might finally have a chance at improving—but well, the piano and I had never been the best of friends. Our breakup was quick, almost painless.

I visited new places. I tried new things. Years of practicing discipline, of freeing time for schoolwork by cutting myself down to essentials, the clean, bare bones of life—years of that, and it surprised me how easily I took to having fun, to making friends.

And so came the ACTS, so came the SATs, the APs and the Common App essay and three more from the University of Chicago. And like a good little machine, I wound myself up for them—a little more carefully now from the therapy, a little better oiled now from the meds. Maybe not quite kicking the habit of worrying, but managing it: a lesser vice now, under control. Old habits are hard to give up, after all, especially ones that had been double, triple, quadruple-checked to work.

*     *     *

Walking in from the cold into the warm foyer of Lewis dorm, one of the first things you notice is the piano. Beyond the quartets of soft armchairs and the warm wood, in a corner next to the stairwells and facing the entire room, it stands: a tall, black concert grand, its wood well-kept and well-loved, keys as glossy as the notes they produced.

It was certainly one of the first things I noticed, walking in that first day of college. Not necessarily the most immediate, processed as it was into the overall atmosphere of Old World grace and comforting hominess—oh wow, so I am going to live here, aren’t I?—but still there, still present. Just one brushstroke in the painting.

And that was how it was, for the first few days or so, a part of the decor I noticed but did not linger over.

I visited new places. I tried new things. Years of practicing discipline, of freeing time for schoolwork by cutting myself down to essentials, the clean, bare bones of life—years of that, and it surprised me how easily I took to having fun, to making friends. All smart kids of course, all talented, but not like the smart and talented kids I’d known in high school, aggressive about knowing each other’s grades and always jockeying for the highest position on the academic ladder. Perhaps there was some of that, seething down under. We were all high-achieving students at a high-achieving school; there had to be other similarities outside of the test scores. Or perhaps that was just me. Already, I was noting the similarities, seeing how I measured up—mathletes and poets and fantasy geeks, boys who had taken the same AP classes, girls with the same pained memories of Chinese school—

And then there were, of course, those who had played the piano.

I noticed at the beginning of first week, maybe the last days of orientation. Walking into the dorm lounge, bright chandeliers and familiar faces in chintzy chairs—Hey Dan! Hi Maddie!—I would see, maybe two times out of five, that someone was playing the piano. I didn’t think much of initially—it was the University of Chicago, of course everyone knew how to play the piano—but after a while, I began to wonder. Some of these musicians had been playing for nine, ten, eleven years—meaning they’d been, what, seven, eight when they’d started?  Practically the same time age I’d been.

And I wondered about that. Wondered about how they did it, the way they took such evident joy in learning melodies and technique—so different from my history with playing the piano, the years of parental disapproval and kicking/screaming that had eventually settled into failed hopes and lingering regret. Wondered about that, whether music had been as hard for them as it had been for me. Watching them play, humming even through the missed notes, not cringing but smiling when others paused to listen, it didn’t seem so.

And yet. Maybe it had been—at least at first, at the start. Few eight-year-olds, after all, have the innate motivation to sit still for forty-plus minutes at a time; few eight-year-olds have the discipline to practice scales twenty minutes each day, every day. Concert pianist Lang Lang Guoren tells journalists that he became interested in the piano when he was two, at three was practicing hours each day at his father’s demand—and just look at him now. World-famous, and grateful to his father for pushing him. Maybe, if I had followed his example like I had been exhorted to, I could have gotten there too, that glittering plateau where all the gritted teeth and lifted bootstraps paid off. Maybe. Maybe.

*     *     *

My mom talks, these days, about selling our piano. It would be the logical thing to do, of course; no one plays it anymore, and it takes up space, sitting alone in a corner of our sunroom, a bin of bent lesson books next to it. A secondhand standup, but still good after all these years, keys still mostly in tune despite the years of disuse.

Listening, I brush my hands over the key bed, say nothing. Dust has gathered on the keys, over the years—on the wood yellowed with age, in the flat crevices between E and F. I think of my stuffed animals, missing fur and missing eyes, mutely sitting in the dark of old closets; I think of my mother, eighteen and envious of the other students, girls who had had money, who wore pretty dresses and could play piano and guitar. I tell her, I don’t know.

But when she asks me whether we should buy a new one, a sleek baby grand or sleek new Steinway, I scoff at it: what would be the point of that, spending thousands of dollars on something no one would use? How was that in any way necessary, how did that in any way make sense?

Well, my mother says, smiling wistfully, it would make the room look nice.

Nice.

Because that was why they’d come here, wasn’t it? Why they’d worked so hard in grad school, spent so much money on private tutors, and so much time cutting personal luxury down to necessity—because it would all pay off here, in this land of new hopes and opportunity; because America would be better, brighter. Would be nicer.

My parents hadn’t had very many nice things, growing up. They’d come to America so that I could have all the crisp clothes and bright holidays they’d never had. All the sullen, long drives to Chinese school, all the evenings spent fidgeting on a piano bench, waiting for the timer to tell me my forty minutes were up—it all had been for this, my parents’ simple wish that I have a future better than they had. In the end, that was what it had all been for; in the end, that was all they had wanted.

*     *     *

I still think, with some nostalgia, of being her again: Amber at thirteen, at sixteen, the girl who would sleep four hours a night to study for AP exams and refuse to eat anything before knowing exact number of carbs first. Time makes fools of us all, makes romantic what had in actuality been terrifying and suffocating—but it is tempting, sometimes, to indulge in the lie. It is a simpler world there, brighter colors and sharper contrasts: up is always up, down is always down, and the whole world is yours, if only you will reach out and try.

From a distance, it is a very beautiful world, very white and very pristine.

And then I hear tales from my classmates, Kyoto-born boyfriends worrying about the number of A-minuses on Ivy League transcripts; and then I hear tales from my friends, old classmates’ younger sisters who are already landing themselves in hospitals, already breaking down. I think of that: of being barely sixteen or seventeen and already knowing fear, the helpless guilt of lying in a hospital bed and listening to parents, angry and terrified and confused, demand why? I think of classmates I know, old dorm mates who discuss bad grades in the context of Bs and 88s, while the next moment dismissing Sylvia Plath’s suicide as selfish. I think: alright. So that is how it happens, how the story goes now.

And then fourteen-year-olds come to me at parties, eager to ask how I had done it—what AP classes had I taken, what clubs had I joined, which standardized tests I had taken and what I had scored on them. And then I look down at them, these rows of young faces so sincere and intense, and I realize that at twenty, I have done it—become the success story, the Harvard inductee instructing others on how they could do it, how they could make it. I look down, and I do not know what to say.

And then I come home, and my parents are nearly in hysterics over the B on my brother’s report card, berating him for not doing as well in Honors English as he does Honors Chemistry, asking him, why can’t you be a little more like your sister—not completely, of course, because God knows how well that ended, but still. Just a little.

And then I think of lying in a white hospital bed, at thirteen, bones brittle as those of an old woman, heart rate resting at the 30s, sobbing not from frustration or fear, but because I was missing school, because I had quiz bowl practice I was missing and teammates I was disappointing, because they were going to make me gain so much weight and people were going to know—I think, and then I remember: this is not a way of life. This is a way of dying, by inches.

And yet. Malcolm Gladwell tells us you need to put in ten thousand hours of effort before greatness. Stephen King tells us that you need a million words of practice before writing anything worthwhile. Marie Curie fainting because she had forgotten to eat. Buddhist monks sitting cross-legged in temples and living on tea and clean mountain air. High school students in China opting for intravenous feeding in order to carve out more time for studying—these are the stories we tell, the idols we make for myth. Privation and self-deprivation the paths to sainthood and transcendence and not egoistic want.

And yet. And yet.

*     *     *

And in the revised, reedited edition of my life, here is how it would happen. In the final draft, I would go back to sixteen, to thirteen, to eight, and this time around, all the equations would add up precisely—time plus persistence equals success, equals happiness, equals the America dream without any thorny remainders left over. This time, the story would run better, smoother, stagehands in their places and actors knowing all their lines—this time, it would go right.

*     *     *

But in the end, it is always the same story. In the end—after all the hours of self-doubt and self-recrimination, of staring at still-familiar keys and wondering what if, what if—after all that and all the years, it always ends the same way.

I stand up. Take my fingers off the keys: Put my old sheet music away, thinking maybe, someday as I push the bench back in, brush the dust off the music rack. Glance one last time at middle C and F sharp, before lowering the fallboard over the keys.

And then—because it is late and I work best at night—I make myself a cup of coffee, stirring in two packets of sugar to cut the tinfoil taste of instant, make it tolerable. Then, kissing my dog goodnight, I go upstairs with my coffee and my laptop, and I write.

Amber Wu is an aspiring academic, part-time writer, and former pianist. An alumna of the University of Chicago, where she studied comparative literature and creative writing, she currently lives in Chicago with her books, a collection of dog-themed paraphernalia, and her plans to pursue a PhD at the University of Southern California. Her fiction and nonfiction can be found in Memoryhouse Magazine, daCunha Global, and The Other Stories.

This essay will have a dead daddy in it. There will be some other stuff in here, but it will mainly be about a dead daddy (mine). There are some who want to know the details. I am not one of those people. But I’m also not generally a reader of dead daddy stories. Add to that list, chronicles of dying relatives of any kind, memories about bad mommies, and random musings on the sanctity of Grandmomma’s cooking. But this is just my preference, and I like mustard on my French fries, so who am I to judge? But for those who can read these stories of dead and dying loved ones, of failed cobblers, of bad parenting, and don’t grow uncomfortable with the level of intimacy they require, who don’t squirm at the level of self-aggrandizing they inherently evoke, who don’t roll their eyes and think, “You and everyone else…”, I’ll give the following details. My father was sixty-two. [1] My father died at home in, and because of, his sleep. [2] My father lived by himself. My father was slightly overweight. My father liked a stiff drink. My father had just recently bought a bike. My father loved, in the following debatable order, the following things: himself (large break), me, his ex-wife (his second), [3] his other daughter, her children, the memory of his grandmother, female attention (which may or may not have included sex), Detroit, White Castle, poker, my mother (his first wife), his twenty-eight years as a cop, the Washington Redskins, a nice dark liquor, the Temptations, The Godfather, a good book. I won’t write about the ongoing legal battle between me and his second wife over his “estate”—basically a pair of socks and a Charles Mann autograph—because that’s even more boring and predictable than dead daddy stories. I won’t write about any of the other women in his life, including my mother and his other daughter (who was born when I was thirteen, and who I didn’t know existed until I was twenty-one). I won’t write about the team that plays football in Washington, because they really don’t play in Washington and they shouldn’t keep that name, and that’s just one of the areas where my father and I saw things very differently. But I will write about White Castle and my dead father, and if you read this as an apology of sorts, it is, but maybe not for what you think.

*     *     *

I won’t write about the ongoing legal battle between me and his second wife over his “estate”—basically a pair of socks and a Charles Mann autograph—because that’s even more boring and predictable than dead daddy stories.

There is a picture. [5]  In the picture, my father has his head braided into five cornrows. He is wearing a dark green dashiki that my mother made for him. My mother braided his hair. The image of what that entailed—he sitting between her legs, she parting his hair and oiling his scalp—embarrasses me. In one hand, he holds a long barrel rifle. In his other arm, he is holding me as a baby. The way he holds the rifle, the gun angles across his body. I have my tiny hand on the wooden barrel of the gun. My father is wearing sunglasses. His look says, “I will defend to the death, this baby in my arm.” The picture says, “I am willing to bleed for the revolution, so that this little girl will have a better world.” The gun says, “You had until April 4^th to pull it together. Now, it’s a demand…”  I could say that I’m looking at the camera as if to say, “I was born in the Congo…” while djembes beat in the background. I could say that you look at the me in the picture and know that if I could talk I would say, “It is the right of the people to alter or to abolish this destructive government, Daddy, and institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to affect my safety— actually, our collective safety and happiness.”  But, I’m a baby, so mostly I just look like I’m ready for a nap.

*     *     *

My mother, who took the picture, says of it now, “We were always being so dramatic then. Like raising baby Kunta to the night sky. My God, I can’t tell you how many times that picture was reenacted.” My mother is not prone to high levels of sentimentality. Both my father and I are.

*     *     *

Or is it “were”? Or is it “I am” and “He was”? And how do you write that sentence? “It doesn’t matter,” I would tell my students, “it’s a fragment anyway.”

*     *     *

The closest White Castle to where my father lived is in Tom’s River, which according to MapQuest is about eighty-nine miles away. There is really nothing exciting in Tom’s River. We—my father, mother, and I—and later, just my father and I, have driven to Tom’s River with no other expressed purpose but to get a sack. I have not eaten red meat in more than sixteen years.

*     *     *

My father became a cop because we moved to Bridgeton, New Jersey, and he needed a job, and somehow his fifteen-year-old charge for trying to bring seventeen stolen guns [6] from New York City to Detroit in a stolen car hadn’t shown up on his background check. At my Daddy’s repast, a man wearing a gold tooth and a brown silk pantsuit sat next to me. “Your father was always a soldier. Extra food tray. Some more time on the phone. Once he saw me on the outside, at a store, and said, ‘I think I have some mail for you.’ He did what he could. Unlike—” and here he lowered his voice and nodded his head towards the table of cops eating behind us, “some of these other motherfuckers who get a badge and forget they niggahs too.”

*     *     *

My father and I hated that word. Whenever I argued that the name of the team playing in Fed Ex stadium was just as bad, my father would only sigh. My mother, when admonished about saying the word replied, “Context is everything, ‘Keng.”

*     *     *

The first White Castle opened in Detroit in 1929. When both my father and I were growing up, there were more White Castles in Motown than Burger Kings, Wendy’s and even McDonald’s. The basic design of White Castle, white sparkling tile and shiny spotless chrome, has stayed mostly the same over the store’s one-hundred-year history. White Castles (popular opinion be damned) were always so clean that when I was a little girl, walking into them on a sunny days almost hurt my eyes.

*     *     *

This is coincidence, but growing up, both of the bathrooms in our houses were predominately white tile. And this reminds me of the time, not too long after a school lesson on Sir Alexander Fleming, that I looked in our medicine cabinet and saw a prescription bottle for penicillin.

*     *     *

The following things, in the following order, make me cry for months afterwards: the chewing gum commercial when the woman goes to college with a box filled with folded wrappers, seeing a man holding his baby in an Ergo, hearing the Temptations play on Muzak, getting pulled over for not coming to a complete stop, the Extra chewing gum commercial when the woman goes to college with a shoebox filled with folded gum wrapper birds that had been lovingly folded for her by her father over the years.

*     *     *

My father had, by my accounts, sex with over twenty women during the time he was married to my mother. This is a surprisingly accurate guess considering that I was a child for most of my parents’ marriage. When, days after his funeral, I share my tally with my mother, she says, “Well, that’s probably a very conservative estimate.” But I said this isn’t about my mother and it isn’t.

*     *     *

My father’s favorite song was “Papa was a Rolling Stone.” [7]

*     *     *

It is five months after my father died in and because of his sleep, not because of his diet, and this man who loves me and whom my father liked, has never had a White Castle. So we drive to a White Castle, and I take great pains to explain to him how to order. No ketchup. At least four. A mixture of both cheese and plain. He orders two, plain. He slides the burger out of the thin cardboard box and looks at it, turning it around to inspect it. He peels off the bottom bun, and then (and this pains me to write), scrapes off the soggy part of the bun where the burger’s juices have soaked through. He wipes his finger on a napkin, spreading remnants of burger and bun onto the sheet. He then neatly folds over the napkin. I am watching all of this through the lens of my phone. I had been poised to take a picture of him eating his first White Castle. And somehow, I still click as he takes a bite. His face is pained, as if I have forced him to eat cuy or tripe or hog maws. He swallows painfully and then says, “Well, give me a Wendy’s any day.”

*     *     *

This man, who I think loves me, was liked by my father because of a shared love of 1970s American History. My father liked this man, despite the fact that this man is white. My father liked this man, who gave him a copy of Detroit: I Do Mind Dying. My father liked this man, despite the fact that this man does not gamble. This man really does not drink. This man, I know deeply, purely, completely, would never cheat. He is as aghast at infidelity as I once was. His parents have recently celebrated their sixtieth wedding anniversary. But a week later, I’m looking at the picture of him eating his first slider and I know I’m eventually going to delete it, just as now I’m deleting text messages from another man I met six months before I started dating this man. And I hear David Byrne in my head and I think, “My God, what have I done…”

*     *     *

I think I love the following things, in the following order: my mother, myself, my father (large break), my best friend who lives in Detroit, the memory of my dead grandmothers, male attention (which may or may not include sex), White Castle…

I think I love the following things, in the following order: my mother, myself, my father (large break), my best friend who lives in Detroit, the memory of my dead grandmothers, male attention (which may or may not include sex), White Castle, Detroit, a nice glass of wine, a good book, The Godfather.

I know I don’t love the following things as much as I should: the man who doesn’t like White Castle, my father’s family, New Jersey, police officers.

*     *     *

When my father graduated from the Trenton Police Academy, we went to White Castle for his graduation dinner. This probably isn’t important, but I wanted to mention it anyway.

*     *     *

In what was probably my mother’s last stand against “the man,” she didn’t seek child support from my father when we moved out. (Perhaps, she should have. At that point, my father had already been in the system for six years.) The arrangement was that she wouldn’t get the courts involved, provided that my parents would alternate on paying for my college tuition. When my second semester arrived and it became time for my father to pay, he wasn’t able to pay. Somehow (credit cards, overtime, loans) my mother was able to get the tuition. In the fall, my father again was unable to pay his portion. I had to come home, to Bridgeton, for two years.

*     *     *

During that first summer home, my father came over to show me a brand new truck he and Madame Mastodon had just purchased. It was one of the Big Three’s finest—white, all chrome with custom details. I would like to say that I reasonably shared my disappointment with my father; that I calmly asked how he could afford a truck, yet, could ignore the bills from my university’s bursar’s office. But I didn’t. I cried, I yelled. I cursed. I slammed the door. I did not speak to my father for seven years.

*     *     *

In dead daddy stories, someone inevitably wishes they hadn’t said this or wishes they hadn’t done that. But, I’m not one of those people.

*     *     *

In dead daddy stories, someone inevitably wishes they hadn’t said this or wishes they hadn’t done that. But, I’m not one of those people.

So, yeah, this isn’t really about White Castle. But it should be. Those perfect little burgers, made square so that they can fit more on the grill. Those five holes in the center so that the meat melts, melts in your mouth. Those crispy, crinkly, crunchy fries. And the Coke. My God, the Coca-Cola.

*     *     *

Six months later, my closest friend, my friend who lives in Detroit, told me that White Castle was selling turkey sliders. And since I gave up red meat, when I go—nay, went—to White Castle with my dad, I’d have to order chicken (which is NOT the same thing). She called me, whispering on the phone from underneath her cubicle. She knew what hearing that news would mean to me. The next Saturday, after getting her call, I went to three White Castles in upstate New Jersey, with employees at each store looking blankly at me when I asked for turkey burgers. A year earlier, this would have been the perfect joke to play on me. Seven months earlier, I would have laughed when I went to my fourth White Castle, this time near Penn Station, and again, was met with confused faces when I placed my order. Four turkey burgers, no ketchup, fries, a Coke.

No turkey, the counter woman said to me twice because I just stood there, looking at her after she had said it the first time. She looked to her coworker as if maybe her English wasn’t getting the message across. I ordered fries, Coke, two chicken sandwiches, and walked to a table.

And I’m sitting there, in a booth, in a White Castle, and I’m thinking about my daddy. And for some reason, I remember something I had forgotten about, the way that it happens in dead daddy stories.

My father and I are at a beach, a lake, really, and he is trying to teach me to swim. And he promises me if I can hold my breath, if I try to swim just a bit, he’ll take me over to a sandbar that exists on the other side. And because my father knows me and because my father knows that I have never seen a sandbar, and because my father knows that in just the few minutes since he’s made that offer, I’ve imagined the sandbar to be much more than a patch of sand, he knows how much of an incentive that offer was. And so I try to swim much harder than I had been trying earlier. I make it halfway towards him where he stood, marking my distance. After I rest for a bit, he tells me to hop on his back and then my father dives in and swims towards the sandbar. I am scared. I am excited. I hold onto his neck too tightly, and at times he says to me, “Not so tight, Pooh.” But he keeps swimming, he keeps swimming.

I’m suddenly one of those people crying in public. I’m furiously wiping my eyes with a napkin someone left on the table. And I know the poor girl at the counter is thinking that I’m unstable or I’m taking their lack of turkey really hard. And as my number is called, as they tell me my order is ready, I’m crying in a booth in a White Castle because it hits me, really hits me. In dead daddy stories, fathers can be a lot of things. But the one thing they can’t ever be is alive.

Author’s Notes:

[1] The average life expectancy for black males in the United States is 71.8. This is about five years shorter than the expected age of death for white men, seven years shorter than the expectancy of black women and about ten years less than that of white women.

[2] His official cause of death was listed as sleep apnea. Who knew?

[3] The order of the next two things in his list is debatable. For the years 1998-2013, his ex-wife—the hideous succubus in the form of Mrs. Snufflelupagus [4] who he was married to during that time—might be third in this list.  For the years 1971-1987, my mother would have been third, and for a brief period, second in the list.

[4]  This is being unkind to Mrs. Snufflelupagus, who besides being a perfectly lovely beast, had the most exquisite eyelashes that were years ahead of the trend.

[5] In dead daddy stories, there is always a picture.

[6] “They must arm themselves as best they can (rifles, revolvers, bombs, knives, knuckle-dusters, sticks, rags soaked in kerosene for starting fires, ropes or rope ladders, shovels for building barricades, pyroxylin cartridges, barbed wire, nails [against cavalry], etc., etc.). Under no circumstances should they wait for help from other sources, from above, from the outside; they must procure everything themselves.” –Lenin “Sometimes you have to pick up the gun, to put down the gun.” –Malcolm X

[7] I cannot make this shit up.

Special Guest Judge, Ana Maria Spagna, on “Dead Daddies and White Castles”:

“There is so much to admire in this essay: the lively voice, the powerful imagery (the rifle, the sunglasses, the cornrows, the soggy White Castle bun), the strong sense of context, the subtle humor, and most of all the devastating self-awareness of the narrator.”

–Ana Maria Spagna is the author of six nonfiction books including Reclaimers and Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus, winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize.

N’kenge Feagin is a Philadelphia-based, Detroit-born, Jersey-raised writer who spent most of her adult life living in Washington, DC. She’s been an adjunct, state park janitor, Girl 6, bartender, program coordinator, hostess, fugitive, waitress, comedy scriptwriter, nonprofit supervisor, restaurant manager, and to her five-year-old relatives, “The Best Cousin EVERRR.”

My brother Mark is the essence of juvey cool, hair slicked back in a perfect duck’s ass, white T-shirt with a pack of Camels rolled up in one sleeve, Levis like the skin he was born in, pointy-toed shoes that the Mexican kids call cockroach killers. He is sixteen, months from dropping out of high school to join the Navy, one of the last recruits they’ll take under eighteen without a diploma. It is a time of screaming all over the house, wives throwing ashtrays at cheating husbands’ heads, acid-bitter grandmas pounding their canes against guestroom walls, sisters squabbling over trinkets, and Mark in a boxer’s stance, face hard, while Dad shouts about speeding tickets and F report cards and a room like a demolition site. “No more sitting back here in squalor messing around with this thing,” Dad yells, picking up Mark’s acoustic guitar by the neck from a pile of clothes and papers near the bed. Mark grabs the guitar from his hand, raises it above his head, and brings it smashing down on the bedpost. Sprong, go the strings.

*     *     *

He burns through life like it is a drag race down a Central Valley back road after midnight on a full moon with cop sirens closing in.

Mark is vivid in the family legend, the first born, the original in a bookend-set of two sons sixteen years apart with four daughters in between. He is a rebel and a scrapper, knows how to fight and to fix cars, falls hard in love. He has no use for his old man’s life-of-the-mind, expressed in hours of booze-fueled talk around the kitchen table, nor for the mild professional tolerance of his social-worker mom. He burns through life like it is a drag race down a Central Valley back road after midnight on a full moon with cop sirens closing in. I know all the Mark stories, and have a couple of my own, but mostly I associate him with absence: his first, then mine, then his again. That, and the passionate memories of others. I have scarcely any claim on him at all.

*     *     *

My older sister is born in 1953, five years after Mark, and occupies with him the temporary nucleus of a perfectly calibrated postwar family. My parents call her Eve, the first female, with a middle name of Adrian after the college where they met, from which they’d set out on bicycles to Oregon to start a new life of letters, running a weekly newspaper far from the sad snows of Michigan. Adrian turns out to be the name that suits her best, Mark agrees. Those Sandy, Oregon years set the template for who the four of them will henceforth always be to each other. The brilliant, reprobate father who would buy a horse for $10 from some Indian bar-buddy. The sensible wife who would laugh tartly that the office rent had yet to be paid, and no one in the family knew how to ride. The fearless first son, who would vault onto the pony’s bare back and lean forward into its mane, urging it forward. And the fierce first daughter who would chase behind, face to hooves, clamoring for her turn at the danger.

*     *     *

Family pictures tell a certain kind of story. There’s Mark at eight in his plaid cowboy shirt and six-guns, scowl-smiling under his cowlicks, hand on the shoulder of Ade in her braids, gazing up at him as if for a signal. Riley the collie is poised watchful at their feet. The house has a front yard with a red wagon and a couple of bikes. Mom has cat-eye glasses, Dad smokes a pipe. There’s rough newsreel glamour in their setting of type and running of presses, Mark helping deliver the paper they publish every week. Things start tipping out of balance when I am born two years after this photo was snapped, though Mark and Adrian are united as the big kids and praise the collie for keeping me herded in my playpen in that cluttered front yard. Then twins Merry and Melody come a year and a half after me, and the little house and the little town are suddenly too small, the books too short to keep it all going.

*     *     *

In 1962, Dad gets a job at the Sacramento Union, a real newspaper, a daily where he won’t have to sell the ads, just cover his beat: state politics, the aerospace industry. I remember the trip south from Oregon, stopping in the redwoods, driving through a tree big enough to have a car-size tunnel in its trunk. Mark is thirteen. Does he roll his eyes and press his forehead to the car window while the old man plays tour guide to the squeals of us little kids? Or does he patiently read the explanatory placards with me, helping me sound out the hard words? I can’t recall. The snapshot only shows us all lined up against the Chevy in stair-step formation with Mark looking off to the left when the camera flashes.

*     *     *

Rat Fink has bulging pop-eyes and bright green fur, a long tongue lolling out of his maniacal grin, spittle flying while his pointy tail swipes back from his torn T-shirt. Rat Fink loves hot rods and hates rules. Mark draws Rat Fink in elaborate detail on his notes in history class, all over his math homework, and on the back of his report card. Rat Fink puts the school on notice. Of course, Mark is smart: our parents wouldn’t have any other kind of kid. But he’s restless, engine always racing. He’d rather have his head under the hood of a car than in a book. He’d rather act first and worry later. He’d rather leave the rest of us in his dust.

*     *     *

One hot Sacramento Delta summer day, my sister Melody and I, ages four and six, decide to run away from home. We’re bored. We’re tired of watching cars pass by outside the split-rail fence, bound for the freeway. We decide to visit our grandmother who has an apartment in town near the high school where Mark is in tenth grade. We pack some dolls into hobo sacks on sticks and load up a Barbie lunchbox, then head out down the frontage road. We get as far as the creek where some older boys stop fishing to watch us approach.

Where you going? they call out, sauntering up the embankment. Whatcha doing?

We’re frozen to the spot when a Highway Patrol car suddenly pulls up just ahead of us on the shoulder, Mark in the front passenger seat. He leaps out and grabs us both up, one sister under each arm. He slides us into the back of the cop car and orders us to sit while the officer radios to the general store, where Mark tells us our parents are assembling a search party. Mark paces alongside the car, stopping every few circuits to lean his head through the open back window and harangue us. “You little shits,” he says. “You should have seen Mom. What were you thinking?” We’re crying silently, too scared to make a sound, when suddenly he starts to laugh. “And Elk Grove! You could at least have aimed for the city. Maybe even San Francisco. That’s what I would have done.”

He slides his wiry frame into the back seat, scooching Melody and me to the side. “This is where I’m more used to riding,” he whispers to us, out the side of his mouth, then taps the glass separating us from the front seat. “Let’s get these little criminals back home,” he says.

*     *     *

In the fall of 1964, my parents finally have their last child, their second son. They joke that Matthew should have been born with the Pill in his fist, so unexpected is he. He’s also just golden and sweet enough to extend their marriage a few years beyond the end of its natural life. One day when Matt is two, he toddles out of the yard of the house we are renting in the middle of a dairy farm, drifts away from his babysitter, who is in front of the bathroom mirror perfecting her Cleopatra eyeliner. The corn is already a couple feet high; the pear orchard is leafing out; the silo door gapes open; the bulls in the big barn are pawing the ground and snuffling toward their lady cows, bumping together around the milking machines. The babysitter’s screams bring the farmhands running, and finally one of them climbs up to the top of the silo and spots Matt making his meandering way across the cornfield toward the county road. The Portuguese foreman and his teenage son bring Matt home howling with fury. Melody and I know Mark would have found Matt in an instant and made him laugh just as fast. But our tracker-brother is gone, off to the other side of the world. He left when Matt was barely a year old. Maybe that’s who Matt was looking for when he wandered off.

*     *     *

The Navy has Mark’s date of enlistment as December 15, 1965, five days after his seventeenth birthday. He serves most of his four years on a destroyer off the coast of Vietnam, listening through headphones for enemy subs, like his father in another war before him. “This is the USS Floyd B. Parks (DD 884),” he writes on the back of the regulation photo he sends home. “She was in WWII and Korea also.” On the front of the picture he marks with arrows pointing down below decks, “My sonar station,” and “Where I sleep.” He also sends a picture of the assembled 200-plus men on board, all of them tiny and practically indistinguishable in their matching crewcuts and white caps, with one circled near the left front: “I think this is me.” He gets an elaborate certificate the first time he crosses the equator. He is engaged for a few months to a bar girl in Hong Kong but breaks it off when she calls him another man’s name during one of their scratchy long-distance calls. My mother keeps Mark’s dress blues in her back closet. When we clean her house after her death in 2010, the wool uniform disintegrates at our touch.

*     *     *

She’d spent her teen years in a convent, which makes her role as a common-law co-wife all the more transgressive—or maybe not, since she’d previously been one of Jesus’s many brides.

By the time Mark comes home on leave in September of 1967, we’ve moved again. We’re in Sacramento proper now, giving a Summer of Love-style combined family a try: my mom, us five kids, my dad’s latest paramour and her three kids, all in a haunted-looking Victorian a few blocks from the Capitol. Carilla is in her late twenties, as close to Mark in age as she is to Dad, and beautiful in a sharp, freckled way, partial to white cotton shifts and gold bangles. She’d spent her teen years in a convent, which makes her role as a common-law co-wife all the more transgressive—or maybe not, since she’d previously been one of Jesus’s many brides.

Mark seethes around the house, chin out, cracking his knuckles and muttering imprecations about disrespect of our mother and neglect of our moral care. He’s in Dad’s face daily, seemingly trying to draw him past argument into an actual fistfight that Mark must figure he can win, muscled up as he is by basic training. After each near-blowup there are whispered kitchen conversations between Mark and Carilla in the name of restoring the peace. Soon the whispers are more frequent than the fights. When it’s time for Mark to report back to San Diego and his ship, he leaves behind a letter declaring his love for her. “I may only be nineteen but I am more of a man than he’ll ever be again,” Mark wrote in his all-caps hand on blue-lined loose-leaf binder paper. If she wrote back, there’s no trace of her letters in his small cache of papers. By late 1968, Dad has moved solo to San Francisco and Mom has transported us kids to Bakersfield. No one seems to know where Carilla landed.

*     *     *

The fall I am supposed to start seventh grade, I am instead in a body cast in a crank-up bed in our living room. I’ve broken my femur in a park-swing incident involving a boy I like and his miscalculated show of interest: Here, let me give you a real push on that thing! After four weeks of traction at the hospital, I am now encased in plaster from my chest to my pelvis and all down my left leg. It itches and I think I will go crazy from not being able to move more than a few inches one way or the other on my own, but my yet-to-be-met homeroom classmates write me nice get-well letters, and the visiting teacher keeps me sporadically busy with worksheets and paperback novels.

In November, midway through month two in my cast, Mark finishes his stint in the Navy. He rolls into Bakersfield with his release pay in his pocket and a permanent scowl on his face. It’s 1969, and even here in Okie-from-Muskogee country, the war is unpopular. “Fucking hippie freaks, what do they know?” Mark snarls, tapping the front page of the newspaper with his cigarette hand. One night he storms through the park out by the river searching for Adrian when she’s late coming home. When he finally steers her through the front door in her beads and bell-bottoms, they won’t look at each other. They barely speak for the few weeks Mark lives on the couch, my living-room-mate, till right before Christmas when I finally get the cast removed.

The doctor comes to the house to saw the thing off, and once he leaves I am horrified to see my dead-white, atrophied left limb. I’d just started shaving my legs before the accident, and now I am convinced I looked like a diseased gorilla. I start crying the way only a twelve-year-old girl can, as if all life is ending. My mom and sisters are fluttering around, trying to console me, when Mark drains his beer and stamps out his cigarette. “Start the bath water running,” he tells Ade, who scurries off to comply. He scoops me up off the bed like a in a fairytale. “Time to get this one ship-shape again.” Ignoring my shrieks of mortification, he carries me into the bathroom and places me gently in the tub. “Don’t worry, I kept my eyes closed the whole time,” he tells me.

The next day he throws his duffel bag into the back of his Impala and heads out again.

*     *     *

There’s a girl in Milwaukee, the sister of a Navy buddy. They’d met by chance when Mark was on shore-leave six months earlier. Christine is dark-haired, dark-eyed, ivory-skinned, the kind of girl you’d drive all night and a day to see. They get jobs together at the appliance factory in West Bend. He fixes cars on the side. In their wedding picture marked August 1970, Mark in his white tuxedo seems to fade a little in the flare of Christine’s beauty. They have a baby girl the following May and name her Misty. We all take turns pushing her stroller to the corner and back in front of Mom’s house in Bakersfield when they bring Misty to visit as a toddler, the first grandchild. She looks just like her mother, who seems weary of childrearing already and is inclined to snap when Misty and her Uncle Matt, now eight, get racing too fast on the sprinkler-wet sidewalk. Mark draws a cartoon of Misty guarding her ice cream cone from our assorted pets. The posture is pure Rat Fink, though the face is essence of Veronica.

*     *     *

Something happens out there in the middle of the country, where life is supposed to be as reliable as brats and beer when the Packers play.

Something happens out there in the middle of the country, where life is supposed to be as reliable as brats and beer when the Packers play. Mark and Christine are in their groove, staggering shifts at the plant, kid-chasing, pillowing into a cluster of other young couples doing the same. Everyone in their twenties, smoothing out the rough winters and rougher childhoods by grabbing onto good times. At some point someone cheats a little, grabs a good time that’s not really theirs, and it starts a chain reaction. Next thing you know, Christine is slicing into Mark’s clothes with pinking shears and throwing them out onto the frozen lawn, then digging a scratch across the cherry paint-job on the hood of his Impala with her nail file. Mark moves in with Ellen instead, who is small and kind, with long honey hair and flowing skirts to contrast with Christine’s hard glamour. Once Christine sets her sights on her next husband and starts making it hard to see Misty—no, she can’t visit your house while that whore is there; no, Sundays won’t work anymore, Kurt and I take her to church now—there’s no point in Mark’s staying around. He makes his way with Ellen back to California, where at least there’s no snow, and no exes to trip over every time you go out to pick up a six of Schlitz.

*     *     *

That June, Mark and his Navy buddy Snakey lease a gas station together near Whittier. It is right off the highway, two exits from Disneyland, and a crushed empty’s throw over a concrete canal from East LA. Mark hires Matt, age eleven, to come work for him for the summer. Matt is thrilled to be hanging with the big brother he is just getting to know, but his real focus is saving up enough money to go to Disney. Matt paints the gas station bathrooms, and repaints them when they get graffitied the very next day. He sweeps the office and restocks the windshield washing fluid and once in a while gets to fill up a car, careful not to spill a drop of gas. On days off he sneaks through the hole in the chain-link fence and picks his way through the dust and sand to the trickling stream of the Rio Hondo Channel, a tributary of the LA River. Down there, the roar of the freeway mixes with the wind and water to make a sound like a good engine humming.

When they get to the last week of summer, Mark drives Matt to Anaheim, pulls up to the gates of the Magic Kingdom, and opens his wallet. “Here’s your pay,” Mark says, handing over $100. “I’ll be back to pick you up at 5 p.m.” The next day, he does exactly the same thing.

Matt figures out the first day that by stationing himself near the exit around mid-afternoon and looking forlorn, he becomes the recipient of every departing family’s unused tickets. He goes on his favorite rides three, four, five times. He eats his body weight in Matterhorn sundaes. And when Mark later gives up the gas station and moves to Bakersfield, he puts Matt to work again, this time sorting the seeds out of oversize plastic bags of pot.

*     *     *

By then what’s compelling is what father and son have in common: sonar, smoke, a string of wives.

In 1976, Mark and Dad are roommates for a few months. The Bicentennial is in full swing, Americans trying hard with fireworks and readings of the Declaration to poke through the funk of stagflation, the gas crisis. Mark and Dad wash up a few weeks apart in Bakersfield, where neither of them really belong; I am already gone, escaped to college on the other side of the country. By then what’s compelling is what father and son have in common: sonar, smoke, a string of wives. I imagine them as saloon buddies, road dogs, backing each other up with pool cues when things get ugly near closing time and knowing just how low to keep their voices pitched in the morning. I don’t know if Dad assumes that he and Mark will grow old on adjoining bar stools at the Woolgrowers Tavern. I just know that after Mark is gone and Bakersfield is out of the question, Dad becomes a magnet for young hotheads all up and down the West Coast, the first call they make from lockup. The crappy apartment they shared near downtown is an empty lot now next to a bail bond agency called Gotta Go.

*     *     *

Melody is barely able to sleep for a month after her twin dies in a one-car crash into a freeway embankment that Merry’s boyfriend is too dumb or drunk to see. Melody knows it could just have easily been one of many other things that took Merry out at sixteen: the wrong pickup while hitchhiking, a bad batch of pills, tightrope-walking over the Golden Gate. The two of them ran hard but Merry ran harder, and now Melody can’t bring herself to face junior year alone. Instead she buries her face into her big dog’s fur until the spins stop, and then lies on the bed in her deadly quiet room waiting for dark.

I can see Mark padding into the adjoining bathroom, wiping off the grease from his latest car salvation project. He usually has two or three hopeless cases going at once in Mom’s stifling garage out back on the alley. He pokes his head into what everyone is now reminding themselves not to call the twins’ room.

“You okay there, Mel?” he asks. He doesn’t expect a yes but he also doesn’t anticipate the wild glaze of her eyes beneath a nest of dark blond tangles. She’s wound and wound hanks of her hair around her fists to try to still her mind for the sleep that won’t come.

“Hey now, hey,” Mark says. He sits on the corner of her bed and lifts her head onto his knee. He sees her hairbrush in the dresser and can just reach it without dislodging her. “I got good at this with Misty,” he says, dabbing at each knot till it loosens and catches some of the tears streaming from the corners of her eyes.

“I’m just so tired,” Melody whispers.

“I know what might help,” Mark says. “You just can’t let Mom know.” He puts down the brush and digs his Marlboro hard-pack and Bic lighter out of his back pocket. Fishing inside the pack, he pulls out a fat joint and lights it up.

“Two or three good hits ought to do the trick,” he says. Melody sits up a little and holds it to her lips. “I see you’ve already met my friend Mary Jane,” he laughs as she inhales, then lets the smoke roll out through her first smile in weeks.

*     *     *

The 7-Eleven is on everyone’s flight path. It’s where all his sisters and little brother buy penny candy or trade up for a Slurpee. It’s where you go when you’re a teenager and you need someone to make a buy: you hang out over toward the ice machine until someone with a real jones pulls up and is willing to make a deal, five bucks if you buy us some Boone’s Farm, a pack of Camels for you if you get one for me. It’s where frazzled moms pick up Pampers and milk after bedtime, praying the kids will sleep through their exit and return. It’s where local stoners go for Funyuns and Twinkies, and local bums go to pee and wash up.

Mark takes the graveyard shift, midnight to eight. He likes the quiet, the long hours broken by occasional headlights pulling up to the front, the jingle of the front door as customers float in and out, maybe two an hour. Plenty of time to read and do a little drawing, and time to chat if someone he knows comes in. Friends of his sisters’ out on the town, or the dudes living across the street, or a new buddy from the apartment on K Street he shares with Ellen and, astonishingly, his dad. There must be something to this idea of mellowing out, Mark thinks. The old man doesn’t piss me off anymore. Slow drivers don’t piss me off anymore. Christine doesn’t even piss me off anymore.

He catches sight of his face in the fisheye mirror behind the counter. Brown shock of hair, mustache and goatee, eyebrows that seem to move on their own. Ellen keeps telling him he’s too skinny, but that’s just because she’s starting to put the baby-weight on. He thinks he looks tough and interesting, like someone you’d want to have a beer with but never cross.

Mark looks up at the Coors clock. 5:20 a.m. Another forty minutes, Melody will jog by to wave hello and then the breakfast crowd will start filtering in. Better check the coffee-maker after I take care of this guy from across the street. He looks like he’s having a bad night.

*     *     *

The Bakersfield Californian, November 9, 1976 “Police Ask for Help in Death Probe”

The Bakersfield Californian, November 9, 1976

“Police Ask for Help in Death Probe”

Police today appealed to the public for help in solving what a spokesman called the “cold-blooded killing” about 5:30 a.m. yesterday of store clerk Mark L. ____________, 27. An autopsy by coroner’s pathologist Dr. Dominick Ambrosecchia disclosed ___________ had been shot once through the heart with a .22-caliber bullet. His body was found by a customer about 6 a.m.

Coroner Richard P. Gervais said the victim, who was employed at a 7-Eleven store, 2331 Chester Lane, was shot at close range. Powder burns were noted on ____________’s shirt. Also, a police official said, the clerk apparently was surprised by the action of his killer.

*     *     *

Christine takes over all the funeral arrangements. He is still her husband, though they’ve been separated for almost two years, though Ellen has been with him ever since. It is Christine who insists on an open casket at the Bakersfield funeral home—as we file by we can’t help joking that it is the only time we’ve ever seen Mark sit still. Then she has him cremated and stashed in a niche at Union Cemetery, where the mausoleum is something out of the Gilded Age though the neighborhood around it is getting ragged. There Mark rests in a drawer marked with his name and dates—December 10, 1948 to November 8, 1976—surrounded by other people’s dead devoted brothers and loving husbands and loyal sons for longer than he walked the earth.

*     *     *

By the time Mark’s daughter Merry is born in March 1977, Ellen has purchased an old bread truck and outfitted it for the drive to Alaska. Adrian is there now, in Ketchikan, a town that has bathtub races on the Fourth of July. It’s as far away from Wisconsin as you can get—far from Bakersfield too. Before Merry has started crawling, Ellen tucks her into the bassinet she’s built in behind the driver’s seat, asks Mom for directions to the freeway, and heads north.

*     *     *

Half-sisters who grew up separated by half a continent of silence, Misty and Merry make up for lost time. Ever since their father’s mother connected them, first by letter and then by cautiously orchestrated rendezvous at her house in Bakersfield when they were twenty-three and nineteen, respectively, they’ve been deeply intertwined. The tattoos are just the latest thing. There’s the elaborate one of a swallow—a perennial sailor’s favorite—with a Converse-red star and cherry blossoms that they designed together in 2008 in honor of their dad, and then got inked separately in Wisconsin and Seattle according to detailed mutual instructions. Then there’s the simple feather from 2013, also for Mark. Whenever they find a white feather in the street or the random back yard, they believe it’s him saying hello. And now he’ll be greeting them every time they catch a glimpse of their own forearms, or each other’s.

*     *     *

At about hour thirty-six of labor, Merry swears she sees her father in the corner of the delivery room, visible just over the heads of her husband and aunts and cousin as they cluster around her, urging Gemma into the world. Is it a ghost or a hallucination from the meds they’ve finally given her? Doesn’t matter. Though she’s never actually met him, she knows it is Mark. He is the age he should be in real time, in his sixties, his slicked-back hair streaked with gray, but his face has that same surprised look it has in the photo Merry props up in the little shrine she recreates wherever she lives. He is wearing a red flannel shirt, because it is Seattle in October, and he can be practical that way. Right before her wedding a year earlier, Merry saw him in a dream wearing that same shirt, sitting at a picnic table on the bluff near where the ceremony would take place, and now here he is again. Afterwards, when she feeds Gemma very early in the morning, Merry swears the baby always squirms to face the corner where Merry keeps Mark’s picture along with the latest feathers she’s found.

*     *     *

In July 2010, all of us who are left pool our funds and buy a cluster of four niches together at Union Cemetery, where none of us have been in three decades. We put Mom’s ashes in one compartment—what’s left of them after we fill nearly twenty small pouches for the siblings and grandkids and great-grands—and in the drawer next to her, the cookie tin of our dad’s ashes she’d been saving in her file cabinet since he passed in the mid-1980s. We make the third niche for the original sister Merry, though there are no ashes to put in it since we scattered hers in the Kern River in a special and wholly illegal ceremony orchestrated by Dad and abetted by Mark. We move Mark over from terra incognita and prop his door open so his daughters can add a poem and a ring and some feathers to keep his ashes company. Then we file out into the summer air thick as pomade, gun our engines, and peel out.

Mickey Revenaugh grew up in in various parts of California’s Central Valley and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. She served as a journalist and editor for many years before taking on her current work in global K-12 online learning. Mickey earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College in 2017, and also holds a BA in American studies from Yale University and an MBA from New York University. In addition to Lunch Ticket, her writing has appeared in Louisiana Literature, The End of the World, One-to-One Journal, Threshold, Catapult, Chautauqua, The Thing Itself, The Tishman Review, and LA Review of Books.

Photo by Zina Saunders

Sharlotte walked into the A.A. meeting just as the Arizona sunset was throwing peach and orange colors on the walls of the cheap commercial space. A loose, dingy white T-shirt barely concealed the inner tube of weight she’d gained from a cocktail of psychotropics. Her thin, unwashed hair looked like an animal pelt pasted onto her scalp. Her skin was broken out, oily, her breathing audible from tables away as she sat down and made her third stab at sobriety in a year.

I was barely weeks into a life without wine in my hand. A mutual friend introduced us and within weeks I was taking her to art openings and she was bringing me to burlesque performances. She’d come to my apartment door on these nights, dolled up, smiling with perfect lipstick like a lady ready to party, hoisting a 12-pack of Coke Zero that we’d devour like our last supper. We’d play Scrabble or swap life stories and she’d laugh, tossing her head back and her mouth opening wide so her deep laughter punctuated the air. We counted our days clean and went to meetings. We counted our weeks clean and went to meetings. They helped me get through prolonged unemployment and the humility of staying on a friend’s proverbial couch. They helped Sharlotte face one sucker punch after another, the latest of which she told me about over dinner at a Thai restaurant.

Sipping a Diet Coke, she sunk back into the corner of the maroon booth. “My shrink says it’s PTSD. That’s why I still can’t work. And now on top of it my other doctor’s telling me I have colitis.”

The next week at our favorite coffee shop, her voice shaky, face sans makeup, she had more news. “My shrink says I might never return to work. She even told me to start filing papers to get disability.” She gripped her latte cup. “This isn’t how life’s supposed to go. I’m an over-achiever. I’ve always bounced back. My god, I want a drink.” Instead she devoured a pastry. By the time our lattes were near the bottom of the thick brown paper cups, her eyes were scanning her milieu. Back and forth, back and forth. A tiger pacing its cage. She picked up her purse, said, “I have to go,” and bolted from the café.

*     *     *

We count our days, weeks, months clean until one of life’s shit storms blows through, blasting our confidence to ashes, making us want to kick the table of sobriety out from under us.

As we counted our months clean, we noticed the zealotry of many recovering addicts, the stuff that’s earned A.A. the moniker of a cult. Specialized language and symbols are like secret handshakes and code words. Hours once spent drinking turn into hours spent talking about not drinking, continuing to place alcohol front and center in members’ lives. Some members find themselves “hiding in meetings,” attending meetings rather than joining the rest of life, terrified of alcohol’s ubiquity, clutching to that safe zone as if it’s some inoculation against relapse. I think about other groups who face a terrifying potential return like cancer survivors. Do cancer survivors in remission spend as many hours or days or months thinking about the disease’s likely return? Do they reside in survivor support groups like addicts do the Anonymous meetings? Do they let the potential return dictate major decisions? A cancer survivor knows her remission could change course at any moment. She knows she’s not in control. She can go in and out of remission just as a criminal can weave in and out of prison. Recidivism. In and out of the bars like V. or Tastee did in Orange Is the New Black. Though they had a choice. When you look at it through characters like those, it looks like they’re unwilling to live straight, like they’re racing right back to what put them in the joint. Then there’s Brooks from Shawshank Redemption. In him, a kind and gentle man, is someone so accustomed to life inside that anything outside seems cold, the light too harsh, the pressure too crushing. What could he do? Live in the halfway-house community for the short rest of his life? For his decision that takes place on the beam he’s carved his name into anyone can feel compassion. The addict, though, empathizes with Brooks. We count our days, weeks, months clean until one of life’s shit storms blows through, blasting our confidence to ashes, making us want to kick the table of sobriety out from under us too. If we learn to weather that shit storm, we don’t become one of the seventy percent who relapse by day ninety. Or the ninety percent who do so within four years.

We take new steps every day toward a healthier life. We get to know ourselves, discover what the hell we’d missed while floating around in a haze for years. We get to know ourselves, discover what the hell we’d missed while floating around in a haze for years, and hopefully learn about ourselves. Self-awareness appears in my mind like a lighthouse. A baby blue beacon of a thing with a Shaker roof, three or four stories high. Instead of overlooking the cold, rocky shores of an isolated coastal town, though, it scans my psychic landscape, ready to strike at the first sign of thirsty thoughts. It’ll be there, scanning, for the rest of my life.

*     *     *

The blue beacon was just beginning to form when my sponsor took me on a sober women’s weekend retreat in the mountains of Prescott. I’d signed up for it two months before, back when the sunlight of sobriety still hurt my eyes. My sponsor, Denise, was like a kid looking forward to summer camp as she drove us out of the bloody heat and sepia-colored desert of the Phoenix valley north to a national forest. Sharlotte and I, by this autumn weekend, had grown cocky in our burgeoning sobriety. She had exercised her free will to stop attending recovery meetings en toto while I kept going, though to diminishing returns. Now I just looked forward to moist, green mountain soil, the smell of pine trees and ponds, and the cool mountain air on lone walks through the woods. When Denise caught onto my plans, eye piercing me beneath her dripping dishwater blonde hair after the first morning shower, I bid farewell to my plans like a child to her favorite toy. She instead extolled the virtue of this annual excursion. A hundred or so women from all over the Southwest met here to celebrate and support each other’s recovery from overeating, sex, gambling, histrionic behavior, drugs, alcohol. In the national forest campgrounds there were real wood cabins with bunk beds and tractor rides and zip lining. And if I was feeling down or doubtful, there were 24-hour meetings for small groups or one-on-ones in the chapel. It wasn’t time for solitude, Denise said. It was time to enjoy the sober sisterhood.

Liquefy it. Put it in cups and drink the Kumbaya Kool-Aid. It tasted like saccharine.

I followed her around from sober celebration to sober celebration, feeling less acolyte, more show pony. In the auditorium we sat in two putty brown, poorly padded, metal chairs typical of VFW halls and church basements to watch a play written and performed by my sober sisters. On stage they used props made of construction paper, tape and markers, along with a few books commonly found in meetings, to recreate a scene seen every day in sober groups across the planet. Some played the role of long-sober people, some were new, and others were struggling to remember why to remain sober. “Find your higher power. It doesn’t have to be God; it can be this chair.” “Embrace the suck.” The audience, scattered in small clusters among the seven or eight rows of chairs, nodded. Mmm hmmm. Uh huh. Southern gospel style.

Later came freeze-dried eggs and other institutional foods over breakfast with some friends Denise had known for most of her thirteen years in the program. They caught up. I listened.

“We had been friends for years! But they assumed that since I wasn’t going to meetings I was back to drinking or drugging,” one said. She gulped from a large plastic mug commemorating last year’s retreat.

“Right. No one even called me when they heard I had my baby. They sure loved to help during my pregnancy—but stop going to meetings and where are they then?” another said. She shook her long, wavy brown hair, forking up another bite of plastic food.

Denise sat there silent, face bent toward her plate. Could she detect my declining interest?

Her skin was broken out, oily, her breathing audible from tables away as she sat down and made her third stab at sobriety in a year.

After the retreat, Denise backed out of lunch plans and left my calls and texts unanswered. I stopped going to meetings. They’d given me a good start in sobriety, but I alone had made wine a central part of my life; I would learn to eradicate it. Even when the shit storms come. Such as the time I finally landed a job, only to watch it disappear after four days. Still I did not drink. With the next oncoming storm, things weren’t as easy. I rode my scooter through it across the December Phoenix rush hour to take care of a computer problem that no, after all, the warranty didn’t cover. The people surrounding me in the mall and at traffic lights were laughing and smiling and singing in a festive holiday spirit, but Santa had put fire where my heart should’ve been, and didn’t it sound like a grand idea to pour wine all over it? I pictured myself pulling up to the neighborhood liquor store where I used to go, picking up a bottle or two, and walking up to the cashier, a young guy who didn’t know to tell me no. That’s where my fantasy reached the end of the tether. Instead, I drove back home through the rain, poured a fat glass of Diet Coke, and drank it on the cement square of my friend’s porch, looking out at the darkness, and belting out frustrated Living Colour lyric after frustrated Living Colour lyric through my headphones. Within twenty minutes of exposing my out-of-sight neighbors to a voice that would win no contests, the rage unclenched its claws. It dissipated like a hangover until the storm passed, leaving me spent, sober, relieved.

That’s the kind of stuff that drew such a powerful connection between Sharlotte and me. We were both learning what to do with life instead of drinking at it. We didn’t need meetings; we had each other. Until one day, her texts came closer and closer, almost palpable obstacles her mind was throwing in sobriety’s way.

“I’m a mess,” she wrote. It had been a week of similar texts. “I’m having a shitty day.” “Waiting for my shrink to return my call.” “I’m wiped out.” Her typing that Thursday grew increasingly illegible as the evening progressed. I walked out to the patio, cooled by the late evening desert. I dialed her up, keeping my voice calm.

In the initial phase the scientists divided the rats into two equal groups. Half remained in Rat Park. The other half was crammed into a typical lab cage. Each was given two containers: one of morphine-laced water sweetened incrementally with sucrose to entice their natural predilection for sweet things, another of unadulterated water.

“Hey there. Whatcha doin’?”

She sounded like she had a porterhouse steak for a tongue. “I’m drunk.”

I slumped into my patio chair, fired up a cigarette.

“I hope you don’t hate me now.”

“Silly girl, I don’t hate you.”

“No matter how hard I work to overcome my PTSD, it might just stick around. What if it does? What if this shit never goes away?”

“It really will get better,” I said, the beginning of a string of platitudes. “I understand.” “Of course I still love you.” I wanted to add some levity, tease her by saying, “Next time you want to drink, call me up. I’ll drink with you,” but what if she called my bluff—and did call me? What if after driving over there I didn’t convince her to put the bottle down but joined her instead? Is my beacon sturdy enough to scan for that? Is relapse contagious?

To slow those thoughts growing out of control I tried to switch to her, to put myself in her shoes. Relief rang through her voice. Ah, what a cost, that relief. She’d have a helluva hangover the next morning. She’d be shaky and sensitive and guilty. Guilty in Technicolor layers. Guilty long after the nausea and headache and crying. I could empathize with those hangovers, having had thousands of them. But I hadn’t yet had one from this side of Rat Park.

Rat Park was the name of an addiction study done in the late 1970s. In it, psychologist Bruce Alexander and his colleagues Robert Coambes and Patricia Hadaway developed a veritable Shangri-La for rats: two hundred square feet for a colony of thirty-two rats, heated comfortably, cushy with cedar shavings, colorful balls, wheels, and other playthings. In the initial phase the scientists divided the rats into two equal groups. Half remained in Rat Park. The other half was crammed into a typical lab cage. Each was given two containers: one of morphine-laced water sweetened incrementally with sucrose to entice their natural predilection for sweet things, another of unadulterated water. The comfy rats in Rat Park drank sixteen times less of the morphine-laced water than the caged rats, preferring plain water. When the researchers added an agent to the morphine water, mitigating the morphine’s effects yet retaining the sucrose sweetness, even the Rat Park inhabitants drank it.

Continuing their experiment, Alexander et al. turned a third group of rats into the Skid Row image of addicts, giving them nothing but morphine to drink until they were sufficiently entrenched in addiction. The scientists then divided them equally between a simple cage and Rat Park. Then they gave them a choice: morphine water or plain water. The caged group lapped up the drugged stuff. The Rat Park group, however, went less and less to it. “The implications,” Lauren Slater wrote in Opening Skinner’s Box, were that “addictions in progress are not inexorable.” Addicts choosing to sustain their addictions are in fact “quite subject to free will.”

*     *     *

Relapse is rarely the knee-jerk reaction portrayed in Hollywood. There’s a long process back to lifting a glass or placing a bet or shagging a stranger in a public bathroom. Research looks at it in three major stages: emotional, mental, physical. The emotional trigger can be a bad day at work—or even a great one. Take Gary, for instance. He’d been sober a dozen years before his relapse.

“My girlfriend asked when we first started dating, ‘You can’t ever drink? Not even a little drink with me?’ I told her no, but then when I thought about it I figured I could handle a drink or two. That wouldn’t make me the raging alcoholic I was before. But it did. Within weeks I was back to drinking like I’d never quit,” he said.

Half a dozen years into sobriety, Denise succumbed. Having come down with a flu while on holiday with family, she simply wanted some sleep. It came. With help from a shot of Bailey’s Irish Cream. She didn’t get drunk. She didn’t fall back into a drinking routine. She considers it a relapse, though. That solitary shot scared her enough to break her two-year hiatus from meetings, back to those people who had stopped talking to her, back to people who welcomed her back unequivocally. Seven years later that shot still gives her nightmares.

Her experience was exactly the kind of touchstone I needed in my fear of relapse by proxy. It was her tough love that fortified my resolve, strengthening it like steel against fear.

“Listen, you’re going to see people fall all around you for the rest of your life. You have to be prepared to walk over the bodies,” Denise said over sandwiches and salads after a meeting. “People are going to disappoint you by picking up a drink again. People you know will go to jail or die.”

Well, Sharlotte hadn’t continued drinking. And she never tested my resolve or called my bluff. The lines of communication grew dusty. No more art exhibits. No more burlesque shows. Maybe she thought less of me for returning to meetings after my paroxysm of relapse fear. She definitely thought my distance looked like judgment, even when we were together. Who could fault her for that? Sometimes the line between empathy and sympathy is gossamer. Sometimes it’s wide as a river. Sometimes it crushes friendships, and sometimes it changes your life. For now I could only stay on the side of sympathy, my blue lighthouse scanning my psyche in the Shangri-La of sobriety.

Maybe one day the beacon of sobriety will lead her this way, away from the bars of cages. I hope I’m still here to welcome her.

Special Guest Judge, Erin Aubry Kaplan

“With humor, heart and urgency, “Fragile Rat” describes the modern travails of addiction—and love—in language that’s honest, propulsive, and never cliched.”

– Erin Aubry Kaplan, is author of I Heart Obama (2016), and the collection of essays and reportage, Black Talk, Blue Thoughts and Walking the Color Line: Dispaches From a Black Journalista. She has written about African-American political, economic, and cultural issues since 1992, and is a regular contributor to Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Salon.com, Ms., and Essence.

Nichole L. Reber digs every day of sobriety and has reached new highs in life because of it. She hopes her essay shows a different side of addiction/recovery than the norm. Her nonfiction and literary criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in Entropy, Fanzine, PANK Magazine, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She writes a monthly blog series about Indigenous World Literature and Contemporary Asian Literature for Ploughshares. In addition to some awards, she holds an MFA from DePaul University.