Hello… No response.

Hello, I say, more loudly, insistent.

hel-lo… He whispers the word, barely able to talk.

hhhh…   hhhh…   hhhh… hhhhnn… The rest isn’t words, just a semi-vocalization, as though he’s learning how to coordinate speaking and breathing.  The sounds seem to come from a distance, as though he isn’t holding the phone directly to his ear.  He’s breathing hard, fast; by the time I register what’s happening I’ve heard him pant four, perhaps five times.  I hang up.

This is the second time I’ve hung up on him.  The first time, about three weeks ago, he’d called at 2 a.m.  That time he hadn’t even said hello.  He’d uttered a couple of half-moan half-grunt sounds, quickly, and then I’d hung up.

He has only called twice, but already I think of him as “my caller,” already I expect to hear from him again.  He will call, I will answer.  He will give some audible indication that he is masturbating, I will hang up.  A routine has been established.  We have a relationship.

I am not afraid but I am slightly worried, concerned that it might be one of my students.  I have no idea, of course, who it is – instinct, more than logic, suggests a student, although there is a degree of logic involved.  The caller is clearly a man, and many of the men I know are current or former students.  If it is a student, then I am disturbed more than fearful.  I love my students, can’t imagine anything bad resulting from even this warped version of communication with one of them.  I am not afraid, but I tremble when I hang up the phone, tremble as I get back into bed.  I’m hardly afraid at all.

Both times he’s called I’ve had the urge to yell into the phone.  Say something, motherfucker!  You asshole, don’t call me again! Following the anger, there’s been curiosity, almost concern.  I’ve wanted to ask, sincerely, Who are you?  Do I know you? And I’ve fantasized chatting with him, casually, flippantly, as he jerked off: So, what makes a man pick up the phone at this point in the process, exactly?

We’ve had less than thirty seconds of contact, but he has entered my world.

I wonder if it’s purely coincidence, my number picked at random.  (But saved, for he called again…)  I wonder if he knows where I live, what I look like.  I wonder how old he is, what he looks like.  I have begun to picture him as a particular student, a tall, blonde nineteen-year old who would email me from time to time during the semester he attended my class, a year ago.  He seemed like a decent kid, but was a poor student.  We’d had little contact outside of class – I can’t even remember his name – but I’d sensed a jittery energy about him, a kind of edginess that registered only vaguely at the time.  He never had anything of consequence to say in his emails, would write hi, hope you’re having a nice day…  I’d respond yes, you too, don’t forget to turn in your essay on Monday.

He is probably not my caller, but my brain finds it helpful to focus on an image, understands that it’s easier to deal with something concrete than something abstract.  And so I picture this kid, think he was a mediocre student, he would probably be a mediocre stalker.

It’s not until I write those words that I realize I must be at least a little worried that my caller might stalk me.  I’m surprised at this response, see it as an over-reaction.  I remember my former student: he is too lazy to stalk me, I think.  I try to laugh.

After the second incident I attempt to learn his number, use the *69 phone service, but the number has been blocked.  I can report the problem to the phone company, but that would result in my number being changed.  I don’t want my number changed.  I don’t want my life interfered with at all.  What I want – even more than wanting the calls to stop – is to know who he is.

I want him to know that he has interrupted my sleep; to wake to his urgent breathing is  profoundly disorienting, cruel.  I want him to know that I cried after the first time he called, that I felt deeply lonely.  When I think of touching my lover I sometimes think of him, and have to stop.  When I touch myself I sometimes think of him, and have to stop.  He has not altered my ability to fantasize but he has altered my ability to proceed unharmed; he has affected my understanding of intent and desire; he has slithered into my psyche and I pray for him to leave.

I hope he is not simply an angry, violent young man, that he is something better, someone capable of change, someone who will abandon this habit – the habit of summoning a woman; of creating, for himself, a witness – who he thinks of, I imagine, as a participant.  (I hope he is just a stupid kid thinking he’s not hurting anyone.  I hope he is not cruel.  I hope he is not lonely).  I want him to know that I am not a participant, am not his lover, his girlfriend, his partner, his wife.  And I want him to know that I want him gone, I want to light a match at the edge of his image and watch it burn.  He has trespassed into my dreams, an intruder, a coward; he has transgressed boundaries with almost as much force as if having lunged bodily from the bushes outside my bedroom window.

I am not afraid but I am alive and because I am alive I am unable to stop thinking and one of the things I think about is him and perhaps in a way he has complicated my life, made my imagination richer and for that I wonder if I should thank him.  Thank you, I think, thank you, my caller.  I pity you I worry about you; you make me sick you make me furious you make me feel like we are the only two people in the world.  I am awake in the night, alone, my body curled quietly under the stars.  And you are somewhere else, one hand on yourself, the other hand reaching for the phone.  You call and I answer.

We are the only two people in the world and so we do what people do: reach out.  And damnit, I have romanticized the situation but part of me believes it: he reaches out by calling and I reach out by writing.  He has chosen to reach toward me and I have chosen to reach back, though indirectly – he will never read this – but still, I am writing, in part, to him.  And although part of me has softened to my caller I do not want to hear what I hear when he calls.  And so we thwart each other: I hang up on him; he does not, cannot hear what I say here.  And because the idea of failing to connect breaks my heart I am sad, and because I am sad for this stranger who has, quite clearly, injured my imagination, I am angry.  And because my vocabulary often reaches its limits when I am angry, all I can think to scream at him is FUCK YOU.  Fuck you, caller.  Fuck you.

You make my heart tired, caller… but what you do with your body does not interest me.  No, wait, it interests me to this extent: I am curious about why – why do you call?  Does your desire have any relationship at all to my understanding of desire; do you think about intimacy, loneliness, fear, love, pleasure, sadness, rage?  What we do with our bodies, alone, together…  how we confront ourselves, how we expose ourselves, how we face one another… what we hunger for, just how naked we can feel…

How alike are we?  Why do you call?
These questions shake me up, my caller, as much as your whisper in the night.

I had met all of these comrades by way of my mother; for once I’d finished clear-cutting the juvenile stacks at the public library, she became my primary source of reading material. She was adept at eyeing my emotional condition and assuaging it with the appropriate nineteenth-century novel, and I’m not sure that it would ever have occurred to either of us that I might benefit from a jolt. It did, however, occur to my father, who, rushing through the house on his way to work, paused long enough one day to hand me his paperback copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

To understand my reaction to this book, you need to understand not only how white I was but how naïvely white. And how naïvely female. Of course I knew I was a white girl, sister of another white girl, daughter of white parents. Nonetheless, though my parents were well educated and well read, both had been born into the rural-industrial working class: into small-time farming and coal mining, steel-mill labor and truck driving. My parents had struggled to evade that fate: they’d gone to college; they’d read books; they’d attained advanced degrees. Yet although we now lived decorously on the outskirts of a city, where we patronized bookstores and listened to classical music and supported liberal causes and ate fish (a horrifying food, as far as my Appalachian relatives were concerned), my parents remained fearful of urban dangers and thin-skinned about their past. They were nervous about visitors, suspicious of outsiders’ motives, self-flagellating about their shyness.

As a child, I often and easily imagined our family of four on an island in the center of a deep lake, in a Conestoga wagon jolting across an endless prairie. We were cut off, cut adrift, dependent only on one another; yet also cherished, yet also protected. So when I return to that moment when my father handed me the autobiography, I also see now what I didn’t see then: my father’s bravery. Given his own fears, I can still hardly believe that he was the one person who encouraged me, wide-eyed and clueless, to open a book and crash face-first into cruel, brilliant, unforgiving Malcolm X.

The books that hate me may be very different from one another in most ways, but all share a particular characteristic: they ruthlessly dissect attitudes that I’ve tended to take for granted. Novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, for instance: she’s an author whose books hate me, though on the surface her Edwardian family novels might seem to have more in common with Dickens et al. than with The Autobiography of Malcolm X. But in truth, Ivy is the meanest writer I know, and the especial target of her excoriating comedy is my humane and optimistic assumption that “we can work out this problem if we just sit down and talk about it.” Fat chance, as the opening of her novel The Last and the First makes clear:

“What an unbecoming light this is!” said Eliza Heriot, looking from the globe above the table at the faces around it.

“Are we expected to agree?” said her son, as the light fell on her own face. “Or is it a moment for silence?”

“The effect is worse with every day. I hardly dare look at any of you.”

“You have found the courage,” said her daughter, “and it is fair that you should show it. You appointed the breakfast hour yourself.”

Lady Heriot did not suggest that anyone else should appoint it.

Her characters certainly do talk; in fact, talk is about all they do. But they purposely use family conversation to ridicule, to flay, to tyrannize. In a Compton-Burnett novel, nobody ever feels better after a chat. Talk equals damage, and Dame Ivy makes it clear that anyone who believes otherwise is a fool. She is a writer who takes a gleeful, amoral pleasure in identifying with her tyrants, and she is so skilled at her work that a reader quickly, and dreadfully, begins to do the same. As essayist Thomas Rayfiel has written of Dame Ivy, “One is complicit with the artist’s indulgence in her vice, executed so skillfully, argued with such convincing intelligence, you find yourself nodding in unwilling agreement with rapists, torturers, murderers whose actions are justified by arguments that seem, in the context of what she has created, incontrovertible. This can’t be happening, you think. This can’t be happening to me.”

In a way, the same could be said of Malcolm X, who buttresses his opinions and assertions with what seem, in the context of the Autobiography, to be incontrovertible arguments. There’s no answering him. Later, away from the book, I might begin to invent some rejoinder, some defense. But with his book in my hand, his words spilling into my addled brain “like steam under pressure”: then, even when he wrong, he’s right.

“I started to be aware of the peculiar attitude of white people toward me,” wrote Malcolm. “I sensed it had to do with my father. It was an adult version of what several white children had said at school, in hints, or sometimes in the open, which really expressed what their parents had said—that the Black Legion or the Klan had killed my father.”

I was a very fair-skinned child, not quite as pale as a redhead but close: the sort of white kid who is prone to blushes and rashes and can sunburn in half a minute. Around our house my complexion was the focus of fretting and, for my sister, annoyance: as in, “We can’t go to the beach because Dawn is too white.” I’d never felt especially happy about my paleness. But until I read the Autobiography, I had never heard it so intensely and obsessively chronicled and generalized—or so reviled.

White, white, white! No longer did the word refer to my own irksome coloring. Now it had become shorthand for every member of my family, all of my teachers, all of the other writers I was reading, all of the violinists I was listening to, all of the composers I was studying. For the first time in my life, I became conscious of belonging to an unsavory subgroup that was not denoted by my relatives, or my parents’ money struggles, or my terrible performances in gym class, or any of the other worries that had heretofore beset me. I was white. That’s all it took. I was white. Therefore, I was tainted.

If I’d been older, I might have gotten angry at Malcolm’s assertions. If I’d been a boy acclimated to heroics and grandstanding, I might have worshipped the fervor while smoothly exempting myself from blame. But I wasn’t able to exempt myself, and this speaker’s fervor, like the fervor of every overbearing man I’d encountered, terrified me into silence. What’s more, I believed he had the right to hate me. For in the same hot and scornful breath as his generalizations, he offered proof. Had my father been murdered by the Klan? No, my father was sitting peaceably in his study grading papers. I may have worried over a million unlikely events, but I had never, ever, worried—not even once—that the Klan would break down our door and murder my father. Malcolm, however, had worried, and his fears had come true.

Thus, within the first twenty pages of his book, did Malcolm X assert his supremacy over me. No matter how unfair he was, how wrong, how hateful, he always managed to twist my arm behind my back; he always managed to win. He accused me of thinking thoughts that I never remembered thinking, of drawing conclusions I never knew I was drawing. He announced, “What I am trying to say is that it just never dawned on [white people] that I could understand, that I wasn’t a pet, but a human being. They didn’t give me credit for having the same sensitivity, intellect, and understanding that they would have been ready and willing to recognize in a white boy in my position.” He declared, “This is the sort of kindly condescension which I try to clarify today, to these integration-hungry Negroes, about their ‘liberal’ white friends, those so-called ‘good white people’—most of them anyway. I don’t care how nice one is to you; the thing you must always remember is that almost never does he really see you as he sees himself, as he sees his own kind.”

Just before I entered first grade, my family moved from Maryland to Rhode Island, into the house where we stayed until I was almost thirteen. Next door, on the other side of the peeling picket fence, lived Maynard and his parents: Judy and Maynard Senior. Maynard, who was my younger sister’s age, possessed a desirable swing-set and a dippy overactive mongrel named Choo-Choo. Despite these advantages, his yard was small, whereas our corner lot possessed a climbing tree as well as numerous good places to hide. I don’t know whether it was Maynard Senior’s or my father’s idea to remove one of the slats in the picket fence; but very soon after we moved into our house, my sister and Maynard and I were wriggling back and forth through that fence, from one yard to the next—swinging, throwing sand, chasing each other, barking at Choo-Choo, hiding under the rhododendrons.

The year was 1970 or 1971, and Maynard’s family was black. Malcolm X’s assertions vibrated in the aether, but my six-year-old ear was oblivious. Did I give Maynard credit for “sensitivity, intellect, and understanding”? Probably not, seeing as it wouldn’t have occurred to me to give anybody credit for those attributes. Did I treat him “with kindly condescension”? Yes, I did; I certainly did. But not because he was black: because he was a four-year-old kid, the same age as my little annoying sister, whereas I was six and was thus entitled to boss him around.

As I grew older, I played with Maynard less often. He was a boy, a younger boy, veering off into boy interests that I didn’t share. But the family stayed in our lives. Judy and my mother occasionally drank coffee together; Maynard Senior kept an eye on our house when we were away. During the six years we lived next door to Maynard’s family, I have not the slightest memory of any parental conversation about skin color, no sense that my father could “never . . . really see [Maynard Senior] as he sees himself, as he sees his own kind.”

What I do remember is that, on the day young Maynard came home from school and found his heart-diseased mother dead on the kitchen floor, my mother was the person he called for help.

A touching story, but Malcolm X would have spit on it. Not a detail, not an anecdote, not even Judy’s dead body would have changed his mind about the speciousness of “‘liberal white friends” and the idiocy of “integration-hungry Negroes.” What’s more, simply recognizing that he wouldn’t have fallen for this version of history, knowing how much he would have scorned my so-called “innocent” reverie, makes me question it myself. Clearly, at a level beyond memory or bewildered argument, I share the guilt of my race. But that’s not the only guilt I share, and not all that the Autobiography hates about me.

For yes, it’s the book itself that hates me, and that will hate me forever. Malcolm may have been dead for more than forty years, but his chronicle never stops seething. Its words and paragraphs, its splintering yellow pages, the chipped cover with its creased, angry photograph assemble a composite life. Sometimes, as a child, I seemed to feel the paper smoldering beneath my gaze. Words leapt like portents from another planet: zoot suit, reefer, hustle, daddy-o. “A friend of mine [was] named ‘Sammy the Pimp,’” shrugged the book. “I wore my guns as today I wear my neckties,” it announced. And, dreadfully, “I believe [Uncle Tom’s Cabin is] the only novel I have ever read since I started serious reading”. . . meaning that “I—yes, this scary, in-your-face polemic—I am what equals serious reading. You, with all your novels, your idiotic poems: you know nothing about it.”

The Autobiography was first published in 1964, the year I was born. Its scorching presumptions cowed me when I was fifteen, and they continue to cow me each time I reread the book. Every single page finds a way to remind me that I am ignorant, that novels and poetry aren’t serious reading, that Bach doesn’t hold a candle to Lionel Hampton, that “marriage breakups are caused by these movie- and television-addicted women expecting some bouquets and kissing and hugging and being swept out like Cinderella for dinner and dancing—then getting mad when a poor, scraggly husband comes in tired and sweaty from working like a dog all day, looking for some food.”

This last ignorance may have been the most devastating one to discover. For at fifteen, when I first read the Autobiography, I also learned that I shared the guilt of my sex; and when I say guilt, what I really mean is that deep, habituated, anxious sense of unworthiness that so many women share. For Malcolm X is ruthless about us, and his pronouncements are austere, chilling, irrevocable.

“All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak: they are attracted to the male in whom they see strength.”

“I always had the feeling that Ella somehow admired my rebellion against the world, because she, who had so much more drive and guts than most men, often felt stymied by having been born female.”

“I’d had too much experience that women were only tricky, deceitful, untrustworthy flesh.”

“To tell a woman not to talk was like telling Jesse James not to carry a gun, or telling a hen not to cackle.”

According to the Autobiography, when Malcolm finally does find the perfect wife, she is perfect because she is perfectly obedient to him:

Betty . . . understands me. I would even say I don’t imagine many other women might put up with the way I am. Awakening the brainwashed black man and telling this arrogant, devilish white man the truth about himself, Betty understands, is a full-time job. If I have work to do when I am home, the little time I am at home, she lets me have the quiet I need to work in. I’m rarely at home more than half of any week: I have been away as much as five months. I never get much chance to take her anywhere, and I know she likes to be with her husband.

Nevertheless, he can barely bring himself to admit that he is fond of her: “I guess by now I will say I love Betty. She’s the only woman I ever thought about loving.”

As a devotee of nineteenth-century novels, I’d already read plenty of books that tacitly agreed with such presumptions about women. Writing about Flora Finching, the middle-aged romantic chatterbox in Little Dorrit, Dickens might as well have said, “To tell a woman not to talk [is] like telling Jesse James not to carry a gun.” Writing about Mrs. Proudie, the bishop’s overbearing wife in the Barchester novels, Trollope might as well have said, “She, who had so much more drive and guts than most men, often felt stymied by having been born female.” But these stereotypes, if no less wrenching in fact, were more palatable to me because they were individualized. As characters, Mrs. Proudie really was an obnoxious loudmouth who made unnecessary trouble for her timid husband. Beneath Flora’s silly chatter, I found a loyal, kind-hearted woman who deserved her reader’s patience and goodwill.

But the Autobiography was different. Its blanket pronouncements claimed to reveal real women, not characters; real white people, not characters; a real hero named Malcolm X, not a character. What else could I do but believe its message? I was fifteen years old. I was longing for love, and smitten with that longing. I was melancholy, overexcited, prone to outbursts, vain, nervous, self-defeating, and talkative. Not only was I white, but I showed every sign of growing up to be exactly the kind of woman that Malcolm would have despised. The Autobiography hated me, and the news was appalling.

Thirty years later, I’m a different person, a different reader. I’ve aged. I’ve become better acquainted with the worlds of men and politics and polemic. By and large, I’ve learned to disconnect myself from the prejudices of the books I read. I’ve learned what not to reread: what poisons are too lethal to try twice. I’m also more aware of this book’s authorial mysteries. As the title page suggests, its creation depended on “the assistance of Alex Haley.” Though I can only guess at how much and what sort of aid Haley offered, I know he was a novelist and thus was likely to have influenced story organization and development. Clearly, Malcolm X could formulate his own speeches and polemics, so perhaps what Haley did for the book was to collaborate with the man to create the character.

And that complicated character is why I keep reading the Autobiography. Perhaps my reluctant attachment arises, at least in part, from Malcolm X’s fervent honesty to his own convictions. As my friend Nick reminds me, “he was assassinated for making [Nation of Islam leader] Elijah Muhammad’s many marital infidelities known to the outside world.  So [even though] he had some truly close-minded ideas about women, . . . he understood that fidelity is an important aspect of human relationships.” That perception seems, in my case, to apply to literary relationships as well. My fidelity to the Autobiography requires, as marriage does, a certain commitment to blindness—that particular sort of blindness that is the flip side of trust. It’s dangerous, this fidelity; for it tests both self-negation and self-respect. It requires me to believe. This isn’t to say that I have to force myself to accept every one of Malcolm X’s pronouncements. But when I read, I do have to believe in his fervor; I do have to believe in his courage; I do have to believe in his rhetorical intensity and his insistent, rhythmic oration.

Oh, that sound! Really, I think that’s what lures me back and back to this difficult book. It’s like a crazy dance that won’t stop, that won’t ever stop, that will kill you on the dance floor.

If you’ve ever lindy-hopped, you’ll know what I’m talking about. With most girls, you kind of work opposite them, circling, side-stepping, leading. Whichever arm you lead with is half-bent out there, your hands are giving that little pull, that little push, touching her waist, her shoulders, her arms. She’s in, out, turning, whirling, wherever you guide her. With poor partners, you feel their weight. They’re slow and heavy. But with really good partners, all you need is just the push-pull suggestion. They guide nearly effortlessly, even off the floor and into the air, and your little solo maneuver is done on the floor before they land, when they join you, whirling, right in step.

There’s no way in the world I’d ever risk going out onto that floor with Malcolm X. Talk about poor partners: good Lord, he’d be better off trampling me under his sharkskin shoes. No, I can’t dance with this man. Everything about me is wrong. But still, I want to watch from the sidelines. I want to see him work; I want to see him shout. At least, when I’m reading his book, I get to breathe the smoke; I get to listen to the trumpets wail. I might matter less than any other character in the world, but at least I get to play my own pale and clumsy bit part.

“Should Ophelia trust Hamlet’s expressions of love?” Ms. Baker asked.

“No way!” Keena called out. Several others also shook their heads.

“Why not?” Ms. Baker pressed. “Mavis…? Are you with us? No? Tran? Don’t look at me. Look at the text.”

Keena started to speak but Ms. Baker shushed her, making brief but meaningful eye contact with each of the other dozen or so students facing her.

She waited.

I watched. In a few weeks she would be leaving for a six-month stint teaching in South Africa; only marginally employed, I was trying to decide if I wanted to be her replacement.

One boy, with his back to the horseshoe arrangement, had his eyes fixed on the Boston skyline a mile or two away. This million-dollar view was a selling point for me, and I enjoyed the irony of finding it here in Madison Park, a vocational high school in one of Boston’s most blighted neighborhoods. The other dreamer, a girl wearing headphones, had her eyes half-closed and inclined toward the ceiling while she mouthed the words to her song. The rest of the students had their noses in Hamlet.

“Perfume?” one small voice said.

“Way ta go, Maria.” Ms. Baker said. “Laertes compares Hamlet’s words to perfume. But what’s so bad about perfume?”

Maria shrugged.

“Look at the text. James? Damien?”

The room was silent. Ms. Baker waited. Five long seconds…maybe more.

“It’s sweet but not lasting!” Maria cried out.

“Yes!” Ms. Baker said, breaking into a big smile.

I had approached this class skeptically. Hamlet? The language of Shakespeare is a stretch for most native English speakers, and would be doubly so, I assumed, for these students, the majority of whom were born in—you name it—Brazil, Cambodia, Vietnam, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, Guatemala, Somalia, Nigeria, Cape Verde. . . . And it was a stretch. When they read the text aloud, even the most proficient students struggled to pronounce the words. Making sense of them required an almost physical effort that left the students thrilled but spent. Yet line by line, under Ms. Baker’s direction, everyone seemed to grasp the story line and give themselves over to the characters’ dilemmas. Everyone, that is, but the two tuned-out students. (“Up all night selling drugs,” Ms. Baker later said of the boy. And of the girl: “Bad situation at home.” She wasn’t just being flip, I later learned—she knew each kid’s story.)

“So what is Laertes advising his sister?”

“Not to do it with Hamlet?” Russell proposed.

Ms. Baker nodded. “Exactly!”

I wondered if I’d just hit them on a good day when the subject was spicy and close to home. But subsequent classes over the next couple of days convinced me that much of Hamlet was uncannily relevant to these students. For one thing, the violence was familiar. Even the substantial number of students who lived in safe, orderly households were never far removed from the high-drama tales of murder and revenge that appeared in the neighborhood papers and spread through the corridors at school. Furthermore, as Ms. Baker reminded them, the Prince was seventeen, a student like themselves who studied in a foreign land, far from home. And Ophelia, she was even younger and had all the questions about love and sex and trust that they had. Everything about the way Ms. Baker approached the material conveyed her belief that Shakespeare was writing for them as much as anyone else (as of course he was), and the students bought it.

I was impressed. Inspired. The kids seemed bright and motivated; they touched and excited me. There was Nadine, an African-American with attitude to spare, a novel-in-the-works at home, and a new gender-bending get-up everyday. (Black lipstick and lacy long-Johns beneath army fatigues!) And there was Ha. In her native Vietnam, she had been severely burned by a kerosene fire and unable to go to school for five years. Now she was on her way to being valedictorian. Slight and quiet, she had the grace of a heron and the tenacity of a bull terrier.

Ms. Baker assured me the work load would be manageable. A student teacher would take two of my courses, leaving me with just four others—two in Senior English, two in Journalism, all relatively small and each meeting only twice a week. As for overseeing the school paper, Maurice, the student editor, was highly responsible, and besides, the kids knew the routine.

I decided I was game. So what if I was “overqualified,” as the dean had brusquely pronounced upon eyeing my resume documenting almost twenty years of teaching writing in colleges and graduate schools. I needed a job. And although this one didn’t pay particularly well, it offered adventure, a way to break out of a life that I had noticed was becoming increasingly insular. As a high school girl in Queens, New York, I’d acquainted myself with the wider world by reading—Black Boy, Black Like Me, The Other America. I was president of my high school’s “Human Relations” club; I participated in exchange programs with students from Harlem, and, in the summer, I lived and worked on a Blackfoot Indian Reservation in Montana. During college and afterwards, I traveled extensively, both physically and psychically. As a college teacher, I attended dozens of panels and workshops with titles like “Dismantling Racism” and “Valuing Diversity.” Even so, I’d noticed that although my son seemed entirely at home in his racially balanced school, all the friends he invited home were white. I didn’t have to look far to find possible explanations: my own guests were an equally homogenous bunch, and when my son and I were out on the streets of Cambridge and I ran into people I knew, they, too, were almost always white.

So, yes, I had my selfish reasons for wanting this job—I felt I was missing out by not having more contact with people of color; I wanted to feel more at home in my own multi-racial community—but also, I thought I could do a good job. Although my experience with high school teaching was limited to brief stints in largely white, upper-middle-class schools, most of them long ago, teaching was teaching, I told myself. I had a Master’s in the Art of it, and, as a veteran teacher of College Writing, I knew what high school seniors should be working toward. At the very least, I reasoned, I’d do a better job than the disaffected, untrained sub they would otherwise most likely get. Furthermore, I’d have two more weeks of training in which I could learn from Ms. Baker.

Two years would have been better, but already I had picked up a lot. I had noticed, for example, how physical she was with the kids—hugging the ones she hadn’t seen in a while, affectionately clonking the heads of the ones whose attention drifted—unless, that is, she’d made a calculated decision to ignore a particular dreamer or doodler for the day. I saw how she, a statuesque, olive-skinned Jew (I’m a petite, pale one) earned their trust by coaching the girls’ basketball team and staying late to teach a prep course for the SAT’s. How she make it her business to learn about their families, their churches, their talents and traumas. How her sternness was always mingled with compassion—a compassion so habitual and far-reaching, it extended even to a bug-ridden computer with whom I once noticed her empathizing. She’d be a tough act to follow but I figured that the structures and routines she’d established, and the positive attitudes she’d nurtured, would carry over to me.



My main job during my official training period was to help students with their Hamlet term papers. These were a requirement for graduation, one for which Ms. Baker had lobbied hard, because she wanted—expected—a good portion of her students to go to college, and for that they needed experience with academic writing.

Of course I agreed, but after a few hours of working with individual students, I began to appreciate the enormity of the task before us. The critical articles they were expected to read (and utilize and cite) were downright tortuous to most of them. And while several students could relate the play to their own lives in powerful and touching ways (“My father also died and my mother dishonored his name by marrying too soon”), such comparisons didn’t add up to an arguable thesis. I figured that the best first step would be to simply chat with students about what had struck them in the play. Laureen and I got off to a slow start but when she casually called Hamlet a transformer, I thought we might be onto something.

“Yes, go on.”

“A transformer,” she repeated.

“You mean he has a transforming effect on others?”

She shook her head.

Transformer? Some new pop psychology phrase akin to “enabler”? The only other “transformer” I knew was the metal cylinder on power lines, beaming out possibly dangerous electro-magnetic fields.

After a lengthy who’s-on-first-like exchange, I realized Laureen was comparing Hamlet to one of those brashly-colored, monstrous plastic action figures my eight-year-old had recently introduced to me. Push a button, one head retreats, another pops up; pull a lever, the shoulders sprout wings.

Hamlet. Transformer.

Transformer. Hamlet.

The comparison seemed both ludicrous and marvelous, but before we had a chance to explore it further, the bell rang—at which point, I glanced at the boy next to Laureen whom I’d intended to “help” next, and saw that his paper was shredded. So many times had he erased what he’d written that not a single word remained intact. By the time Ms. Baker left, maybe three quarters of the students had completed a paper she deemed successful. This seemed miraculous, especially considering that several of the remaining quarter had shown up only once or twice since the semester began. (Next to one of those names in the grade book, I noticed the word “incarcerated.”) It would be my job to help and prod the ones who still had a chance. This was the only bit of old business I had to deal with. As for future World Lit texts, I was limited by what books were available—Ms. Baker had ordered Salman Rushdie’s Haroun. Beyond that I could more or less do my own thing and Baker encouraged me to play to my strengths, i.e., work primarily on student writing.



I had what I thought was the perfect first lesson. I would ask students to free-write on their names, then read aloud or just talk about what they’d written. I had used this ice-breaker with countless groups of various ages and levels and it had never failed to increase people’s comfort with writing, with each other, and with me. It also helped people plumb deeply buried feeling and it always elicited much wonderful writing. Now I had what would surely be the ideal group for this exercise—hailing from so many different places and having names both splendid and strange.

I began with brief instructions on what I meant by “free” writing—my usual spiel:

Write quickly, don’t stop. Don’t worry about grammar or spelling or punctuation. Don’t worry about what others will think of what you’re saying. These won’t be graded and you don’t have to share them if you don’t want to. If you get stuck, don’t stop, just keep repeating yourself or writing ‘stuck’ ‘stuck’ ‘stuck’ until a new thought comes. The writing, of course, will be messy and full of mistakes but that’s okay—these are meant as a warm-up, a way to mine your brain. We’ll write for about eight minutes. No talking while we write. Any questions?

Usually there are a couple, but this time the questions, the balking and bitching went on and on:

“Do we write about our first name or last?”

“There’s nothing to say about mine.”

“I don’t have a pencil.”

“I sprained my thumb yesterday.”

“I miss Miss Baker.”

Most kids, I think, genuinely wanted to cooperate, and in the end, quite a few came up with something interesting—one boy was named after an uncle who died choking on a chicken bone; another, after Portugal’s greatest soccer player—but what should have taken twenty minutes took forty-five and a couple of kids produced nothing at all. One had spent his time drawing magnificent cartoons. And another—I had been excited to see him writing non-stop, but when I took a closer look I saw his name, again and again, in giant loopy script—three or four pages of this and just this. He, I later learned, had “special needs,” as did many of my students. The term was relatively new then, new at least to me, for colleges had not yet started to admit such kids, at least not knowingly. The phrase so clearly implied that someone knew what those needs were and knew how to meet them, but if that was the case, no one had shared their knowledge with me.

When it was time to read aloud or just talk about what they’d written, only two students volunteered. When, near the end of class, I asked students to exchange phone numbers so they’d have someone to call about the homework if they were absent—creating a sense of community is always my first priority. Well, I was prepared for some flack at the h-word (Ms. Baker had told me it was hard to get them to do any.) but what surprised me were the several students who refused to give out their numbers. “My mother told me to never give it out,” one shy Latina girl explained. Others, I later learned, were worried about calls from the immigration officials or a cousin’s parole officer.

The day wasn’t a total failure, I decided on my drive home, but I was struck by the amount of energy it had required to achieve so little, and by how I, too—like Hamlet, like my immigrant students—was in a foreign land. There was a lot I would need to learn before I could demonstrate even a modicum of cultural sensitivity.

Overqualified? I’d had my doubts all along (had long ago switched from high school to college teaching in part because the latter was a breeze in comparison) but now I cringed at the foolish vanity that had allowed me to bask in the dean’s assessment and even grant it some credence. What use were my elaborate, well-honed systems of responding to first drafts, of teaching students how to evaluate their own work and respond to the work of their peers, if there were to be no drafts to begin with, or not enough trust to share them with others?

Sobered, I arrived the next day with a new bag of tricks: two “Name Your Baby” books and several Xeroxed copies of the book’s special section on popular African-American names—the Asians had to go it alone. The books created much excitement. “My name means lion,” one boy roared. “Mine, king,” said another, flexing his muscles. I thought high school students were a little old for such unabashed strutting; still I was delighted by the enthusiasm. One boy was so turned on he wanted to Xerox the whole book!

In another class, after trying free-writing again (and encountering only slightly less resistance), I handed out an excerpt from Sandra Cisnero’s House on Mango Street. This two-page meditation on the name Esmerelda, had been a real crowd-pleaser when I’d used it with college students and adults. Sensuous and lyrical, imaginative and emotional, it would serve as the perfect model for the revision I wanted these students to do of their free-writing—or so I thought. In fact, several students seemed intrigued, but near the end of class, a girl named Lupita loudly proclaimed: “With Miss Baker we were doing term papers on Hamlet. Now we’re doing baby stuff!”

Baby stuff. The phrase haunted me, even though Lupita’s “friend” had looked at me sympathetically and said, “When we were doing Hamlet, she complained about that!”

The ironies both amused and unsettled me. Here was a Latina female snubbing Cisneros in favor of Shakespeare, personal reflections in favor of term papers. I was reminded of an article I’d read years before. Lisa Delpit, an African-American educator, argued that free-writing was all well and good for elite white students who knew standard grammar and needed loosening up, but most minority students, she insisted, needed to learn standard grammar, in order to gain entrance into the dominant culture. All that loosey-goosey stuff, she said, was selling them short. I didn’t agree at the time; I believed there was room for both imagination and mechanics, freedom and discipline, just as I have always believed there is room for both dead white males and live women of color. But now I wondered if I ought to ally myself more with Delpit. I started second-guessing myself at every turn.

Of course, every teaching situation—every student, really—requires one to continually reassess and recalibrate. Jose, one senses, needs pumping up; Franklin a kick in the butt. Last week, Darlene needed time out to cool off; this week, she needs to be pulled back in. Such is the delicate balancing act any good teacher must perform. It requires dozens of little decisions every few minutes with success dependent on one’s abilities to read countless subtle cues. Are tears, for example, evidence of too much stress, or a calculated ploy for leniency? Is a complaint that work is too easy to be taken on face value or is it a cover-up for embarrassment that what sounds easy feels hard? I’d always prided myself on my ability to assess which students needed what, and how hard I should push, but now, unschooled in the culture of poverty and racism, and confronted by so many different personalities and codes of behavior, I was misreading some cues and being misread. How else to explain the costly blunder I made some time after that “baby stuff” complaint.

I had come across an editorial by long-time Teacher’s Union President, Albert Shankar, much of which was in the voice of a straight-A student from the inner-city who then transferred to a suburban school where she received C’s for comparable work. Realizing she didn’t yet know half of what she would need for success in college, this girl, in a stern but compassionate tone, was trying to warn her brothers and sisters not to rest too easy.

I made copies of the article, passed it out, and we read it together. It seemed like a good way to convey that I, like Ms. Baker, had no intention of selling them short. I believed they were capable of making it to college, but it wasn’t going to happen without a lot of hard work. Probably some students took the article in the spirit I intended, but Nadine—my source for much information, no doubt not all of it true—told me later that some students were insulted by it. They felt I was putting them down.

If anyone else had delivered this news, I would have been quicker to shrug it off, but Nadine had some kind of hold on me and I took the comment to heart. I even considered the possibility that some part of me hidden to myself had wanted to put a few of my students down. It was true I’d been feeling frustrated, embarrassed even, by my inability to control the few unruly ones who made it impossible for the others to learn. But no, I concluded, I wasn’t trying to get back at anyone; rather I’d made the mistake of imagining that these kids would react to such a wake-up with renewed determination—just as I would have. Now I realized that I—my psyche, my habitual ways of reacting—might not be the best source of information about how these students would react (and I’m still learning that I shouldn’t even assume that those more like me will react to things the way I would.) I hadn’t considered how fragile many of these kids’ self-images were. (“Why would you want to teach here?” more than one student asked me, bringing tears to my eyes.) I didn’t think enough about how many times each day they were dragged down by reasons to give up; I didn’t realize how easily they might interpret my attempt to motivate them, as my way of saying they were too far behind to ever catch up.

Just how damaging that mistake was, I’ll never know. I do know that shortly after it, I seemed to enter a period where I was getting, not merely sullenness and lack of preparedness, but rudeness and hostility. Take Henry—too handsome for his own good, I decided. Flashing his disarming smile, he’d arrive twenty minutes late and charge across the room, belting, “Yo. Wassup? How’s it going?” Take Nadine. From that point on, she seemed out to get me at every turn. When I gave the winner of some class contest a prize (a never-touched blank journal I was reluctant to part with), Nadine publicly proclaimed it a cheap gift. Only now does it occur to me she might have been chagrined she hadn’t won the contest herself. Or maybe she just saw how hard I was trying, how insecure I was, and she reacted as any self-respecting adolescent would: perversely. Quite likely, her cruelty and Henry’s histrionics and Veronica’s surliness were just standard issue—part of a lengthy testing period these students—so frequently themselves the target of abuse—subjected all authority figures to? When I e-mailed Ms. Baker about some of my frustrations, she wrote back that it took her “six months to get them to do anything” and she was sorry to hear that apparently they were going to “make me do all that work over again.”

I don’t mean to imply that those first few weeks (months?) were disastrous. They had their bright spots, the brightest of which may have been working with my student teacher. Though it seemed farcical for me to be mentoring anyone when I so needed mentoring myself, I loved observing and advising and conversing with Karen, and my insights and suggestions helped her prevail through some classes that were downright fiascos.

There were also encouraging moments in my own classes. In one I shared my free-writing on my name, saying that my father had changed his so it wouldn’t sound so Jewish and hamper his business success. I confessed that while I longed for a name that felt more genuine, I was sometimes glad that I could keep my Jewishness hidden. I’m not sure what the students made of this but their rapt attention told me they knew I was speaking from my heart. And this name unit that had started so inauspiciously led to several more spirited classes where we discussed an Israeli story called “The Name.”

A woman is pregnant and her father wants her to name the new baby after his nephew who was killed in the Holocaust. The woman, on the other hand, objects to all reminders of the horrific past; she wants to give the child a modern, forward-looking Hebrew name. In my more rambunctious class (with Nadine and Henry, et al.), we debated whether it is better to remember or forget painful events. We listed the pros and cons of each approach; we tried free-writing again and James shared his piece about a fight he’d gotten into with a childhood playmate in Honduras. I don’t remember how he’d offended her, but for some reason she was out to get him and did so stupendously by throwing a pepper in his face. “It was the 3rd hottest pepper in Honduras,” James wrote. This was just the kind of spectacular detail free-writing often breeds, and a poignant reminder of all the knowledge this boy had that was common and crucial in Honduras but nearly useless here—except, of course, in its power to delight the likes of me. When I got frustrated, as I often did, by just how much some of the students didn’t know (how to address an envelope, for example; where to put the stamp), I reminded myself of all they knew that I didn’t.

Our discussion of the Israeli story led us to a poem by the Mexican-American Lorna de Cervantes. Students enjoyed probing the images and the question the poem posed: What happens to our childhood memories that are “mown under”? Some spoke passionately about the pain of losing contact with their native country and the childhood they had there. They puzzled over what they would find if they dug up those memories—a “corpse” or a “seed.” For homework, Celeste, a sixteen-year-old mother (there were two or three in each class) wrote about having lost out on all the fun of being a teenager. That period is like a corpse, she wrote, “gone forever.” Another student, who was responsible for the care of her severely asthmatic mother—as well as several younger siblings, one of whom was awaiting a liver transplant—wrote that she’d never had a childhood at all.

In these few memorable classes, students saw, as they did with Hamlet, that literature could speak to their deepest concerns. They experienced the magic of metaphor, the power of their own voices when they speak their heart’s truths. And they saw how a well-chosen detail can evoke a whole, long buried world. I also noticed they were less inhibited about revealing themselves by connecting to what they read, than they were if I simply asked them to write about themselves.

These successes sound substantial to me now, yet at the time my pleasure in them was overshadowed by the number of students who came without their homework or didn’t come at all. And as I moved into what I think of as the middle and most discouraging period of my six-month stay, the victories began to feel more and more piddling. Maybe because my sense of urgency was growing. How would we ever get out even one issue of the school paper? How would my seniors learn even a quarter of what they needed to make it through a month of college? What should I be doing here, anyway? Would college teachers and future employers value a heightened self-knowledge and poetic sensibility as much as I did? Maybe I should put all my energy into teaching sentence structure, vocabulary, the use of the apostrophe? Like Delpit, I wanted to give the students the currency they needed to succeed in the dominant culture, but I also had misgivings about concentrating solely on that, for, as the prominent African-American writer bell hooks has said, “Every step into the white, educated world is a step away from the only culture in which minority students have felt at home and validated.”

Of course, every good teacher struggles with the problem of too much to do in too little time, but in large, urban public schools the needs are generally greater, the stakes higher, and the interruptions and impediments overwhelming. I wanted to scream every time the loud speaker went on to announce a track team victory, every time we all had to huddle outside because some kid got his kicks pulling fire alarms. During my initial visits, the vocational emphasis of the school excited me. The TV studio and hair salon, the print shop and a student-run restaurant—they all made Madison Park a sexy, happening place. But now that I’d seen how many students didn’t know “two” from “too” from “to,” didn’t even have a notebook or folder where all their English assignments went, I was becoming a back-to-basics fanatic. I started resenting the school’s progressive features that I formerly would have applauded. These kids didn’t need more stimulation, I thought. They need quiet and calm. They ought to have English every day, I raged. Two out of five won’t do it, especially because one of those is often missed in favor of some internship, field trip or special visit from a local business. Better still, they should go to boot camp. The gentle kind, in a pastoral setting, far away from the baby brothers who need to be taken to the emergency room, from the uncles who need translators at court hearings, from the monotonous, deadening after-school jobs that buy them things they need to feel cool. I had an inkling of the psychological cost of leaving one’s family and community, but from inside the chaotic world of this school, I was beginning to wonder if there was any other way.

Meanwhile, I seemed to be wasting more and more class time sparring with Henry, who didn’t see why we shouldn’t have a little party whenever he decided to stroll in; and with Lupita, who refused to put away her nail polish. I remember after one particularly unproductive class, one of the most diligent students said: “My family worked so hard and risked so much to come to this country so I could get an education, but,” his eyes welled up, “I can’t get one here. Nobody else wants to learn.”

My eyes welled too. I felt he was wrong. There were others, some who would even have admitted it. I berated my “overqualified self” for not knowing how to do right by them. At the same time, I realized that even the most seasoned teacher would have her work cut out for her here because the tone was controlled by those who bragged about their F’s.

I felt sad and fed up. I’d discover that a boy who said he’d gone to his internship never actually got there—had gotten lost and felt too defeated or embarrassed to call for better directions. I’d spend an hour with a kid discussing an alternative to the never-delivered term paper and he would then disappear for three weeks. I’d try calling the parents of absent kids, but either no one was home or they didn’t speak English or I’d leave a message that the student would erase before anyone else heard it. And the one time I did actually meet with the parents of one particularly bright, disaffected African-American boy, they were at as much of a loss as I was and could only bemoan their choice not to bus their child to a white suburban school. I was so exhausted by 1:45 when the school day was over, I could only hope I’d be able to make the short drive home without falling asleep at the wheel. And Nadine—her usual fascinating, infuriating self, always quick to jab me where she knew it would hurt the most—one day, she loudly (there was never any soft with Nadine) accused me of never staying after school like Miss Baker did.

What could I say? I had stayed a few times near the beginning, but less and less as fatigue and irritation settled in.

And then. . . None of this is easy to reconstruct, but the days got longer, and it wasn’t quite so grueling getting up at 5:45. In our Journalism classes, the bare bones of articles came trickling in. Karen and I started working with their authors one-on-one, and it began to look as if we might get out an issue after all. Hilda sweated through five or six drafts of her lead article gleaned from several of Miss Baker’s letters from South Africa. Nadine and Maurice worked hard to construct arguments for and against Ebonics. Tom polished his jazzy poem on why teachers shouldn’t patrol the hallway. (Actually, I was the one who decided it was a poem when I saw the jagged margins; Tom told me he just didn’t know how to format on the computer.) There were the usual diatribes against the Walkman Rule and the nasty lunch food, but there were also articles on the lack of black history in the curriculum, on the suspect popularity of Tommy Hilfiger, on abortion, gay marriage, sexually transmitted diseases; on what it means to be a man, and on how it feels to live all alone—which this student did. There were reviews of art exhibits and original poems on God and love and Martin Luther King. And although a lot of the writing looked to me like it was done by much younger kids, the newspaper had substance, passion and pizzazz. I couldn’t have been more proud.

By then it was mid-May. Karen had to leave, and the very class that had once tortured her threw her a party with presents and loving, appreciative letters. As for the classes intent on torturing me, small victories continued to occur. When we wrote about my friend’s double-exposure photographs, for example, or when we talked about why Rushdie believed so passionately in the power stories have to transform our lives. I can’t claim there was any dramatic turn-around; nevertheless, something started to shift in me.

I’m not sure what did it. Insights from veterans certainly helped. One day over lunch, I admitted to a guidance counselor that some of my students seemed amazingly immature—“amazingly” because I would have thought that with all their responsibility, taking care of younger siblings and working after school, that they’d have been more mature. “Yes and no,” the woman said. “They’ve been forced to grow up too fast—and without the nurturing that allows someone to really grow up.” And in late spring, during a late spring professional day, a guest speaker said something that stuck: “It’s true most inner-city kids are years behind, but don’t get angry at them for being where they are.”

Perhaps I just got better at picking my battles? Or maybe now that we were in the home stretch, I was simply able to let go a little and relax? All I know is around the time that the newspaper came out and Karen was packing up, I was falling in love with the kids.

They’d gotten under my skin. I don’t know how else to describe it—except to croon that line, as I often did then, smiling and shaking my head. Not that the aggravations ceased or even lessened, but I stopped taking them so personally and paid more attention to what gave me pleasure: Eric’s pride when he taught me how to cut and paste on the Mac; Celeste’s excitement when she told me she’d seen one of our vocabulary words in a magazine. I knew I would miss a lot of these kids, even—especially?—some of the ones who gave me the most grief. And I was full of “if only’s.” If only I hadn’t been so green, so easily thrown off course by a little lip. If only I’d had my own classes from the start and not had to deal with the students’ anger over Ms. Baker abandoning them. If only I’d had more time; even Ms. Baker had foundered for six months, and I was convinced I was getting the hang of it now. I went to the dean and told her I’d be interested in a more permanent job.

Senior classes end a good month before graduation, and I remember that last month as my best—not because I only had half as many classes, but because I began to see a lot of the seniors individually. They came voluntarily—eager for help finishing long-overdue assignments or for my feedback on their graduation speeches. Many of the students did their best work those last few weeks—maybe because individual help was what they needed all along. Maybe because graduation mania was in full swing and already students were waxing nostalgic about their suddenly wonderful school with all its awesome teachers. Some started visiting me just to chat. Not Nadine, but I swallowed my pride and nominated her for the Intellectual Curiosity Award—which, in spite of everything, I believed she deserved. When she won, she must have found out who’d nominated her because a day or two later, she thanked me. No small victory, that one.

Graduation conflicted with some other obligation I had, but when I heard about what an emotional event it was, I regretted not making it more of a priority. One hot day in late June, I finished up the rest of my grading, cleaned out my drawers, said a few more good-byes and turned in my keys. But all summer I dreamed about the place—even after I had accepted a part-time job teaching writing at Tufts. I dreamed, mostly, about Henry. He had plaintively begged me to pass him, but I didn’t feel I could. I wondered if he’d gone to summer school or just given up on the whole education thing.

In the fall I went back to Madison Park for a visit. While I was hoping to see some of my sophomores and juniors, I went mainly to see Ms. Baker, who hadn’t responded to the messages I’d left on her machine. I was eager to learn what impression she’d gotten of the job I’d done.

When I arrived, she was talking to another teacher in the hall—and she just kept talking to that teacher for a long time, not acknowledging me at all, though I was sure she had noticed me. I was tempted to give a little smile and wave and then disappear, but that isn’t my way and besides, I couldn’t imagine why she was being so cold—so rude, really. I knew I hadn’t been a smashing success, but I thought I’d done pretty well, all things considered. So I kept standing there feeling increasingly foolish until she couldn’t avoid me any longer. When we stepped into her classroom, she came out with it:

She was upset that I’d failed so many seniors, especially because among the failures were a couple who had pretty decent skills.

I was shocked. I didn’t know how many I had failed—I guessed six or seven, which didn’t seem like a lot out of over fifty, especially since a couple of those had never shown up and one had come only once and only, it seemed, to show off the flashy pet iguana he cradled under his jacket. Of the others, either they hadn’t done the term paper or they had but they’d done nothing since. None of these even seemed like hard calls—except possibly Henry, and only because he’d begged me and flashed me that smile of his that was so hard to resist.

Still, Ms. Baker blamed me. Why didn’t they come to class? I could imagine her wondering. Didn’t you make it exciting enough? Didn’t you call their homes after every absence like I told you to? Don’t you know what they’re up against? How complicated their lives are? How precarious their faith in themselves? How crucial it was at this juncture to give them the benefit of the doubt?

For months afterwards, I caught myself rebutting her:

I tried to make some classes fun, but these kids are eighteen years old—they shouldn’t expect everything to be fun.

Even if I had stayed late, Henry wouldn’t have come, Lupita wouldn’t have come. Could you at least give me a pat on the back for the school paper? Several people said it was the best issue ever!

I hated how defensive I sounded. In hindsight, I was sure I could have done better.

All this was years ago and I’ve more or less made my peace with what I did and didn’t accomplish at Madison Park. I never really pursued a permanent job there; I was offered a position at a prestigious university and I took it. As an adjunct, I don’t get paid much there either, but I can teach whatever books I’d like, use their massive library, and stroll through their gardens and galleries. I don’t need a key to go to the bathroom, and on my way home, I don’t doze off at the wheel. I have quite a few students of color but few who aren’t middle- or upper-class. Sometimes I miss the kids at Madison Park—their rawness, their hunger and daring; James’s mastery of the hierarchy of Honduran peppers; Jose’s all too intimate acquaintance with the brutality of the Guatemalan military, Paulina’s muscular knowledge of Cape Verdean rhythms. I miss feeling as if, just possibly, I could make a big difference in someone’s life.

On the other hand, my current students generally come to class, do their homework and show up for appointments. Many of them will eventually get good jobs, jobs that can make a difference, and I tell myself that I can influence what they will do with the power they will have. I encourage them to live an examined life; I expose them to theories about white privilege and interlocking oppressions; and I assign them readings about the lives of kids who go to schools like Madison Park.

I met her for the first time at her father’s apartment just outside Washington, DC. I’d agonized over what to wear. Work clothes would be too formal, but jeans would make me look too casual, too young. I settled on a blouse, cotton pants, and a pair of loafers. With a spray of perfume, I tried to mask the cigarette smell that clung to my coat from happy hours in downtown bars. I wanted to make the best possible impression.

“I don’t know if I want you to come to my home,” her father had said, when I called to introduce myself one week earlier. “I don’t know you.”

I offered to meet in public, but he resisted.

“How old are you?” he asked. “Got any kids?”

I answered truthfully: “Twenty-eight,” and “No.”

“How would you feel if a 6-foot-5 black man came to your door and said, ‘I’m going to advocate for your child?” he asked.

I paced back and forth in my basement apartment, searching for an answer among the second-hand furniture, which now made me feel even younger, more inexperienced.

“I understand your concerns,” I said, “but believe me, I have good intentions.”

I wanted to make it clear that I was not afraid of commitment. Maybe I wasn’t ready for a family of my own, but I was ready for my life to be about something more. I was prepared to enter into a long-term relationship with his daughter.

“My daughter and I are going through a hard time right now. She’s twelve,” he said. “You remember what it’s like to be twelve?”

That, I said, I could do.

Now, one week later, Joe Williams answered the door of his apartment in a white T-shirt, jeans, and high-top sneakers. He held a cigarette in his hand, smoke drifting up and across the lenses of his broad eyeglasses. He was as tall as he’d claimed to be on the phone.

At barely five feet tall, I found Mr. Williams intimidating. To my surprise, he seemed rushed and nervous — intimidated by me.

“Destiny,” he called behind him, “the lady’s here.”

The walls of the apartment were white and bare. As I stepped inside, I detected the mild scent of burning rubber, like that of an old vacuum that had just made a quick tour around the room. I sat down on a worn black leather couch facing a large-screen TV.

That’s when I saw Destiny.

She entered the room and smiled shyly, her round brown eyes staring at the beige carpeted floor. She was petite and naturally pretty, with clear skin and short black hair pulled up into a ponytail. She wore jeans and a white t-shirt with a round neckline that revealed the strap of a bright pink bra – provocative, I thought, for a girl her age.

She looked up only to offer a polite hello.

I unbuttoned my coat and took a few moments to explain that I’d be visiting regularly, helping to make sure Destiny had everything she needed, like a tutor or vouchers for the bus. What I didn’t mention was that I was supposed to make sure that Destiny appeared safe and Joe appeared sober.

“And of course,” I said, “I’ll make regular reports to the court.”

Before I had to ask, Joe began to share the details of their family history.

“…I’ve been out of work since… They got me on these meds now … My daughter’s been through a lot … You heard about her cousin? What he did to her?”

I’d read about all of it in Destiny’s files – her parents’ drug addiction, the sexual abuse by a teenage cousin — but somehow it felt wrong to say so. I nodded and took notes as if I’d never heard it before.

Without my asking, Joe presented Destiny’s latest report card, which had been resting on the dining room table. She had earned A’s and B’s, with one C-.

“Destiny needs to read more,” he said, “otherwise, she’s doing good.”

It felt strange to be privy to such information, all because I had used the word “court.”

I asked Destiny what she liked to do on weekends. She said she liked to go the movies or to the mall.

“Why don’t I come pick you up on Sunday and we’ll do something fun?” I suggested.

“That’s it?” Joe asked, looking relieved.

“That’s it,” I said, and rose to leave. I had never taken off my coat.

He ordered Destiny to walk me to the door, which she did, in dutiful silence. Then she walked me down the apartment hall and held open the door of the building for me.

“I’ll see you on Sunday,” I said.

She smiled at me and nodded, just a flicker of appreciation in her round, brown eyes. Then she turned away and walked back down the hall.

For the last four weeks, I’d spent evenings and weekends learning about the child welfare system. I memorized laws, read practice cases, and role-played with the other volunteers in my class. Now, armed with a red binder full of paperwork and a letter of appointment from the judge, I was supposed to be able to determine the best interests of a child.

I quickly realized this would be no easy task.

On the following Sunday, Destiny’s shoulder-length hair was blown straight and shiny. With a black wool beret pulled down just above her left eye, she looked older than the last time I’d seen her, and older than I had at her age. She asked me to take her to the mall so that she could look for hair extensions.

In training, they’d told us to take kids to parks or for walks in their neighborhoods. But I didn’t know the area, and I was new at this. I had few responsibilities on weekend days, and loved to shop. Maybe, I thought, this would be an opportunity to bond.

It was February, and we’d had a light dusting of snow the night before. Destiny politely kicked the slush off her sneakers before getting into my car.

She commented on my “fancy” Honda Civic, which to me was boring but practical — nothing compared to the expensive new models that lined the streets of my neighborhood.

Then she noticed my purse. “Kenneth Cole!” she said. “Expensive.”

“Got it at Filene’s Basement,” I said. “I’m a bargain hunter.”

I wanted to disabuse her of the idea that I had a lot of money — or that I was going to spend money on her.

I let her tune in a local hip-hop station on the radio then suggested that she program it so that she could always listen to it when we drove in my car.

“If you want,” she shrugged, unimpressed by the gesture. Then she turned and stared out the window for the rest of the drive.

At the mall, we stood by a marquee and plotted a course through the garden-variety chain stores. Out of nowhere, Destiny asked, “Did you commit a crime or something? My brother said maybe you did something wrong, and this is your community service.”

“Spending time with you is not a punishment,” I said.

“My brother said maybe you would buy me presents.”

“Sorry,” I said, “but that’s not why I’m here.”

I knew right then that the mall hadn’t been a good idea. I was supposed to be gathering information, learning about her life at home and at school. Instead I had brought her to a place full of expensive, unobtainable things, and I was sure to disappoint her.

As we walked through the mall, I asked questions about classes and friends. Her answers were brief. Eventually she mentioned missing a recent field trip because it was too expensive.

“Next time let me know and I’ll talk to your case worker,” I said.

Maybe, my role as an advocate was open to some interpretation. As long as I could be a mentor, and help Destiny get the things she needed, I would be doing some good.

When we cruised by the food court, Destiny declared that she was hungry. I offered to buy her either a hot pretzel or an ice cream cone.

“Can I have a pretzel and an ice cream cone?” she asked.

I looked at all the kids standing in line with their parents, and I couldn’t say no. I just hoped that her father wouldn’t find out that I was already spoiling her.

Over the next few months, we got to know each other better. Destiny showed me pictures of her favorite niece, who lived in Las Vegas with Destiny’s sister. She told me about the boys in her class who liked her. She was smart and self-assured. She had been through a lot, but I had reason to be optimistic about her future.

Meanwhile, I did some background work, checking in with a school guidance counselor. “The good news is,” the counselor said, “I don’t know the child. That means she’s not in any trouble.”

The caseworker confirmed that there was no pressing need to reevaluate Destiny’s living situation. “After all,” she said, “We’re just looking for minimum standards of care.”

I was working in an office with mothers who talked about their kids’ college funds, trips to Europe, and internships on Capitol Hill. To me, “minimum standards of care” didn’t seem like much to aspire to, but for the time being, I concurred.

One evening after work, I was surprised to be greeted at the Williams’ door by a man I’d never met before. He wore a skull cap and held a cell phone to his ear. While talking on the phone, he let me in and cruised back toward the bedrooms with the leisure of someone who lived there. In the living room, Joe lay on the couch, his long legs dangling over the end.

He nervously rearranged a blanket on his lap and told me he was “down with a cold or something.”

Since the shopping mall trip, I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t feed Destiny any more junk food. But I felt the need to get her out of there.

“I’m starving,” I said. “Have you eaten?”

She wanted a Big Mac meal. “It’s only two dollars,” she said.

At McDonald’s, we sat and ate burgers. I thought of the other advocates from my training class and wondered whether they were all abiding by the rules, feeding kids nutritious snacks while I fed Destiny greasy fries. I asked her whether things had changed at her father’s, whether she felt scared by strangers in the apartment, whether anyone had hurt her.

She just dipped her French Fries in a pool of ketchup and told me, repeatedly, that everything was fine.

I remembered a warning I’d gotten — off the record — from experienced volunteers. No matter how badly the kids are treated by their parents, they always want to stay at home.

I thought of whisking Destiny away to my apartment and keeping her until the strange man was gone and Joe looked upright and sober. Destiny had never been to my apartment, but I had described it to her and shown her pictures of my orange Maine Coon cat. But it wasn’t my place to take her away from her father. Reluctantly, I drove her home, resigned to calling her caseworker in the morning.

“Do you visit other kids, too?” she asked before the got out of the car.

“No,” I said, “just you.”

For the first time, she gave me a hug.

That night, I crawled into bed, comforted by the purring of my cat. But I lay sleepless, wondering whether I’d done all I could to keep Destiny safe.

2.

Destiny’s grandmother, Teresa Jones, was a sixty-something woman who had raised nine children of her own and taken in a few nieces, nephews, and grandkids along the way. Friendly and energetic, she called me “girlfriend” from the first time we met. She lived in a high-rise apartment building within just a few miles of Joe’s.

Destiny had been living there since an uncomfortable court hearing in which the judge admonished Joe for not submitting to drug tests and ordered Destiny to be removed from his home. Destiny herself was not present in court. Her father had done what he felt to be in her best interests and sent her to school.

In the courthouse, I’d been afraid to approach him — afraid he’d blame me for losing his daughter again. But it felt wrong to ignore him, so I said a polite hello.

He shook his head, eyes downcast. “Destiny just needs to read more,” he said. “Other than that, she’s doing good.”

No one – not Destiny, not the caseworker, and not Mrs. Jones — had heard from him since then.

Destiny’s new home was all flowered upholstery, needlepoint, and stray toys from whichever child happened to be visiting — or living there — for a while. On my first visit, I looked quizzically at a plaque in a corner that read “WWJD.”

“What Would Jesus Do?” Destiny said, looking shocked that I had to ask.

I didn’t bother to tell her that I was Jewish, but nodded as if to say, “Of course.”

She showed me the bedroom she shared with a cousin. She slept on a bottom bunk in a bed covered with pillows and stuffed animals. The room smelled of perfume from a row of miniature bottles along the dresser top.

Mrs. Jones had strict rules, but she assured me they would be good for Destiny. According to her, Joe had let his daughter get away with far too much.

“I would never turn my granddaughter away,” she told me, while Destiny was out of earshot, “but it’s another mouth to feed. And the department doesn’t give you much. I get paid for kids when I was a foster mom — just some cash for groceries, you know? But I don’t get any money for Destiny.”

Folded in my wallet was a $20 bill that I would probably blow on a couple of beers later that night. I considered handing it to her. What would be the harm?

But I thought of our trip to the shopping mall, and remembered the dangers of setting the wrong expectations. I said that I was sorry, but she would have to take it up with Destiny’s caseworker.

I told Destiny that I would see her in two weeks, after she had settled into her new school. Then I said good-bye and left, thinking of the $20 in my wallet – a nice Jewish girl, wondering what Jesus would do in my place.

Over the next year, Destiny and I took trips to the library, a couple of museums, an amusement park, and a women’s professional basketball game. We went to the planetarium along the wooded Rock Creek Parkway, where Destiny looked out the car window and exclaimed, “I can’t believe this is the city!”

We went shopping together once again — to Target, after she’d received a $50 voucher from her social worker to buy school clothes. At the register, she discovered that she had a few dollars left, and to my surprise, offered to buy me a pair of earrings.

“They’d look good on you,” she said, holding up a pair of rhinestone studs.

“No, thanks,” I said. “You keep that money for yourself. It’s yours.”

Then I turned so she wouldn’t see the tears brimming in my eyes.

The following summer, Destiny failed a class and learned that she would have to go to summer school. Classes would keep her busy for a few nights a week, but I worried that too much unstructured time might get her into trouble. The mothers in my office talked about soccer, basketball, and art camps for their kids. I wanted Destiny to have something to do other than wander around the city, looking for places to escape the heat. She deserved more than just minimum standards of care.

With her caseworker’s help, I got her enrolled in a camp at a nearby YMCA. Destiny was looking forward to it, but she didn’t want to take the bus by herself on her first day, so I took a few hours off of work to drop her off.

In the YMCA parking lot, kids kissed their mothers or fathers goodbye, leapt out of their cars, and bounded up the steps of the building. Many wore blue T-shirts with white lettering — camp uniforms that Destiny, a latecomer, had not yet received.

We got to the registration desk to find that Destiny’s payment had not come through. Frustrated after spending days making phone calls and faxes on her behalf, I raised my voice louder than I’d intended.

“Look,” I said, “I know for a fact that Child Welfare Services sent a payment. I’m not leaving here until she’s registered.”

Behind me, Destiny shrank back. She rolled her eyes and tried to distance herself.

I realized that I’d drawn attention to her as a kid in the system — a kid whose parents couldn’t pay for camp, a kid accompanied by a volunteer — when she only wanted to be like everybody else.

Within a few minutes, we were escorted outside to an athletic field, where kids were slowly gathering around their counselors. We found Destiny’s group leader, a gregarious young African-American woman, who immediately welcomed Destiny. “We’re gonna have a good time,” the young woman said.

I liked her already. From the way Destiny smiled, I could tell that she liked her too.

As I walked back to my car, I stopped by the side of the building and watched as Destiny stood on the periphery of the group. Like a nervous parent, I lingered, hoping she might wave good-bye or signal that she was all right.

But after another moment, she disappeared into the group, just like any other camper.

By 15, Destiny was no longer the soft-spoken girl who carefully kicked snow off her boots before stepping into my car, the girl who politely walked me to the door of her apartment building. Now she had attitude.

She started missing curfew, disappearing to “get the mail” and not coming back. She wore tight jeans and borrowed low-cut belly shirts from friends. Buxom and curvy, she changed hairstyles on a regular basis. Sometimes it was blown straight and shiny, other times it was braided tight against her scalp in intricate patterns.

“Three boys like me,” she told me. “But don’t worry, we’re not hittin’ the skins.”

Her grandmother was exasperated.

“Destiny lies. She manipulates,” she said. “She’ll convince you the moon is made of cream cheese.”

Destiny said her grandmother set unreasonable rules. Why wasn’t she allowed to go to the Rec. center on Saturday nights? All her friends hung out there. And why did she have to be home so early in the evening?

I tried to reason with her: “Look, just live by your grandmother’s rules for the next few weeks. Once she starts to trust you again, she’ll loosen the reins.”

It didn’t work. Destiny ditched classes. More than once, she got caught drinking and smoking pot. It wasn’t such unusual behavior for a kid her age. But she was a kid in the child welfare system, and the system intervened, moving her in and out of her grandmother’s home — through treatment centers and group homes — over the next two years.

3.

“Destiny’s gone,” her caseworker said. “She took off two days ago.”

By this time, Destiny was 17. She had moved from a shelter back to her grandmother’s home just a few weeks before.

I was sitting in my cubicle at work when I got the call. I spent the rest of the day preoccupied with worry, feeling guilty because I hadn’t seen Destiny in far too long.

I called the police, who didn’t seem particularly concerned — maybe because she was a kid in the system, a kid who’d already been in trouble.

I wondered if she was doing drugs and couch surfing with friends, or whether she’d hopped on a bus to Vegas to join her sister and niece.

Like Destiny, I had moved over the years – through apartments, jobs, boyfriends. I wondered whether I was suited to be Destiny’s lady anymore. Our visits had become less frequent, and less successful. We didn’t relate the way we used to, gossiping over ice cream sundaes. Maybe Destiny needed something different, and that something wasn’t me. Maybe I didn’t need her as much as I had before.

A week after she’d disappeared, she strolled into her grandmother’s apartment, said hello, and casually opened the refrigerator.

She was back.

I arranged to meet her outside her grandmother’s apartment one morning the following week. When she walked out of the building, I was surprised and somewhat ashamed that I barely recognized her. She had changed so much in such a short time. She was a young woman now – thin and toned, a bright smile, the morning sun glinting off long auburn hair extensions. Tight denim shorts capped off her shapely legs.

“Grandma said you were looking for me!” she said, and threw her arms around my neck.

“Of course I was,” I said, surprised and moved by how much it mattered to her.

I decided to stay on.

That same year, Destiny’s mother, Yvonne, reentered her life. A petite, slow-talking woman with faint freckles, Yvonne had gotten sober and secured a job as an aide in a nursing home. She began visiting Destiny regularly at Mrs. Jones’ – her mother’s — apartment.

Destiny always greeted Yvonne with affection and cuddled up to her. The two would sit on Mrs. Jones’ flowered couch as Yvonne stroked her daughter’s hair or rubbed her back. They didn’t seem to bicker like a typical mother and daughter. I figured they didn’t spend enough time together to fight.

Whenever Yvonne mentioned Destiny’s name, she would add, “Bless her heart.”

“Destiny doesn’t want to go out with you today, bless her heart.”

“Destiny wasn’t happy living with her father, bless her heart.”

One day, Yvonne, Destiny, and I walked to the park and decided to get soda and ice cream from the Good Humor truck.

“Thank you, bless your heart,” Yvonne said, and stepped away, leaving me to pay for all of us.

Yvonne had lost custody of all nine of her children. One, an infant, had died after being left to sleep in a dresser drawer. Another had lost part of a thumb after Yvonne bound it to keep her from sucking on it. She had been clean for years, but she couldn’t get Destiny or her other kids back until she found her own place to live instead of drifting through her friends’ homes.

I treated her with respect, but I resented her for putting Destiny in danger. Even more so, I resented Destiny’s loyalty to her.

As an advocate, your job is to solve a problem. Once that problem is solved, your role is no longer necessary. I realized that maybe I didn’t want Destiny to move back in with her mother because then the case might be closed, and I wouldn’t be necessary anymore.

When Yvonne’s name finally reached the top of the list for subsidized housing, the judge allowed Destiny and a brother and sister to move in with her. The caseworker was pleased. If Yvonne could pay the rent and keep the kids out of trouble, the case could be closed. Destiny was ecstatic. Mrs. Jones was relieved to think that perhaps her childrearing was done for good. Everyone was happy, except for me.

I saw the inside of Yvonne’s apartment only once, shortly after Destiny moved in with her. The family was living among boxes, the floors still bare. Still, they were all excited to be on their own, as a family. They had adopted a kitten. Destiny would start another new school that fall.

From that point on, almost every time I called Yvonne’s apartment, the voice mailbox declared itself full, preventing me from leaving a message. On the rare occasion that someone answered the phone, it was a friend or neighbor who happened to be hanging out there. Destiny wasn’t home, they said, and they didn’t know when she’d return.

Within just a few months, I had no idea how Destiny was doing in school — or whether she was going to her classes. I wasn’t even sure which school she now attended. She had fallen so far behind it wasn’t clear whether she would graduate on time, if at all. I wondered who she was hanging out with — or hittin’ the skins with. It seemed like we were back to minimum standards of care.

Before long, the caseworker informed me that Yvonne’s neighbors were complaining of loud parties and people coming and going at all hours, occasionally via the second-story balcony. The rent went unpaid. Yvonne got evicted. Destiny’s life was disrupted once again.

In the courtroom, I recognized the judge, but not Destiny’s attorney — a young African-American woman in a fitted navy blue power suit. She sat close to Destiny and touched her shoulder protectively. I waved to Destiny from the back of the room, but she looked at me with empty eyes and turned away.

I wondered what Destiny had told this attorney. That she wanted to stay with her mother? That from now on, she would go to school and abide by the rules? That the moon was made of cream cheese?

Destiny had a different attorney at practically every hearing. They usually wouldn’t meet until just beforehand, when Destiny would tell her side of the story. I no longer concerned myself with these rotating attorneys because the judge usually sided with the caseworker and me. Today we were calling for Destiny to move back in with her grandmother, who could set better limits that Destiny’s mother could.

But this attorney was particularly engaged. When it came time for her to speak, she requested that Destiny and her mother be allowed to live together in some kind of temporary housing. Destiny had moved far too many times already, and she deserved to be with a parent for once and for all.

Before she finished, the attorney leaned down to let Destiny whisper in her ear. Then she stood up, straightened her suit, and announced, “Your Honor, Destiny also says she doesn’t want to have an advocate anymore.”

The judge asked why.

“They don’t get along,” the attorney said.

I looked around a courtroom full of faces I hadn’t seen before. Over the years, Destiny had been through multiple caseworkers, attorneys, and therapists. Maybe I hadn’t always been the best advocate, and maybe I hadn’t always done the right thing, but I was the one who’d been here all along.

When the time came for me to speak, my voice trembled with anger and frustration.

“Your honor, this is the first time that Destiny and I have disagreed about her best interests. We are going through a hard time right now,” I said. “But I think that this is a time when she needs an advocate the most.”

The judge ordered Destiny to move back in with her grandmother and extended my appointment for another six months. But I never saw Destiny again.

I now worked more than 20 miles from Mrs. Jones’ apartment, but I fought rush hour traffic to visit one more time. When I arrived, Destiny was inexplicably missing.

Mrs. Jones was mortified. “I think you should go help somebody who wants to help herself,” she said.

It sounded as if her grandmother was about to give up on Destiny. I didn’t want to give up, too, but I felt like I didn’t have a choice.

I told myself that it wasn’t me she was rejecting. She was tired of being in the system, and that she no longer wanted the court – or anyone associated with it – in her life. I wanted to believe that the time I’d spent with her had made some kind of difference. But all I could do was be thankful for what our relationship had done for me – when I’d felt alone, when I needed a purpose, someone to care for.

Once I resigned, I had no more reports to write and no more rush hour drives out to the suburbs. My weekends were free to take road trips or meet up with friends. I didn’t miss the responsibility.

But after a few months, I did miss Destiny. I wrote her a letter in care of Mrs. Jones. By this time, Destiny would have aged out of the child welfare system. Her case was closed. I hoped that she’d graduated from high school. Maybe she was heading toward college, or maybe she had moved to Vegas, where she was living happily with her sister and niece.

I never got a response.

I still wonder what happened to that letter. Maybe Mrs. Jones gave it to Destiny, who kept meaning to write back, but forgot about it. Or maybe Destiny crumpled it up and tossed it into the trash – just a reminder of her time in the system, a time when she was a kid without parents, a kid escorted from place to place by a volunteer.

Maybe it’s for the best that I don’t know what became of her. Maybe I should leave it at that.

Or maybe I’ll just write her another letter.

“You tell me,” she said, admiring the “youth job” in the mirror. “When do you see a woman under ninety with gray hair.”

I remember these Saturdays as bathed in sunlight regardless of weather, the women’s faces flooded with laughter, purpose, and a too rare sense of relaxation. As single mothers trying to earn a living and keep house, they had few moments of rest, and even fewer for self-indulgence. Hair-coloring fell midway between necessity and that self-indulgence. Frances was a devout Irish-Catholic and my mother an Eastern European Jew; what united them was the struggle to survive, concern about their children, and the perhaps universal women’s dilemma of hair.

I shared that dilemma. Whenever I complained about my kinky hair, my mother shook her head.  “When you were a baby, I couldn’t keep you in the carriage.” She inhaled deeply on her cigarette, her eyes sharply critical of my unhappiness and continued, “Strangers would grab you up they were so in love with your platinum curls. Women would kill for your hair. You don’t know how lucky you are.” She’d shake her head again, disappointed in her foolish daughter.

As a girl of eight or nine, I strove to remember when my hair was an asset rather than a liability. I closed my eyes imagining bright wisps of curls haloed charmingly around my small child’s face. I sometimes manufactured bits of comforting memory in counterpoint to attending a school mostly populated by Irish students with shining straight hair. My hair and my Jewishness had had relegated me to the ranks of “the other.”

My fuzzy hair, even at that young age, seemed symbolic of an inability to fit in, an outward manifestation of my internal shy awkwardness and feelings of inadequacy. Further, it suggested something outside of the realm of acceptability, an inability to conform to the mores of the day. Taunts of poodle-pup, coupled with little barks, trailed me down school corridors, but in a school beset by gangs, stealing and truancy, name-calling was a minor problem ignored by school authorities. Each morning when my mother wet and detangled my hair with a wide-toothed comb, I complained, cried, begged not to go to school. She always shook her head, reminding me that “an education is the most important thing you can get and it’s free.”

By junior high school, I discovered that I didn’t need my mother’s permission and became a visitor rather than student during much of my pre-college academic career, spending time in Manhattan at the big public library, Central Park, or one of the museums. One afternoon after emerging from the subway station, I walked a different route home through a predominantly Puerto-Rican neighborhood and spied a small beauty shop with a sign in English and Spanish that advertised expertise in cutting curly hair. The shop-window was clean and welcoming with advertisements for hair products and photos of beautiful woman with tamed hair-styles. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and after I retrieved my brother from the baby-sitter, I impatiently paced our tiny apartment until my mother arrived. I harangued her for two days until she finally relented and gave me five dollars for a hair cut.

The next afternoon, five dollars scrunched down in my pocket, I walked into the empty beauty parlor. A young Hispanic woman named Lillian whose wavy hair suggested now vanquished curls ushered me into a chair then surveyed my head.

“I’ve never worked with hair so kinky,” she confessed. “Not even my own.”

I was silent, my chest painful.

“But I can do this fine,” she said in a surge of confidence.

Lillian turned me away from the mirror in order to surprise me with my newly obedient locks when completed.

For some period of time hair fell around me like yellow snowflakes. Her face was tight with concentration, the snap of her scissors unnerving as she continued for what seemed like hours. When she was finished she stepped back to look at me. Her eyes announced failure. She silently turned me toward the mirror and I saw a stranger as shorn of hair as a new Marine. My face seemed huge, my forehead high as a balding man’s, an androgynous specter I’d never met.  I looked at her in helpless despair and she muttered apologies, looked away and said she wouldn’t take any money.

“When it grows back,” she said. “I’ll do it for free.”

That possibility didn’t exist.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered again after I gathered my courage to step out onto the street.

On the way home, blindly panic-stricken, I bumped into a man who put a kind hand on my shoulder and said, “Careful there son,” adding to my humiliation.

That night, after quietly surveying me, my mother said, “It will grow back before you know it.”

My marine cut further infused me with a sense of worthlessness, unmitigated by my mother’s continuing reassurance it would grow back, that it allowed my beautiful features to show, that I was not my hair and my worth was not judged by how long or curly or blonde it was. I finally said that if that was really true she wouldn’t dye her own hair.

She looked at me thoughtfully and lit a cigarette before answering. “In the business world women need to look young. It doesn’t matter how old you are, you need to look like a chick or they don’t hire you.”

Her response silenced me, suggesting, as it did, years to come in my struggle with hair.

In junior high school I discovered orange juice cans to attain the sleek hairstyles of Grace Kelley, Audrey Hepburn, Kim Novak. In what would become a nightly ritual I gathered together long hairpins, a wide-toothed comb, a jar of warm water, and clean cans. I stood before the little mirror over our kitchen sink, dipped the comb into the jar, wound a small section of hair so tightly around a can that my head hurt, then fastened it with hairpins. When the pinning was complete and copious amounts of hair spray applied, my hair, which resembled something destined for the trashcan, was covered with an enormous kerchief. Interestingly enough, a popular style evolved from this, and the streets were often filled with adolescent girls wearing kerchiefs over hair rollers like badges of femininity.

The sleepless discomfort of my head never actually resting on the pillow, of sharply-poking pins gone astray, punctuated by my mother’s incredulity about it, were offset by an imagined sense of being fashionable, that is if it didn’t rain allowing my petrified helmet to retain its shape. My lacquer-stiffened hair, when I looked in the mirror most mornings, seemed a promise of new possibilities – through discomfort and hard work I could achieve some measure of acceptance and a small circle of friends. My assumptions were wrong; a history of being an outcast coupled with my lack of school attendance and being a Jew, guaranteed the continuity of my status.

Despite my continuing absences I was promoted to high school because I managed to pass all my exams, showing up to take them, then leaving, mostly spending time at the New York Public Library, which I’d fallen in love with. The beautiful, light-filled reading room of elegant wooden chairs and long tables, couched in silence, literacy and contemplation, housed more than a few eccentrics and provided a place where I felt I belonged, a belief fostered by the solitary nature of others. Here I pursued my own interests, studying many obscure books while surreptitiously sweeping flakes of hair spray that resembled dandruff from the open pages. It was while sitting outside on the wide stone steps waiting for the library to open that I overheard a conversation between two African-American girls. They were rhapsodizing about a beauty parlor called Straight-Shot. I turned to look at them. Both girls, a bit older than me, had pin-straight hair. As soon as the library opened, I raced to the Manhattan telephone book, and located the Midtown beauty salon.

That afternoon I made an appointment. My mother, beleaguered by my continuing unhappiness about my hair, agreed to give me twenty-five dollars, a fortune to wrangle from her budget. That summer I could get working papers and I assured her that if the treatment was successful I would pay for it out of my earnings.

“You’ll have to,” she said. “I can’t afford this.”

“I know,” I told her. “Thanks Ma, and if it works maybe everything will change.”

She shook her head and said, “Your hair is beautiful, one day you’ll believe that.”

“Maybe one day, Ma. But not today.” I hugged her with gratitude.

That Saturday morning I walked into an enormous room more a warehouse than a beauty saloon. The air reeked with lye, burnt hair, and stale conditioner. There were at least twenty-five black women standing behind chairs so crowded together they barely had room to work and large hair-dryers stationed anywhere there was room. Straight-Shot was owned by a thin Caucasian man in an expensive suit who checked appointment times when a customer walked in the door. Against one wall was a private station occupied by the owner’s brother, Mr. Sam. Mr. Sam had an enormous mirror, a desk of various implements, a cushy barber’s chair, and his own hair dryer.

It was immediately apparent that white girls were assigned to Mr. Sam, while black girls were assigned to whichever woman’s chair became free. This made for a faster flow for the black woman, and I indicated that I wanted to be styled by one of them. The owner instead sent me to a small row of seats telling me I was next for Mr. Sam whose appointments were spaced out. As I waited, I really understood for the first time the meaning of segregation, something I’d never noticed in New York where so many different nationalities and skin shades crammed the streets together. It suddenly, really hit me that the black kids in school sat at their own table and walked home together, something so taken for granted I’d never thought about it before. In many ways, I had more in common with these students yet the possibility of a friendship hadn’t occurred to me. As I sat there I noted a snobbishness emanating from Mr. Sam and the white girls, all better-dressed than I was, and the working class consciousness instilled in me by my socialist mother spurred my anger. I stood to insist on one of the black women, but at that moment Mr. Sam motioned that it was my turn and I was far too eager for straight hair to protest.

The process consisted of a thick lye-scented paste combed on, duration carefully timed to avoid destroying the hair and to only minimally burn the scalp. It went quickly, girls were moved to the sink, paste washed out, conditioner applied, hair set on enormous rollers and dried.

The room was overpoweringly noisy and seemingly chaotic, but in truth it was orderly. The black women knew exactly what they were doing and turned out head after head of shining flips, the popular hairstyle of the moment. In contrast, Mr. Sam applied the paste, took his client to the sink where a black woman washed her hair, set it in rollers and placed her under the hair dryer, pulled out the rollers when the hair was dry. Mr. Sam took it from there, lingering over each head, moving a lock of hair just so, then with a voila! and showy flourish of hands perhaps similar to that of a doctor after brain surgery, sent her on her way. After this first time I insisted on being processed by one of the black women and the astonished owner shrugged his shoulders, and assigned me to whoever was available.

But that first time; I left Straight-Shot trailed by the odor of lye, my scalp on fire, my eyes red from fumes, but with gloriously straight hair. My mother wrinkled up her nose at the putrid smell and my brother ran around the kitchen holding his nose.

“I liked your curls,” my mother said.

“You didn’t have to live with them,” I answered.

“If it makes you happy.” She shrugged.

“I’m happy.”

Thus began my fifteen year relationship with Straight-Shot. By that summer I had working papers and a job and paid for my every-two-months appointment. I did indeed develop a small circle of friends, most probably due to my new-found confidence and more frequent appearances in school. That Monday, after my first appointment, attending school to take a test, I approached the black students’ table hesitantly. They looked up at me with startled concern. The civil rights movement was a faint whisper and I realized that I had no models of black/white friendships to guide me, that would come with my first adult job when I developed an integrated circle of friends and participated in civil rights marches, but then I felt intimidated by my own ignorance. I realized that the vague thread I might have begun a friendship on, kinky hair, no longer existed. I nodded, smiled, and walked to my own table.

By the time I graduated and got my first adult job straight hair was a way of life. In between appointments, and whenever it rained, I used my mother’s iron, on a low setting, to smooth my hair. Bits of spray starch, transferred from iron to hair, sometimes fell during work or on a date and embarrassed me, but the cost, burning scalp, one-week of putrid odor, and periodic ironing felt worth it.

My first husband, who was Cuban, loved my hair. By the time we married I had grown it quite long and often wore it in braids or, shades of the past, wrapped it around my head. He felt the putrid odor a small price to pay for my appearance. Over the next few years we had two sons and moved to Long Island. I continued my trips into the city to get my hair straightened. Despite the shifting culture around it, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the Vietnam war, Straight-Shot never changed. Walking into the room was walking into the past. Mr. Sam, on his platform, never grayed despite being at least sixty. It was clear from his comb-over that he was balding. By then some black women were shifting to afro’s and Straight-Shot didn’t have the same mob scene. It had settled into a kind of placid conservatism that seemed reminiscent of those country clubs and lounges cradled by the past that men went to in order to escape the emerging present.

I had formed a close friendship with Donna, a black woman I worked with on the library board and in a group to establish a women’s shelter for battered women. We spoke about many things: anti-Semitism, racism, poverty in America and, one afternoon, hair. Both Donna and I had processed hair, and I spoke about letting mine go natural, noting how many white women in the civil rights movement had hair as kinky as their African-American friends.

It was an interesting time to be “the other,” for we were now in groups, a new kind of conformity marking us, moving us, in one sense, further away from our original, outcast designation into what was becoming an in-group. A romantic notion of being the outsider, personified by films like Easy Rider and Billy Jack, began to creep into the culture. The clothing, beards, hair-styles, idioms, vernacular were slowly being assimilated into the population at large, diminishing their initial rebellious inference, and although few actually engaged in civil disobedience, many had acquired the “uniform.” I realized that in this environment it took less courage to allow my hair to revert to type. I asked Donna if she thought about it.

“Well,” she answered. “Even with kinky hair, you pass for white so to speak, not me. I’m not ready, it’s a little scary, we’re still too close to slavery, Jim Crow and lynching, and look at what’s happening in the south. It would also be a problem with my part-time job if I showed up with an Afro.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

She shook herself, then smiled and hugged me. “You should be sorry – all those Jews killing Jesus.”

We laughed then, although none of it was funny, merely absurd and entrenched.

Over the next six months my hair grew out. It was a weird mix of long, straight pipes of hair narrowing into tightly curled wire. When there was enough of that wire I cut off everything that was straight. My husband was furious and insisted I straighten it again; I refused. He then bought a long blonde wig and insisted that I wear it out with him; I refused again. My decision to attend college, help establish a women’s center and run consciousness-raising groups with a feminist therapist, contributed to the disintegration of my marriage. My curly hair became an outward reflection of what I felt inside; a growing confidence and determination.

One afternoon, when Donna and I were handing out leaflets to establish a traveling library, I told her about the problem with my husband. She was sympathetic but had no suggestions. I held out a leaflet to a man in a business suit hurriedly passing by and he glared, actually shoved me and shouted, “Damn Kikes and Niggers everywhere forcing things down your throat.”

Donna and I looked at each other and she said, “Girl, guess you don’t pass for white after all; that nappy head gave you away.”

This time I felt a sense of pride and Donna said that for the first time she was seriously thinking about letting her hair go natural.

Donna moved to Seattle a few years later and we lost touch with each other. By then I had grown more politically active and my husband, a decent man mired in a chauvinistic culture, couldn’t accept the changes in me. We divorced. Soon after I graduated, my mother died, and my children and I moved to Maine near a close friend and her children.

One winter morning, five years later, I woke in my empty bed to snow falling outside and I realized how lonely Maine can be in the winter no matter how many friends. I looked at myself in the mirror as I brushed my teeth and realized that my tight, mop of hair was now more gray than blonde. I thought about growing older alone, the prevalence of dyed hair among nearly all my friends, and my “business” presence, as my mother would have put it. Later that day, I had lunch with an unmarried friend whose electric-white hair was greatly admired. She smiled at my compliment that it looked beautiful with the blue dress she wore. After a moment or two, however she said, “All my friends love it, but I seem invisible to single men, and even when shopping, I have to really be assertive to get service. It’s as though once your hair is white, you get placed into the category of anonymous gray-haired women. It seems like the only people who see me, not my hair, are my friends.”

Her words, coupled with my loneliness, haunted me on the drive home.

“The hell with it,” I said. I drove to the drugstore, found the closest shade I could to my natural color, drove home, took a deep breath and opened the bottles. Later, I stared in the mirror at the familiar blonde and felt I looked ten years younger. I shook my head and whispered, “Here I am, Ma; partaking of the fountain of youth.”

My second husband, who I met a few months later and whose silver hair is considered distinguished, is ten years younger than me. For me, that fact justified dying my hair as routinely as visiting Straight-Shot once was.  One evening, after I’d colored my hair that day, my husband came home from work, kissed me hello and looking at my hair said, “Once again no silver strands among the gold.”

We laughed and then he added thoughtfully, “I hope you’re not doing it for me. I really don’t care.”

“No,” I assured him. “I’m doing it for myself.” I wondered, however, if that was true; I was all too conscious of our ten years difference.

A few nights later, over dinner with my older son’s family, my son hugged me Good-by and said, “You know Mom, it’s weird to have a wife who is grayer than my mother.”

On the way home, I thought about how comfortable my daughter-in-law was with her gray hair. She provided the role model for her daughters that I’d never had and I realized that if enough of us provided that type of role model, we might be able to change cultural perceptions. I remembered that old sixties adage; if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

“I’m going to go grey,” I told Kevin solemnly, the words and my voice portentous, as though the decision was life-altering. For Pete’s sake, I told myself, you’re just letting your hair grow out.

I kept my hair short during the growing-out process, self-conscious as the gray pushed the blonde further and further from my face till I was neither one color or the other. More than once a woman in the supermarket or at a conference or dinner party said to me, “You’re growing your hair out? When I nodded, I was often told, with a head-shake, “I wish I was brave enough to do it.”

I wondered at the concept we shared that it was brave to just let your hair revert to grey. I finally snapped at one woman, “For God’s sake, I’m not racing into a burning building to rescue children, I’m just letting my hair grow out.” She looked at me strangely.

Finally, one morning, the last remnants of blonde fell to the floor under the onslaught of my beautician’s scissors. She had initially declared my face too youthful for gray, but when we saw the pure white curling around my head, she said, “It’s gorgeous. Women would kill to have hair like that, thick and curly and that shade of silver.”

I chuckled at the similarity with my mother’s description of my curls, looked into the mirror and there my mother was as she might have looked had she stopped coloring her hair. I burst into tears, needing to immediately reassure my hairdresser that it had nothing to do with her.

For the most part, the difference my gray hair made was so small that I often forgot I’d let it grow out and was jolted when I spied myself in a mirror somewhere.

“Look at me,” I joked to Kevin. “I’m finally growing older with you.”

A year later Kevin and I went to Lapland, for him to present a week-long work study program for international students while I worked on a series of essays about the experience. I often went out to the ponds and woods with the working groups and helped take samples. It was arduous work that involved hauling logs, pushing through brush, wading through bogs; I had a blast. Most of the students were young women in their twenties, but it was easy to strike up friendships with them, despite age and language. We discussed cultural differences between our varied countries, shared life experiences, and even had a discussion about Lyme Disease which I’d had for an extended period of time and which was epidemic in many of their countries. I felt accepted as an equal.

The final day there we had a feast, the cafeteria tables heavy and pungent with reindeer steaks, grilled vegetables for the few vegetarians and a plethora of sweets, including scrumptious Finnish chocolate. Many of the students celebrated by drinking heavily and joyously. Just before the party was over, Erica, the unofficial spokeswoman for the group, came up to me and with a hug said, “We girls always talk about you and we want to be just like you when we’re your age.”

I looked behind her at the young faces beaming at me while I thanked her for what she meant as a compliment. I’d thought of myself as one of them while we worked together never realizing they were acutely aware of my age every moment. They had relegated me to the defined category of older women rather than viewing me as an individual and were thus surprised that I didn’t fit the stereotype. I lay in bed that night thinking about otherness in America, propagated by false assumptions, stereotypes that had a life of their own. I’d encountered it as a Jew, as having kinky hair, as being an early anti-war activist, and most recently as one of the aging. Only a year earlier nobody had ever used the term “your age” to describe me, merely because my hair was dyed; certainly my wrinkles were fully on display.

Her words, however, inspired an unexpected pang of anxiety; no matter how active I was, I was still ten years older then my husband who was often surrounded by young women. Despite Kevin always being scrupulously faithful, complimentary and loving, the anxiety persisted.

The next day, when we arrived in Helsinki, I went into a drugstore, purchased hair coloring, and dyed my hair in the hotel room. When it was done I looked in the mirror and, indeed, I looked ten years younger. It hadn’t changed anything physically, I was still a sixty-five year old woman, but what changed was the attitude of everyone around me; I was no longer a woman of “your age” indicative of an allowable suspension of belief about age that often occurs once a woman dyes her hair. Once again my hair was symbolic of societal beliefs.

Everyone was startled back home having assumed I was done with hair coloring. I felt cowardly at succumbing yet again to my fear of stereotypes, indeed accepting an insulting one to my husband, that men always seek younger women. I knew my effort to conceal the aging process would ultimately fail; that soon the difference between my hair color and face would present too great a denial of the obvious. Yet still I clung to my need for a certain kind of acceptance, even if that acceptance was based on cruel stereotypes about older women.

I thought about my mother and Frances fifty years ago, helping one another to dye their hair at that cracked kitchen table. I wished that my mother were with me now, that I could put my arm around her and joke about the fountain of youth. I wished I could say, Listen, mom—let’s be role models for your great-granddaughters and my granddaughters and stop pretending we’re still chicks when everyone knows we aren’t.  I imagined her, then, cradling my aging face between her hands and saying, why not, we’ll do it together.

Please don’t kill yourselves. Don’t do it. The suicide rate for Afghan/Iraq War vets is five times the numbers that die in the war, now about one an hour or 24 a day. Time heals. Give yourself time. Avoid impulsiveness. Impulsiveness gives no time. Get the guns out of the house. If you have a noose ready, get rid of it, a stash of pills, get rid of them, a stripped electric line? Get rid of it. Get rid of the readiness. When you hear that train a comin’, it ain’t your train. Stay off the tracks. No bridge has your name on it. No bridge. When you are suicidal, you are distraught. Distraught does not make for clear thinking. Impulsiveness compounds the problem, leads to mistakes. Mistakes may be worse than death.

You need time, more time, much more time, maybe a lifetime. PTS speeds things up. You need to slow down. One of the best ways to give yourself more time is to give your time away. Start with your family. Little children can really slow you down. Their presence to the moment, their curiosity, their imagination, their playfulness can all rub off on you if you slow down with them. Learn to identify ten trees in your neighborhood with your children and their friends. Learn the names of ten birds, ten insects. Then learn ten more of each. Pick some wild grapes and make jelly. Gather some hickory nuts and make cookies. Learn the natural world with them.

Men, learn to cook. Learn to feed yourself and your family. Your children would love to work with you in the kitchen. It will strengthen your marriage. Nurture her. Learn good nutrition. Bake bread. It’s great fun punching down the dough. Sit with your family at the table. Just for the fun of it, chew each mouthful 25 times. Slow down. Feed friends and neighbors. It’s healing. Go to the Farmers Market. Visit their farms. Grow something. Grow herbs and some flowers. Your children would love to grow something with you. Grow it and eat it. I learned how to make a simple red pasta sauce in Viet Nam. Do it from scratch. It’s simple and it builds confidence. Then do variations. Don’t eat standing up, out of the pot. Slow down.

Volunteer your time. Help a neighbor, cut grass, rake leaves, shovel snow. Help the elderly. Visit a shut-in. Helping others helps you. It can help get you out of your – self and getting out of your – self helps. SELF can be toxic. Being concerned about others helps. Self needs time to heal. The healing is up to you but taking care of others heals you. The trauma in Post Traumatic Stress begins with violence, war, rape. Military sexual trauma—rape—currently affects a third to a half of all women. The trauma begins with horrible violence. Life wants to live. It is as simple as that. Life wants to live. Violence can pervert that very simple truth. It can twist it, create doubt, create ambivalence. There can be only two responses to violence. One is to return the violence. The other is to return love. Love is a long, slow, hard, painful path. No one coming out of war or rape is prepared to be loving but PTS is a sign that you can love. PTS is a sign of the love in you.

Post Traumatic Stress is not a “disorder.” It is a natural response to what you have been through. It is a response to a terribly unnatural and unhealthy trauma. It is a sign that deep inside you understand that life wants to live. That is the starting point for your new life, the post-trauma life. It is a gift and a blessing if you let it be.

Veterans Suicide Prevention Hotline 1 800 273 8255 press 1 for veterans.

But Seamus has never been a careerist, at least as I have known him. He has been like his model, W.B. Yeats, a force for living literature, a teacher and an enabler of fellow writers, whether writers of indominatable Irishry, or of international situations. Having himself earned the opportunity, he has been gladly willing to “give the other man (and woman) a hand up.” He writes in the essay, “Yeats as an Example?”: “For all the activity and push of the enterprise, the aim of the poet and of the poetry is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual work into the larger work of the community as a whole, and the spirit of our ages is sympathetic to that democratic urge.”

His favors to Ploughshares literary magazine deserve particular mention, and most probably exceed the list of which I am personally aware; that is: Seamus as the subject of a feature interview by James Randall in Ploughshares 5/3 (along with new poems), then Seamus as guest editor of Ploughshares 6/1, and later again of 10/1; Seamus as the featured reader at three different fundraisers for the magazine; and finally Seamus as a trustee and then as trustee-emeritus at the point when Ploughshares was acquired by Emerson College. In all instances, contributor, editor, reader, and trustee, he served as an unpaid volunteer, as did we all. He honored us, I feel, in recognizing and taking part in Ploughshares as a collective effort “to be of service.”

I first met Seamus as the friend of Peter O’Malley, who co-founded and co-directed Ploughshares with me, beginning in 1970; they were friends from Ireland, presumably Dublin, where Heaney had moved in 1972. Peter from the earliest days of Ploughshares, from its origins in the Plough and Stars pub in Cambridge (where Peter had been bartender and one of several investors in the bar), had travelled back to Dublin with copies of the magazine and sought to enlist Irish poets as contributors, among them Desmond O’Grady, John Montague, Thomas Kinsella, Hayden Murphy, Derek Mahon, and Seamus. This was during the height of the troubles between North (Seamus’s native Derry and Belfast) and South (his residence in Dublin).

There had been, of course, decades of regular literary commerce between Harvard and Dublin in overlapping careers and social circles. The writer Fanny Howe, daughter of Mark Howe (Dean of Harvard Law School) and Molly Howe (nee Manning, of Dublin), was one of the early Ploughshares editors and a personage in younger literary Cambridge. Molly Howe, in turn, was a passionate supporter of The Poet’s Theater, and of its Irish model, founded by Yeats, The Abbey Theater. The curator of the Lamont Poetry Room at Harvard, John Sweeney, had cultivated Irish poets; as had his successors, Robert Fitzgerald and Stratis Haviaras. Robert Lowell developed a fondness for Ireland during this time. Lowell had become interested in Ploughshares because of Frank Bidart, his close friend, who edited an issue in 1975. Lowell and Heaney, I gathered became acquainted in Ireland; Heaney says in his 1979 Ploughshares interview: “anytime he was over in Ireland with Caroline in Castletown, we met them. There was a certain trust and intimacy”. Heaney also admired Richard Wilbur, and Peter had married Wilbur’s daughter, Ellen, just after we started Ploughshares.

Aside from the connection through Peter’s friendship, among the earlier Ploughshares editors and friends, James Randall, then chairman of Emerson’s writing program, had been interested in Irish poets, and had attempted to bring Heaney’s friend and fellow Belfast poet, Derek Mahon to Emerson College as poet-in-residence. He had also been reading Heaney with interest and when Heaney arrived at Harvard to teach each spring semester, Randall interviewed him for Ploughshares 5/3, which had for its cover an original monotype portrait of Heaney by Michael Mazur; this portrait, incidentally, given its sinister leer, was variously described as “a potato with two slits,” or as a portrait of Heaney as a bog person. The interview succinctly described the literary provinces of Heaney’s art, and served to introduce them to ours; the substance of Heaney’s “tradition,” like an ambassador’s portfolio, would be repeated in the first national reviews of Field Work and later of Preoccupations and Poems 1965-1975, first in the New York Times Book Review, then in Time. Suddenly the machinery of media recognition had smiled on Seamus and before long friends were referring to Famous Seamus.

It still seems a marvel to me how he protected the genuineness and privacy of his art, kept and has kept unswervingly to the writing, while dealing with the pressures of a visible, public career. Similarly amazing how he maintained all aspects of his integrity, as a family man, a friend, a teacher–and as an Irishman, the pride of Irish-Americans and a rallying icon for readers and nonreaders alike in venues such as the Eire Society.

At Peter’s urging, Seamus agreed to edit a special “Transatlantic Issue” of Ploughshares, beginning in the fall of 1979. Abroad for the year, he would solicit work to represent the contemporary tradition he had described in his interview. Though the manuscript arrived late in the mails, after worried international phone calls between our first managing editor, Joyce Peseroff, and Seamus, the assemblage was remarkable. We rushed through the typesetting, proofreading, and layout, got a cover image from a book of ancient Irish art; then harangued our printer, Edwards Brothers in Ann Arbor to meet their 21 day production deadline. They proved late–subscribers, booksellers, and librarians were all querying, since here it was late May–and then finally the printer informed us that they had shipped the issue. One, two weeks passed and still it failed to arrive. We put a trace in for Roadways, the shipping company, and after another week, Roadways declared the shipment, roughly one ton of cartons stacked on three wooden skids, lost. We threatened to sue and Edwards Brothers was about to push the button for a reprint at the shipper’s expense, when Roadways declared the shipment found somewhere in Illinois. Because of the label “Ploughshares,” it had been misdelivered to a farm implements wholesaler. We received it in early June and rushed to distribute copies on both sides of the Atlantic. By September, 1980, it had sold out and we were desperately hoping for returns.

From the beginning, Ploughshares had been working to attract new readers. Given the support from one of the first “Literary Magazine Development” grants from the NEA (1978-81), we set out to play on the cultural opposition of Irish, Catholic, and Boston College on the one side and Yankee, Protestant, and Harvard on the other. In terms of a prospective audience, this meant summoning a monied, cultural and social bloc of Irish American lawyers, doctors and businessmen, which normally remained separate from literary Boston. We mounted a benefit reading series, renting Sanders Theatre as a non-profit, and combining Robert Lowell with John McGahern, Richard Wilbur with Brian Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop with Mary Lavin (though Bishop died unexpectedly the night before and we proceeded with Friends of Bishop reading in her memory). Peter then sought a downtown Boston location and organized a black-tie benefit in the Parker House, featuring his friend, Siobhan McKenna, who was touring a one-woman show, The Branchy Tree, a medley of passages from Yates, Synge, Joyce, O’Casey and others. Though barely meeting costs, this otherwise brilliant event did succeed in friend-raising. At a lower ticket price and in a more populist location, the Cambridge Boat House, we had standing room only for Seamus’s first Ploughshares reading, 2/28/81, and after costs, raised more than $4500. Blocs of tickets had been underwritten by some of Peter’s McKenna friends, while our earlier, literary constituencies turned out in full force.

Novelist Thomas Flanagan, who had appeared in the “Transatlantic Issue” with a rediscovery essay on Benedict Kiely, formally introduced Seamus, who stood at a music stand for lack of a podium, and with our Ploughshares banner behind him, began by quipping that many of us had most likely never touched a real plough, but he had, and then read from the Glanmore sonnets in Field Work: “Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground,/ Each verse returning like the plough turned round.” A grand success. Joyce Peseroff and I had come to know Seamus directly through the editing process and he treated us with level recognition, comprehending, artist to artist, I felt, as we comprehended apart from and behind the social commotion.

Our friends, patrons, readers, all lamented and yet romanticized the element of sacrifice in perpetuating Ploughshares, how it operated always on a shoestring. By 1984, the year, finally I was hired full-time at Emerson, my first and only full-time, paid job, the shoestring both for Peter and for me had frayed to a filament. Life was catching up with us, marriages, children. Seamus, firmly ensconced at Harvard as the Boylston Professor, was in Cambridge that year, and had edited for us long distance again, this time an issue selected entirely from unsolicited work, 10/1: “Occasionally,” he wrote in his introduction, “the plough broke new ground, but its usual work was to plough up the old ground and criss-cross its own furrows.” He invited Peter and me to his quarters in Adams House, and we talked about somehow getting Boston College to sponsor the magazine. I said something at the time to Peter about my having “gotten my nut, but you still have to get yours,” meaning some form of full-time livelihood. And I remember Seamus’s sharp glance.

In the next few years, the toll of lives put Peter and me increasingly at odds. Operating primarily on public grants, we had been obliged to organize, legally, not as a partnership, but as a charity, with the two of us as co-directors overseen by trustees. The trustees were, after a fashion, Peter’s friends, Bernard McCabe (critic and former English Department chairperson at Tufts, who admired Peter’s musical compositions), Daniel Aaron (close friend of Peter’s father-in-law, Richard Wilbur), and Barry Spacks (also a Wilbur friend, for some years in absentia in California). Seamus agreed informally to join this number, but had not as yet been formally elected.

Meanwhile, Emerson College was seeking to negotiate an affiliation. They had been subsidizing my volunteer time in operating the magazine by granting me course releases, and the writing program, as created by James Randall, already overlapped with the Ploughshares community.

Peter had come in and met with me and the new Writing Division Chair, Richard Duprey, and had behaved cordially, saying that the Ploughshares board would like a formal letter of interest from Emerson, which Duprey promptly sent. Then Peter dropped out of touch for nearly a year, while I continued to build the fiscal base and operations of the magazine; and while, at Emerson, Duprey having moved to fill a vacancy as Acting Graduate Dean, I worked as Acting Chair of the Writing Division, and the President pressured me directly for progress on the Ploughshares matter.

Some time before, the magazine had moved from my second bedroom into a rented a store front office nearby in Watertown. The budget had grown enough to support our first managing editor, Joyce Peseroff, who had been coming in two or three times a week for $4000. When after two years, she left to write, teach, and to start a family, she was followed by Suzannah Lee, for $6000, and then by Jennifer Rose, who boosted the job to $9000. Each managing editor, working day by day with me, became another witness to the realities of how Ploughshares survived and operated.

I called and left messages for Peter, and as the urgency mounted of a grant report to be signed, or an application, or some corporate document, I might catch him for a moment at his apartment in Cambridge, but we rarely spoke or met. I wrote to him, finally, that we needed to reply to College’s statement of interest in Ploughshares before the end of June, 1987. He had by this time promised to consult with his friend, John Taylor Williams, as our pro bono attorney, and to send the college a letter. But the promised letter never arrived and at the end of July, I wrote him: “We can’t keep not communicating and are overdue with a businesslike response to Emerson.” By mid-August, I wrote him tersely that I assumed his silence constituted consent and that I was going forward with the business of the organization. I would keep him informed. By November, in a friendly tone, I wrote him in an update: “the next emergency is to sit down with the lawyers and worked our a reorganization that will allow us to proceed with corporate fundraising and/or affiliation.” Again, we needed to expand the board, and “we have to address the reality of how the organization operates and can operate in the future…” I didn’t see “the co-directorship as a reality,” and recommended a true overseeing board of a trustees and an Executive Director. Ploughshares couldn’t survive another year if we continued “begging or ignoring these issues.” Still no response from Peter.

At this point, I tried contacting our trustees, Daniel Aaron, Bernard McCabe, Barry Spacks, and Seamus. McCabe was in England, Spacks in California, but Aaron and Heaney were both at Harvard. Seamus met me for lunch, and after hearing my concerns, suggested that I write to McCabe, which I did. Then Seamus met me again to go over the draft of my letter, and to soften its rancor. I outlined the Ploughshares situation as honestly as I could, appealing now to the trustees because Peter had been absent and had refused to resolve issues central to the survival of the magazine. I described earlier attempts to expand the board, which Peter appeared to view as a move to “get him out.” I described my frustration at Peter’s unilateral actions in the name of Ploughshares in matters where I would have had an opinion and informed concern, namely his earlier approaches to Boston College and Brown. Now we had a letter from Emerson, which called for a response.

McCabe wrote back, agreeing that Ploughshares faced an administrative crisis and offered to come over in May for an “extraordinary meeting of the trustees.” I sent a memo to all parties, including Peter, again detailing our problems, and, with Seamus’s generous help, calling for a meeting at Seamus’s house at 10 Kirkland Place on May 8. The afternoon of the meeting was sunny and humid. Seamus and his wife, Marie, offered everyone drinks. After our official meeting, we would have a gracious sit-down dinner. Bernard, Dan Aaron, Seamus, and Peter spoke casually about Irish composers and about the tenor, John O’Sullivan, whose music Seamus was playing from a tape. Eventually we stepped out onto a screened in porch with a long dining table, where places had been set, each with a yellow pad and pencil, a xeroxed agenda (handwritten by Seamus), and a glass of water. Ellen Wilbur, as Clerk, kept the minutes. We managed to settle the resignation by phone of Barry Spacks, and the election of Seamus, and of Peter’s lawyer friend, Ike Williams, also called by phone from meeting, as new trustees. We all promised to submit additional suggestions for later action. McCabe was Chairperson of the trustees. Seamus and Bernard would write a letter from the trustees to Emerson; Ike Williams would serve pro-bono as the Ploughshares counsel.

The trustees’ letter was sent the next day to Emerson and replied to now by John Zacharis, as Emerson’s Senior Vice President. He wrote back that he had hired “a consulting attorney for the college,” Jim Samels to draft some ideas for achieving “greater exposure for the college” in sponsoring Ploughshares, without the college assuming part-ownership or control of the magazine.

Samels began meeting with me in the fall of 1988. I met with Peter in September in a restaurant on Charles Street. He told me that Bernard and Seamus (back in Dublin at this point) were coming over later in the fall and I should write them that the Emerson proposal was forthcoming. If the deal went through, Peter said he would sever his connection with the magazine. That he was hiring a lawyer, and I should too, to “determine a settlement of his personal interests.”

Samels was manic, eccentric and tenacious. Zacharis had chosen him, given Peter’s stalling, for his street smarts. He would call me at any hour at home, asking for ideas, responses to ideas, and pressing me for progress reports. Often he called on his car phone, which would go dead as he drove through a tunnel or overpass; often, grunting with exertion, he would call from his exercise bike. He seemed amused by my mendicant idealism and enjoyed boasting of his own good life for contrast.  Despite his fast talking, high pressure manner, I believed he understood the special value of Ploughshares, and that he promised the only realistic, foreseeable resolution to the Ploughshares wars, short of killing the magazine. The proposal we discussed was for a trial year, leading to a full-scale “buy-out” rather than a sponsorship. By early January, 1989, Emerson was proposing a $30,000 cash subvention in exchange for presence on the Ploughshares board, free advertising, and the addition of “at Emerson College” to our logos. Then at the end of the year, Emerson would have first refusal on a “buy out,” perhaps in the $100,000 range, which would go towards an endowment. Faculty course releases could help fund staff positions. Jennifer Rose at this point submitted a friendly letter of resignation, and I hired my former student Don Lee in her place, “since he has been gradually groomed to that role.”

At Emerson, Richard Duprey had returned as Division Chair and my application for tenure was being reviewed–strictly a separate issue from the Ploughshares negotiations, I was told. I was distressed by a split vote in the faculty, but by March my tenure had been granted. Samels met alone with Peter in early May. Emerson was pressing for a resolution that could be announced at graduation. Peter made verbal demands that echoed his earlier claims; he was seeking a continuing salary and a title as well as a pay off. He stalled well past the graduation deadline, then finally sent a letter in which he claimed that the Ploughshares trustees were his appointees; that he had the “sole authority to represent Ploughshares“; that we already had two other offers of affiliation; that he had “led” the magazine for twenty years; and that in any deal, all editorial decisions must be the province of “the editors, DeWitt Henry and Peter O’Malley,” and that he, Peter, must be acknowledged “as working head of the magazine.” When Samels asked for my response, I suggested designating Peter as “Founding Publisher” on the masthead; I also conceded to a fifty/fifty split of up to $15,000 settlement for work in the past, an amount to be raised only from the sale of back inventory. Samels replied formally to Peter with these terms, as well as with the substance of Emerson’s proposal (which was a pledge of $250,000 over a five year period in exchange for a full transfer of Ploughshares‘s assets and rights to Emerson). Peter again stalled.

In the meantime, on the Emerson front, Duprey resigned as Division Chair, effective August 1; he supported my appointment as Chair, and the faculty duly approved.

In July I wrote my own ultimatum to our trustees. I was ready to resign and, if necessary, start a new magazine at Emerson, unless: 1) I was empowered as Executive Director, 2) I served in a well-organized structure, overseen by a working board, 3) we had means to support paid staff and to continue building our fiscal base. As I understood the Emerson proposal, it accommodated these conditions. In addition, as tenured faculty and as incoming Chair of the Writing division, I was in a position to make much more possible than these terms alone suggested. I then contacted Heaney, Aaron, and McCabe separately by phone and learned that none of them had heard of or seen Emerson’s letter of June 30 to Peter until it arrived appended by me to my memo; that each now approved of the Emerson proposal; and that Seamus and Bernard would send personal letters to Peter to that effect.

Things got crazier and crazier. I had a call at home from one Gerald Gross, a Vice President at BU, who said he was a friend of Richard Wilbur and of Ike Williams, and that he hoped to meet with me to discuss BU’s acquisition of Ploughshares. I said flatly that the trustees of Ploughshares had already approved of an arrangement with Emerson, and any further discussion concerning BU would be inappropriate. Samels and I now did some investigating, and when it became clear that Gerald Gross was serious, that Peter had spoken with him, that my friend Sven Birkerts had been called in for a meeting and offered the salaried Executive Director position (Birkerts called to tell me he had turned it down), that Gross so far was acting on his own and had not yet approached Silber, that no one in the English Department or Creative Writing Program had yet been consulted, and that the endowment figure being proposed by Gross was one million dollars; when all this became clear, Samels then threatened to sue BU for “interference with Emerson’s advantageous relationship with Ploughshares.” Negotiations were dropped. Internally, Gross was embarrassed. Later, in mid-September, Ike Williams sent a formal letter to the Ploughshares Trustees, angrily resigning. He explained that in his limited, pro-bono role as an advisor, given Emerson’s lack of assurance of tenure for me and its hype about using Ploughshares to build a commercial writing program, he had encouraged Peter “to test the waters at BU.” He did not like “being bullied and threatened”; did not like “my friends and clients being bullied and threatened”; did not approve of the Emerson proposal.

Since Bernard McCabe was in London and Seamus now in Dublin, Dan Aaron in his Harvard office served to represent the will of the trustees and was given power of attorney. As friends to Peter, all parties were distressed by their involvement, yet all remained generously concerned and responsible. Samels met with Dan Aaron. Dan then conferred with Seamus and Bernard by transatlantic phone, and on September 20 the three of them agreed to accept the Emerson proposal.

Once the transfer was official, I wrote to Ellen that I was sorry for the strife that Ploughshares had caused. There was no answer at the time, and neither she nor Peter appeared at our inaugural Ploughshares at Emerson party, January 22, 1990, to celebrate “the journal’s contribution to contemporary letters, its new status as an Emerson publication, and its aspirations for the Nineties.”

Peter and I had no contact. I heard that he was separating from Ellen. He signed his first Ploughshares check from Emerson over to Ellen. Once the Ploughshares office had moved to campus, he called Don Lee and stopped in to collect a full back file of the magazine. I ran into him there and we had a cordial exchange. Having separated from Ellen, he had an apartment with a bay window right across from 0 Marlborough, the Emerson dorm where I now went for lunch. He traveled a lot, and had another apartment in Munich. He’d come into some money. He had a German partner in Munich and they were acquiring rights to foreign films for distribution in the U.S. They’d just bought to rights to Felix the Cat. I helped carry the boxed back issues out to the front of the building, so he could come around and load them into his car.

In connection with Associated Writing Programs, I staged and used the Ploughshares friendships to stage, a benefit reading entitled “Love Sick” on Valentine’s Day, 1990. As we had in the heyday of Ploughshares benefits, Stratis Haviaras helped me to enlist Seamus as a reader and the Sanders Theatre rental. The readers besides Seamus were Gerry Stern, Jayne Anne Phillips, Grace Paley, and Sharon Olds. We had a terrific turnout. Seamus’s favor, however, was to Stratis and to me personally. He was finished otherwise in any connection with Ploughshares, partly out of deference to Peter’s feelings, partly out of having done his turn. He’d had enough, thank you.

In mid-March, the Ploughshares trustees officially resigned and elected Jim McPherson, Carol Smith, and Frank Bidart as their successors.

Shortly thereafter, late in the spring, 1990, Seamus read with Dick Wilbur at Harvard to benefit Stratis’s Woodberry Poetry Room. I bought my ticket and I sat high up in the Sanders Audience with a sad, sad sense of deja vu and dissociation. There was Peter in the front row. From my distance: there my friends, there the literary mob, there Ellen, there Peter and Ellen’s son, Gabriel. Our association of twenty years was over. We weren’t speaking. A few left over old time Ploughshares patrons, like guests from Gatsby’s parties showing up after his death, apparently still hadn’t heard, and thought this was a Ploughshares event. Others avoided hellos, eye contact, or any evidence of Ploughshares solidarity.

My last sight of Peter was after we had moved to 180 Tremont and I was still Chairperson. I was walking back from an early appointment at Emerson’s administrative building along Newbury and caught sight of him having breakfast presumably at a sidewalk table at 29 Newbury, a stylish bar and restaurant. He was reading Variety. He wore dark glasses and had moussed his hair to look like Robert DeNiro. I didn’t stop and he didn’t see me.

My last sight of Seamus and of Marie Heaney was at a benefit reading at Radcliffe several years ago for The Poets’ Theatre, organized by a former Ploughshares editor and friend, David Gullette. Seamus read with John McGahern. We all had aged, but in the midst of distraction, he fixed me with a look of instant comprehension, woe, and measure–a ninth circle look–pressing my hand: “How are you,” he asked.

“Lawrence, Massachusetts.”

“No, like, where’s your family from? Y’know, what are you?”

“Well, my dad’s from Nicaragua. My Mom was born here in the States, she’s half Irish, half Lithuanian. I was born here.”

“Oh, so you’re Spanish then.”

People love a simple answer.

My grandma is a second generation Lithuanian immigrant who remembers Lawrence when it was full of immigrants from Europe, not the Caribbean. She wasn’t too happy when my mom married a Nicaraguan. She speaks Lithuanian, as do my mom and uncle. I never learned. Sometimes I wonder if she regrets that.

One day my uncle and I were helping her open a package. I borrowed a knife to open a box and handed it back to her. My grandma stood right behind my uncle with the knife in hand.

“Be careful with that, ma,” he said, arms crossed and head and shoulders above us both.

“I’ll cut you,” she said. “I’m a Spanish.”

“He’s Spanish,” he says, pointing at me, an eyebrow slightly raised.

Her eyes widen, panic in her pupils. She says “No, he’s not!”

I didn’t learn Spanish until third grade, for my first trip to Nicaragua, but never spoke it well until high school. I’m still not fluent and speak better to those I’m not related to. On my first visit to Nicaragua my cousins tried to help me learn.

They had me read out of a textbook from their religion class. I struggled, and eventually broke down and cried. They remembered it the next time I visited, four years later. My cousin Sergio said the word lloraste in a sentence while bringing a fist to the corner of his eye, twisting it. It wasn’t in a mean or teasing way—he was just saying “Remember when you cried at my house?”

“You know, you could pass,” says David, my roommate. He’s not talking about a test. He means “for white.”

I shrug, unsure how to respond. David doesn’t get it; he’d love to pass.

Most white people think he’s black, which annoys him. That said, his skin’s still a shade or two darker than he’d like to admit. David’s Dominican, but he’s not too proud about it. He doesn’t like other Dominicans who live in the States, those in Lawrence and New York, though he does love the people on the actual island.

David is determined to marry a white woman and have a kid with green eyes. It’s part of his American dream. He came from the Dominican Republic as a toddler, endured a brief stint in the Bronx projects, grew up in Lawrence, saw his family move to a better neighborhood and is now on his way to a nursing degree. He thinks he’s earned a white wife and light-skinned children with green eyes and Irish names.

I mention my mom’s eyes are a greenish-hazel color.

“Dude, you might be a carrier,” he says.

“So?”

“You don’t want kids with green eyes?”

I tell him I don’t care what eyes my kids have. I’m perfectly fine with my brown eyes, after all. I don’t get why David cares so much, but it’s fine—he doesn’t understand why I care so little.

Tía Sayda loves whiteness. She’s tan-skinned, brown-eyed and has dark brown hair, but is proud of her Spanish ancestry and the bit of German from her father’s side. In her opinion nothing’s better than blonde hair and blue eyes, so it’s weird that she married Berto, “the most indio-looking man in Masaya,” as my dad says.

Tío Darwin, easily my favorite uncle, got sick of this attitude and decided to have some fun. He told her the name “Ramírez” actually came from the German “Ramirshtein.” It’s an obvious lie, but Sayda bought it, much to Darwin’s amusement. She spent an entire party bragging about her family’s German roots and the great Ramirshteins, thoroughly embarrassing her daughter.

A Dominican coworker told me she thought I was “just white” because I didn’t speak like most people from Lawrence. I don’t use much slang and don’t have the accent typical of Lawrence kids – it’s like a mix of Dominican and New York accents with a bit of Boston thrown in. I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so I just said, “Oh, right. Makes sense…”

Years later I’m on a plane from Miami to Nicaragua, waiting for takeoff. I sit next to an older woman leading a missionary youth group to Nicaragua. She’s nice, from Rhode Island, but she knows Lawrence, my hometown.

“And you don’t have an accent! Good for you.”

I’m speechless after she says this and then a man comes by and tells me I’m in his seat. Turns out I’m actually up one seat, so I say goodbye to the woman and sit next to a middle-aged man. His wife’s Nicaraguan and he’s meeting her in León. We chat about some of the places we’ve been and talk a bit about Boston sports. He tells me he’s from Worcester and I tell him I’m from Lawrence.

“Oh, wow,” he says, “and no accent.”

It’s spring break 2010 and I’m in Nicaragua on my own for the first time. I’m welcomed at the Managua airport by a few aunts and uncles. My Spanish has vastly improved. Tía Mariana, my great aunt, is happy I can actually speak Spanish. I ride back to Masaya in Darwin’s pickup truck, in the back seat with Sayda, looking at the dried-up countryside and the mountains and volcanoes on the horizon. They brag about how strong the native influence is in the area. Darwin even claims the Mayan language still survives in the outskirts of the Masaya province, but my dad thinks he made that up.

Kimberly, my teenage cousin, sits in the front with Darwin, her father. She was a little girl when I last visited; she probably forgot what I looked like.

“Parece latino,” she says to him. She thinks she’s being discreet, but my ears and my Spanish are better than she thinks: He looks Latino. Darwin gives me more credit than she does.

“Of course!” he says in Spanish, loud enough for me and the whole countryside to hear. “He’s my blood.”

My cousin Chantal is showing me around Masaya. It’s a great town, full of people and colorful buildings made of adobe, with a nice park and famous marketplace. Some damage from the earthquake in 1972 is still visible. It’s where my Dad grew up and some of his family still lives. Chantal’s only a year older than me, but I feel much younger following her, struggling to communicate in Spanish, and take in the information she gives me. I’m taking pictures of everything and joke that I hope I don’t look too much like a tourist.

“Eh,” says Chantal. “It’s obvious you’re a gringo.”

Lake Nicaragua is so big Francisco Cordoba thought it was the Pacific until his horses started drinking from it. There are islands and fresh water sharks in the lake, and waves that rival any ocean. A big statue of the conquistador loomed over the lakeside plaza my parents took me to see on my first trip to Nicaragua. There Dad told me about Cordoba, the conqueror of Nicaragua and namesake of the country’s currency. I heard a hint of pride in his voice, which was odd because he had always been more proud of his native ancestors and never had good things to say about any Spaniard, dead or alive. I couldn’t understand how he or my family or Nicaragua could claim both natives and Spaniards.

“Dad, why is he a hero if he killed all the Indians?”

Dad laughed, looking the statue, and then turned to me.

“It’s complicated, isn’t it?”

Anderson’s book was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1971. The year says a great deal about the book. There are references to the student unrest throughout the United States, to writers such as Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse and to the likes of Allen Ginsberg who is quoted a few times and acknowledged as an important descendent of Whitman.  Whitman is one of the three writers, along with Emerson and Henry James, to whom Anderson’s book-length essay is devoted. A chapter on Hawthorne forms a counterpoint to the workings of the imperial self that Anderson sees at the heart of much American literature:  “Hawthorne saw human selves as fostered in a net of relations, finding their meaning and value only through these relations.” One need only think of The Scarlet Letter and its variously entangled characters in order to feel that “net” is more than a well-worn metaphor. To quote Anderson again, “What he [Hawthorne] sought and found was a world in which dramatic awareness of antinomies in human nature was the very ground on which a community was built.”

There are several words—“dramatic,” “human nature,” and “community”—in Anderson’s sentence that indicate how different Hawthorne’s quest was. The thrust of the imperial self (about which I will be writing more) has been, among other adjectives, annunciatory, prophetic, overbearing and unitary. Though Anderson doesn’t write about it, Ginsberg’s Howl is a perfect example of the imperial self, as Ginsberg seeks to suborn the nation to his ecstatic grief and as he propounds an urgency compounded of both duress and vision. His poem—and Emerson’s essays, Whitman’s poems and Henry James’s novels—testify to the assertive authority of the individual self, a presence peculiar to the United States, a nation composed of selves, each one at once fragmented by the striving toward happiness and putatively whole as a free person (or 3/5 of a person in the historical designation reserved for the unfree), each one accordingly restless, uncertain, excitable, inherently anxious yet free to make up what wants to be made up—including certainty. Since the nation was an imaginative, paper act, a literal declaration of independence (confirmed in the bloodshed of war), it should come as no surprise that the literature the nation gradually brought forth put a premium on the omnipotence of the individual self. Behind the various historical realities—economic, religious, philosophical, political and geographic, a world Anderson denotes by citing the authors of The Federalist Papers—stood the adumbrations of the nascent American self. Though it is a tautology, it is nonetheless crucial to an understanding of the nation and its literature—the self is self-defining. The self peoples the world not vice-versa.

Drama is impossible because the world beyond the self is unreal. Human nature does not exist because the self makes everything up. Community is a notion that can be taken up and discarded at will. There always is an elsewhere—both inner and outer—in the United States. The term Yvor Winters once applied to Robert Frost—“spiritual drifter”—might be applied to the nation as a whole. Winters saw Emerson behind Frost and though Winters believed there was a romanticism present in both writers, a notion Anderson debunks since romanticism exists in relation to the social world and the imperial self seeks to obliterate the social world, Winters did put his finger on a distinctly American condition—that pining, importuning, visionary self.

To the casual onlooker, particularly one from an older culture, the absence of drama, human nature and community in the workings of a nation’s literature might seem like a recipe for nightmare. And indeed more than one American writer—Melville, Nathaniel West, Ralph Ellison among others—has summoned up that nightmare. A world of one “acquainted with the night,” as Frost put it, was a world where “One luminary clock against the sky / Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.” The poem is calm but the image is not. If social definition can be discarded or barely exists (in contradistinction to the agonies Hawthorne portrays in The Scarlet Letter), then the self has no choice but to be free and to put a high value on that freedom. If it seeks manacles, the manacles are chosen ones. That may make the self, as a writer such as Melville attested, all the more frightening. Behind Frost’s spiritual drifter who has “outwalked the furthest city light,” stands Captain Ahab who has left everything behind and in the throes of pursuit embraced not tragedy but mania. For “the apostle of a unitary consciousness,” a phrase of Anderson’s that refers at once to Whitman’s narrator in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and to Maggie Verver in James’s The Golden Bowl, there can be no tragedy. Everything is dissolved in the notions of the self.

Those notions, as they state what the world according to the self can be or should be or ecstatically is, are motions too. Anderson chose the word “imperial” very carefully. There is optimism, joy and power in the imperial self, words that apply respectively to Emerson, Whitman and James. These are qualities that have attracted many people to both the nation and its almost inherently expansive literature. There is also very little gratitude or humility or remorse. For not merely in the end but all along the way, the act of self-definition has nothing to define itself against except for other acts of self-definition. In all three of the writers Anderson examines there is a sense of great energy and great urgency but there is also the shadow of democratic diminishment, the torpor of equality. If everything is unitary, nothing adds up—a condition Emerson welcomed since he fervently believed that (in Anderson’s words) “we are not bound by time”.  Whether time is a treadmill or an incessant novelty dispenser (or both), being an American turns out to be more strenuous than one might have thought.

Being American was also, as befitted a new democracy in a new-to-Europeans land, inherently revolutionary. I mean this in the sense that democracy not only was bound to create new social situations heralded by the age of Jackson but also to grant a new level of distinction to the individuals who comprised the nation. Anderson is nothing if not explicit about this. He writes: “For the first time since Aristotle the habitudes that accompanied the belief that we are social animals were effectively denied on the plane of society itself.” He goes on to note that “The fact that our imaginative desocialization is not a familiar theme in the study of American literature is partly the result of our having attempted to turn all negatives into positives.” Touché.  The prophetic boldness of Emerson and of the 1960s definitely infused Anderson. The Imperial Self is a work of engagement in the best sense of that word: it seeks to tell us why we live the way do. It seeks to explain via three crucial writers how curious our American normalcy is.

It can be hard to discern what Emerson, who in Anderson’s estimation is the fountainhead of the American self, is being prophetic about. There is so much urging in Emerson’s writing and, as Anderson astutely notes, very few particulars. Emerson seems peculiarly American in that he seems a sort of real estate salesman of an uncharted inner world, a booster for a Florida of the soul. This is not to diminish Emerson. On the contrary, it is to see him in the context not only of the rational religion of the Boston he grew up in but also of the expansiveness that is a basic American excitement. Emerson’s genius was to announce the presence of a limitless inner expansiveness. To quote Anderson, “The glad tidings which brought you to the mourner’s bench were, in Emerson, to be sought within; the personal God was one person too many for the soul which sought its authority in an exploration of its own consciousness.”

The marvel of Emerson is that he seeks to sunder one enormous knot—the stultification imposed by social demands and the timidity and resentment thus engendered—while he creates another—the place of the soul in a secular society. The puzzlement is at once enormous and explicit. Anderson writes, “Secular incarnation, as I have called it, means being one’s own redeemer, sitting at God’s right hand and acting to some purpose in the world.” This is bound to give pause. We are in at least three different realms—self-definition, God seeking and everyday purpose. Another way of saying this is that we are in the realms of ego, spirit and pragmatism simultaneously. Yet if one considers the present moment in the United States where the evangelical impulse is so forceful while the sense of what Americans have to do with one another is so attenuated, one sees the crossroads at which Emerson set up shop. Perhaps because he could take the religious impulse for granted, he felt emboldened to speak for the self more than for the soul. Christian salvation had been there for the taking more or less forever but the unfettering of the powers of the individual, the savoring of uniqueness on such an unparalleled scale was something new under the Western sun.

Emerson wasn’t a preacher. He was an essayist and lecturer. He worked in the secular realm. He borrowed the vestments of ministerial urgency but that was natural. What is shocking, however, and what Anderson points to as critical in our understanding of what underlies many American assumptions is the raising up of the individual self, the fact that “the road to transcendence lay through self-absorption, one had to take possession of the imperium of one’s own consciousness.” Thus for all the talk about the nation as a polity, the true American focus is the course of the individual. It is the individual who drives the imaginative engine that makes the nation go. No one is being dragooned by the forces of king and church, the world of the official “fathers” to use Anderson’s fraught word. The energy is the giddiness of possibility, the endless merging and blurring and enveloping that the world offers to the individual who at once participates and through the  commonplace miracle of consciousness makes his or her own. What Emerson confronted was, amid all the canny and sometimes smarmy Ben Franklin uplift, the fantastic emptiness of the United States, the sense that nothing here has to be, that everything is made up and changeable, that nothing is decided or decisive. As Anderson writes, “The social world was not for him either a home or a significant and threatening other with which we enjoy a dialectic relation, or in whose denial we affirm ourselves. His sky was empty of these possibilities; he had to fill it himself.” This isn’t mysticism on Emerson’s part. He was no Boehme. It is the tonic of self-assurance and self-revelation. Emerson, a man who endured numerous personal losses, was a self-made man in the purest sense of the phrase. The opportunity that every dawn brings forth was genuine for him. We call Emerson an optimist but it is more than that, he was an astute fantasist. “His private fact,” as Anderson puts it, “became public in the statement of it.” (Again, think of Ginsberg in this regard.)  That he was taken up to the degree he was taken up by the world did not surprise him. The door was there. He opened it.

Whitman’s announcing himself to Emerson and Emerson’s recognition of Whitman and Whitman’s publicizing that recognition seem more a parable rather than a series of historical incidents. If ever there was a writer who was interested in making private facts into public occasions, it was Walt Whitman. When Emerson saluted Leaves of Grass as “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed,” he was recognizing the song of the self that he had adumbrated. He was recognizing that the step had been taken, that someone believed in the self as an imaginative construct in its own right, that someone loved himself—not in a narcissistic fashion but in a wholesome, generous fashion. Anderson writes of Whitman, “His chief imaginative task in the world was to envision it as an extension of himself and to provoke his pleasure in himself in others.” It was natural that such a person should announce himself over and over as an American. Who else in the wide world of 1855 would do it? As Emerson himself wrote in his oration “The American Scholar,” “As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it.” Walt brought it.

What Anderson does so beautifully is to make us feel how breathtaking and lonely Whitman’s achievement was, how it arose from one man, how extraordinary his faith in the earthy soul of his life, in his secular incarnation was. He is hard on those who sought to turn Whitman into one more artist and who sought to focus on the formal sufficiency of Whitman’s work while discounting “the personal authority of figures in the culture.” For Anderson, Whitman’s poems were “major accomplishments in the definition of a new form of consciousness,” which is to say exactly what Emerson was calling for.  “A poem,” Anderson wrote, “is, so to speak, a partial act, and prophecy is a total act.” Emerson and Whitman were prophets or they were nothing, for as Emerson in a sense imagined Whitman, Whitman went a step further and imagined an audience that did not exist yet, that his poems would call into being. One self would call unto many other selves. In Anderson’s words that speak so deeply from the era in which he wrote: “The writer of these poems was an amazing man, a shaman without a tribe to follow him, who nonetheless believed that he could, by using words, communicate a sense of the world, a mode of consciousness, that would create a tribe for him—and turned out to be right!” The exclamation mark is very much Anderson’s. It speaks to the ecstasy of the prophetic nature of the work.

Whitman’s poems remain poems rather than religious texts. They are secular performances yet they speak from a world that recognizes a soul that informs the vocal self, a soul that can’t be pinned down in any creedal sense but that is crucial to what makes a human being a human being. In the poem that Anderson chose especially to focus on, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Whitman wrote at the poem’s conclusion, and in reference to the “dumb, beautiful ministers” he has saluted a few lines previously, “You furnish your parts toward eternity, / Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.” There is a crucial economy at work in the balance between self and soul, an economy that was powerful in Emerson and Whitman who amply testified to the religious impulse (thought not to a sect) as it played out in the new American self. That impulse naturally allowed for the spiritual scent of humanity, the vague yet real soul.

Anderson is not particularly concerned with this economy. In the last of three writers he considers—Henry James—the religious impulse is nil. The cloth of the novel comprises a whole. The novelist can make real the sufficiency, however bruised it may be, of the socialized world. And the imperial self as it flourishes in a novel like The Golden Bowl lives thusly: “Consciousness is not the interior world of the novel: there is no interior world, and no person whose inner struggle is the result of outward circumstance. There is no such division as that between the inward and outward at all. Appearance is wholly in the service of consciousness , and nothing appears which is not in the full Blakean sense the product of consciousness. There is nothing intractable, unknowable, unshaped to human ends.” Although the last sentence speaks to the world of a novelist and a novel, it speaks too to the world of human enterprise at large and particularly the American world, a world that believes serenely in the powers of its consciousness and that is not afraid to trumpet that consciousness at the drop of a foreign hat. It speaks to a world that must believe in the impetuosity of consciousness and that can allow no room for the unknowable. Or worse it cannot acknowledge that there is such a thing as mystery. As the current age makes plain, the evangelical religion that has defined the United States for over two hundred years must thrive on assertion or die. This is a recipe for, among other things, hysteria.

Even as it proclaims the unitary consciousness that is able to subsume and reassemble life, the American world Anderson summons up is a riven world, riven not the least by the enormous effort the imperial self must make to hold the world together. In one sense the vision would seem to justify the effort: Emerson’s exhortations, Whitman’s saluting the genius of what proceeds from his own genius, James’s articulation that goes beyond articulation and that shapes life itself into a verbal artifact. The creations of these men are a good deal more than grand gestures; they are incarnations, to use Anderson’s preferred word. They make good on the promise of the new world; they are not redundancies. And yet—and one senses that Anderson himself is troubled by this—there is something inherently frightening about a post-social world, something utterly chilling, a smile that is really a grimace, a pose that cannot hold because it is made of such disparate elements and because it has so slim a meaningful past to lean on. If history is bunk, if the eleventh grade English class complains when The Scarlet Letter is handed out that “this is old stuff,” then Americans are only as good as their latest assertion. When people tired of the Model T, even Henry Ford had to face that one.

Anderson wrote at a very specific moment. What he called “the religion of art” that was typified by the New Criticism and that made the work of literature into a self-contained icon was passing. On the horizon was Theory which sought to abolish art as a value unto itself and proposed instead a sort of x-ray vision that could see and reduce everything to underlying structures and dissolve authority. It is perhaps an irony that an era of such extreme strife—the 1960s—should turn out to be a mid-point possessed of an openness and explicitness that Anderson personified.  The up-in-the-air quality of that decade meant among other things that all critical bets were off. History reached even into the offices of professors. The New Criticism and Theory were both the result of quiescent eras. The 1960s were not quiescent.

The subtitle of Anderson’s book bears repeating—“an essay in American literary and cultural history.” It is a description that says a great deal about his attitudes. He was intent on probing in the manner an essay probes. He trusted his instincts and he trusted his learning. The intuitive insights that the era prized and that were being recognized in so many domains weren’t to be slighted but neither was the awareness that every era bears “varying cultural burdens.” Along these lines, he had his hopes: “I…believe that literature will have to be brought within the circle of historical concerns in a fresh mode.” The issue—and it is a huge one—is that of continuity in a society that prizes discontinuity, that is, in its fashion, addicted to the seemingly novel gestures of the self because the primal imaginative force of the society lies in those gestures, however fantastic and ill-advised they may be. The United States as an inherently forward moving endeavor is inclined more than most societies to not so much bury the past as trivialize it. Walt Disney is (to cite Emerson’s phrase) a very representative man. The sheer sketchiness of the society as it seeks to form a polity of selves, the overwhelming commercial concerns such that, like God,  the Economy is capitalized, along with the brutal legacies of subjugation, lying and slavery are too much to take on. Again, it is an irony that the peace and love era of the 1960s brought much of this grief to the fore. The agony and ecstasy acted out within that decade may not have been appetizing but it was real.

Toward the end of his book Anderson summarizes his three writers. It is worth quoting at length. Writing of “the underlying constancy of the separate identities,” that is to say the social roles that are at once fantasized and enforced, he writes that he “was able to show that Emerson’s blurring of the immediate and the prospective is not simply an assault on the self reciprocally known; it murders time and kidnaps ideals into the single consciousness, destroying the character of shared hope. It also enabled me to show that Whitman’s all-engrossing consciousness is based on a body reshaped to its uses , and that Henry James’s ‘point of view’ is in the first instance the psychic necessity of the undivided consciousness, since all the differenced roles were equally unreal, equally available as material.” This is a legacy that Anderson brought to light in a coherent fashion and that remains with the United States. If the self is everything, then what is left? And if the society is so keen on possibilities that are at once pragmatic and fantastic then how can it aspire to any ideal? And perhaps most keenly and why Hawthorne’s shadow looms over Anderson’s book—what are we to make of one another when we deny the importance of social ties, when we make a fetish of personal identity?

It is Hawthorne, who, in a sense, has the last word in Anderson’s scheme of things, the Hawthorne who explored “both the necessity and the cost of community.”  Anderson puts it succinctly, “The future which Emerson spoke has been realized: our view of persons has rather more to do with their symbolic representations of themselves than with their ties to others. The exploitation of the self has proceeded in step with the exploitation of the continent.” That exploitation can’t go on forever. I, for one, wonder what reckoning is at hand while saluting Quentin Anderson for facing up to an essential American dilemma.

Petrified: the word tossed around in my head like a buoy – scared to death. My arm hairs stood on end as if they had feeling, as if they were also terrified.  Sitting at my desk in the Office of Alumni and Parent Relations at my undergraduate alma mater in upstate New York, I was cold and uncomfortable and shaking slightly from within. I rubbed my palms over the pricks of clammy skin, trying to erase the signs. I did not want people to see that I was anything but fine.

The dizziness came in spells, like the altitudinal drop of an airplane just before a crash: engine failure, death on impact, if not first from the snapping of the neck due to the fall, too dramatic for any body to handle. Several times I felt my stomach sink, as if the floor was being taken out from under, without warning, no time to brace myself. Luckily, I was in the basement of Erwin Hall, the College’s administration building, a floor that rested upon the earth, which shouldn’t give way, I told myself, this was not California where the ground splits apart: it was New York, where things held together. I was quite light-headed and nauseated from the narcotic painkiller: I had just had my wisdom teeth removed.

My wisdom teeth were like cranky children, digging their heels in, refusing to let go. They were hidden under my gums and attached, as if by cement, to my jaw bone. In pulling them out, there was a lot of drilling and excavating –- blood and tissue. It was a horrible, mangled mess. I remember lying there, awake, under the knife, my body full-length on the chair, head and shoulders tilted behind me, almost like a back bend, my neck elongated like an ostrich’s, the nitrous oxide turned on.

“There are risks in undergoing this procedure,” Dr. Burgart had enumerated, “nerve damage, loss of feeling, even death can occur.”

I preferred to think that Dr. Burgart, the dentist, was really named Bogart. Once aggravated by his ego, grown out of proportion by his tendency toward dental sarcasm, I changed my mind about him while under the influence of the nitrous oxide. He was tall and tan and blond and forty-five, and married with three teenaged children, and, at twenty-six, I thought I might be developing a crush. Once or twice, in my head, I rehearsed asking him to elope with me. He would whisk me away from all this chaos.

Dr. Bogart had a strategy to the extraction, approaching each tooth with deftness  and care, with an intimacy and an intensity, as if he were making love. I left my eyes open during the procedure. I wanted to see everything as I wore the mask, taking in the gas with each breath, trying to keep my mind intact.

I was running. June 21, 2000, the Wednesday after Father’s Day, a few weeks before my wisdom tooth extraction, I was running, listening to the oldies station, the only station I could access on my radio walkman. The scenery of Geneseo, where my alma mater was located, was magnificent, but radio reception was near absent in the depths of the valley, where the track was, beside the alfalfa fields.

I was jogging to the rhythm of the music, my lungs taking in the air and letting it go. It had been four months since my father confirmed himself cancer-free, almost a year since forty percent of his left lung was removed and labeled: malignant. I recalled that fateful July 1999, and the morning after my father’s cancer diagnosis, when I awoke beneath a blanket of shock, turned on the television, and heard the initial coverage of the disappearance of JFK Jr.’s plane. I remembered the way I thought, how do they know what is true? A few days later, as I stood in the check-out line at the local Wegman’s, I saw the words flickering from TIME magazine: John F. Kennedy Jr., 1960-1999.” The headline read: “JFK Jr. Feared Missing, Presumed Dead.” I stared at this picture: the philanthropic brown eyes, the groomed brows full and dark like mindful caterpillars, the dashing grin – all pronounced dead before the person they were a part of had been found. It had been decided for him. He was wearing a lot of makeup, I noticed, a creamy foundation. I wondered, had anyone ever seen what was really underneath? I was mesmerized by the issue. It churned inside, tossed and turned, ruffled, agitated like rough seas. I could not stop the thoughts from coming, crashing forth like the tide.

This drew me in:

The plane – it had disappeared from radar and had plunged into the foggy depths of America’s collective mind, the remains thought to be mixing with the waves that crashed and lapped in comfortable cyclical motions, gentle as a baby rocked, beside the shores of Massachusetts. According to the article, John F. Kennedy Jr., Carolyn Bessette and her un-famous sister had not yet been found in the flesh. Still, the cover of TIME confirmed: hope was gone.

“Abrupt descent,” are words reporters use to detail plane crashes. They also use phrases such as “stabilizing mechanism,” “final moments,” and “sudden engine failure.” They illustrate the course of massive structural damage on the television news. They show reenactments in slow motion, like cartoons. TV technicians become like children with video games that simulate the event, their appetites insatiable for the vicarious replay, over and over and over again. Correspondents and official sound bites speak of the aircraft at large: the cockpit voice recorder, the flight data recorder, the “black box.” They chronicle those things found: the suitcase, the novel and the bookmark, the toothbrush – the personal effects. These found remains are, of course, all but the person. The person they never find. At least not intact.

Sometimes, when authorities exhume the wreckage from the ocean floor, they put it on display at the local yard for investigation. It will later be placed at a town museum for the public to look at in awe, or for the schoolchildren to study for a class project, like the pieced-together bones of a dinosaur: this is Tyrannosaurus Rex, minus a few ribs and a femur we could not find. You can look all you want, but please do not touch. It is not practice to put the remains of the passengers, even one or two, on display, that would be too real, it cannot be done. The truth, if you must know, is that the people you knew have become so mangled from what has happened that they are no longer knowable. Why upset yourself by looking at what can no longer be recognized, by viewing what is no longer distinguishable or definable? It would be too hard for you to handle, you would collapse or have a nervous breakdown, you would never be the same. Something would switch off in your brain.

There are attempts to deal with the aftershocks, the emotions, of course, to put them in ordered compartments, to make you feel better, to help you feel more settled, in control, at ease. They call it “closure.” Causes and effects: these labels are explained and digested.            
You try to comfort yourself with overused maxims such as “death is a part of life” or “the healing process,” or the practice of religion, “everlasting faith.” You hold on. You tell yourself the deceased is not really gone but is living on in spirit. “The soul inspired” leaves the walls of the body. You picture it. Like steam, it rises through the chest cavity, up through the head, or flows from the mouth like warm blood, with the last exhalation. The personal effects, however, are left behind. Except for the body, the person. Touchable evidence of a life once lived you must let go.

People are sorry, though they are not personally responsible for what has occurred. They did not want it to happen. There are regrets. There comes a list of things to be done differently the next time, a set of instructions, a recipe: “How to Prevent the Fatality.” But there are holes, something is missing. Ruefully, it will transpire again. And once again. That’s life. Yield to those forces beyond your control, it’s the adult thing to accept the imminent. Trying to change the inevitable doesn’t do a person any good. It just makes things messy.

Now it was 2000, a year later, and I still continued to look at the issue of TIME and think with a wistfulness, let it all swirl in my head, the scene: JFK Jr. would appear on some secret island off the Cape, handsome and strong and debonair and above all put-together, as everyone depended on him to be. The Prince of Camelot. The hero. The role model. Possibly, he had needed some time off by himself, away from the eyes of the needy blank faces that made up modern-day America. He hadn’t told anyone, of course, because to do so would’ve sabotaged the whole idea of “time off.” He’d just wanted to be in a place where he didn’t have to play a role, where there were no expectations of him, where he could be anonymous, fallible – human – for a few quiet breaths.

What was wrong with that? It’s what they call denial.

I was running, listening to the oldies station, when the breeze picked up and a large shadowy man parked his red pickup truck and got out of the vehicle, unleashing a big black dog. The animal began to gallop fast, faster, faster, towards me. I stopped breathing, freezing for a moment, cold in my tracks:  it was coming right at me a pulsing fear washing over me like an ocean wave –

Lord have mercy on the boy from down in the boondocks –

The dog turned, his black coat shining with a sense of urgency – Go home. I had to go home.

When I reached my apartment, I found my answering machine flashing. There was one message. It was from my brother, Neal. I had missed him by ten minutes.

“Tracy,” he began, “Dad got in a bit of trouble today, he’s okay for now, but he had to have some emergency surgery on his brain. Call me.”

I hadn’t yet caught my breath as I dialed Neal’s phone number. There was no answer. I wanted to demand, where was my brother when I needed him?

I could not wait. I dialed my father’s number, I would speak with Anne, his wife. He had gotten remarried two years after my parents’ divorce, when I was twenty. He had met Anne on the Long Island Rail Road, he said, it must’ve been fate, she had changed his life.

“Your father –” Anne’s voice stalled, like a motor, after the initial greeting, coughed like a carburetor. “He –”

“What?” I prodded. This question stopped my breath: Was he dead?

“He started not feeling well,” Anne said. “He had a migraine, and eventually the pain got so bad he collapsed. I had to take him to the hospital in the middle of the night. He passed out in the car. The doctor says it was a tumor that bled on itself.”

“But I just spoke with him the other day and he was fine,” I said. “When did this begin?” I was not focusing, the words were a dust storm in my mind, the meanings caught in my mouth. I already knew it had begun months ago, my father had mentioned the headaches several times, but he had ignored the signs, had thought nothing of the recurring pain.

“Two days ago.”

“Why didn’t anyone call me then?” I asked. My heart began to pound against my ribcage as if it was trying to break out of a prison: hard, hard, hard, I thought I might die slow, slow, slow, I thought it might cease.

“Oh Tracy, don’t you give me that,” Anne said, “there were other people who were more important than you to call.”

“But I’m his daughter.” I felt ashamed of my voice, because it sounded small.       “Well then you ought to act like one,” Anne’s voice escalated, “you’re never here when he’s sick, you’re only around when he’s well.  Some daughter you are, he might be paralyzed and I don’t think I can deal with taking care of that for the rest of my life!”

The words lingered in the air, these price tags of love.

“I want to speak with him,” I said.  The backs of my thighs were shaking;  my hands,  my neck felt clammy. “What’s the number for the hospital?”

“I don’t know,” Anne’s voice scattered like dandelion seeds.

“I want to speak with my father,” I said it again. My ear pressed, ached against the receiver.

“You can’t,” Anne’s voice pushed against me, bruising, like an admonishment. “He’s not able to speak with you right now.”

“Well, his doctor, then,” I said.

“Don’t you dare call his doctor,” she said. I heard it as a growl. Her words bit. “The last time you did that you really embarrassed us.”

“But I’m his daughter,” I repeated, the word “embarrassed” sticking to me like glue. “I have a right to know what’s happening to my father, to hear the truth.”

“The truth,” Anne’s voice turned cold, “is that if your father knew how you really are, how you are treating me, he would be very disappointed in you. In fact, I know he already is.”

“This isn’t the time to be discussing this,” I heard my voice outside myself. “Right now my father is the issue.”

My tongue was flypaper, thick and numb and sticky, and too big for my mouth, for my words. I wanted my father, I felt I’d lost him, and yet I also wished with urgency for him to die. I could not say why.

I shrunk back, then, like a turtle. I hung up the phone and took off my sneakers and clothes and got into the shower and stayed there for a long time, letting the sobs go as silently as I could so that no one would hear me or know what I thought, how I felt, my tears indistinguishable from the pin-needled stream, the rushing sound of the water.  Vigilance: that night an old ritual took over – my body’s, my mind’s – of not sleeping. I was a little girl, I regressed, I was afraid of the dark, afraid of the big monster under my bed, hiding in the shadow in the hallway, lurking in the darkness, waiting for the precise moment to spring on me. I remained on guard with fear as my cloak. My eyes remained stuck open, on the watch, unblinking, until eventually, after several hours passed, the lids grew too heavy to support. Finally, I let my body give in, let the dark heaviness take over, and, consumed with restless slumber, I closed my eyes.

I began to have this recurring dream:

There wasn’t much of an event sequence, just this pervasive sense of impending disaster. I was in the passenger’s seat of a car, my father was behind the wheel, driving, despite his blind spot, the vision damage caused by the brain tumor. “I don’t have vision problems,” he said, “my eyes are fine, it’s my brain that isn’t getting the message.”

On a curve in the road, my father lost control of the car. There was the slow-motion skid, and then we crashed. I felt myself dying. I heard a voice – it sounded like my mother’s – saying “oh no,” with sheer morbidity. Then it was over.

In the days that followed, I imagined that when the tumor came apart in my father’s brain it was like a plane’s explosion: first the dull headache and nausea from the drop in altitude, then the disorientation, the pounding, the force of gravity taking over, the body’s tumultuous plummet, down, down, breaking through the invisible shield, leaking a bloody red fire, insides turning out upon outsides. As a word, gravity is a close cousin to “grave.” Meaning: serious. Weighty, like tired eyelids. His condition was grave. Grave: a place of burial.

My father had survived the emergency surgery, but the long-term prognosis did not look favorable, though that was what I thought, not what my father told me. I’m fine, he said so himself. But what I heard from my father and what I held in my heart were separate entities at odds with each other, in conflict, diverged within.

This made my mind run and my heart race.

“Trace?” Dr. Bogart probed, removing the instruments, and himself, from my mouth. His voice lilted, “What’s the matter?”

There were black spots, the edges of my vision were closing in, toward the center, the world before me darkening, like a curtain fall only this was from the sides instead of from ceiling to floor. I thought I was losing consciousness, my heart was pounding hard, and harder. I wondered if this was what it was like for my father when his blood pressure went down to zero during his chemotherapy session, which he had called to tell me about at ten o’clock at night, saying he was only abiding by my wish to know what was going on. He made it sound as if I had brought it upon myself. My mind froze and then, it seemed, my whole being tensed up like a cornered animal. It was all I could do to tell him to never call me that late again before I hung up the phone.

I was squirming within my body as if it were a prison, which still lay in the chair, trying to break free from its bounds. I thought I might be suffocating. I could not speak. There was fluid filling my mouth, sliding down my throat. I thought it was blood; it tasted salty. I swallowed it, but a thick warmness filled up the space, far back, once more, and again. I started to choke. I could not speak. I grasped at the mask.

“Lower the gas,” Dr. Bogart shot a look at the nurse with the red hair who was positioned on the other side of me. The nurse went through the motions quickly. “Trace?” Dr. Bogart said.

I was thinking about the scene: my father, the tumor bursting in his brain, the blacking out, the pressure dropping to zero, the rush of the oxygen mask, the breaking up of my voice calling to him, Dad! Dad! can you hear me? Dad? He did not answer, for he was no longer there. It was a bad dream from which I could not awaken. This was how it was going to happen. This was what it was like, going under. This was how it felt to just let go.

Cut to black.

“Trace,” Dr. Bogart called to me again, calmly, “I’m turning on the oxygen, just breathe in and out, in, out.” He demonstrated for me, inhaling and exhaling. I looked up at him, at his masked face and surgical microscope glasses, which made him look not only handsome but intelligent. “You feeling better now?”

I was not. I shut my eyes tight. I felt my heart falling, down, down, down, my insides rising up through the top of my head. I was dying. I wanted my father. I wanted my mother. I wanted someone, someone to hold my hand. Someone to hold your hand? A voice berated within. I was twenty-six years old and I was acting like such a child, this was unbecoming. I turned my head, “no.”

“You’re going to be okay,” Dr. Bogart said, unwavering, as if he had seen this scene before. “You had a bit too much of the nitrous oxide, you were hallucinating on me, I don’t wanna know what you were dreaming.” He chuckled at me. “Just breathe, in and out.” Once more he demonstrated for a few rounds. “You okay?”

It was passing. I was actually feeling a little better, the breaths were coming more easily now, the air was more accessible, cooler, in my lungs, I was more in control of my heart, the pounding had relaxed to regular, steady beats. I was seeing things more clearly. I nodded, “Yes.”

“Good,” he continued, “I’m going to ask you that more often than you may want, but it’s just so I know you’re still with me, okay?” I nodded, “Yes.” His voice remained even. “The nitrous is on lower now,” he said, then reinserted his fingers into my mouth.

It occurred to me that if anything were to happen, there was no will.

When my father was first diagnosed with the lung cancer in July 1999, I asked him about this. At the time he was enjoying the sugar on top of a cinnamon bun, which, according to the oncologist, he should not have been eating. We were at the food court at LaGuardia Airport. I was sitting across from my father, waiting for my flight to Rochester, watching, wondering. I wanted to know his wishes, for his future, for his past, for his life, for his death, for me, about me, in relation to – I wanted to know, before it was too late. I wanted to have an understanding. I wanted him to.

He was thinner than usual because of the chemotherapy. He was telling me he had lost six pounds because he wasn’t eating very much, he wasn’t very hungry, he was wasting away. I wanted to tell him I had lost weight too, but I did not say it. I figured he would see it himself if it was noticeable, if it was anything. He should see these things. After all, I thought, he was my father.

When I asked him if he had a will, he didn’t look up at me. He nodded no. “I had one when I was married to your mother, but I don’t have a current one,” he said. He was not paying attention to me. He was preoccupied with the food. “Why? Are there particular personal effects you want?”

I was surprised to be stunned by his question. I had not anticipated it. “All I want is you,” I said.

He spoke like the Cookie Monster, to the food in his hand, “Goooood,” and then to me: “You want some?”

“No, thank you,” I said. “I’m not hungry.”

It was the forceful tug and pull that alarmed me, like a mugging. The tooth would not budge. I could tell Dr. Bogart was perplexed, frustrated, his arms strained, taut and quivering and fueled with what seemed to be all his strength, and yet still he could not remove it. I thought, there’s something very strange about watching someone pull with all his might for nothing else but to get a tooth out of your mouth.

“She’s got to let go some time,” he murmured. For a moment, he paused in thought. Then, he turned on a drill that looked like a miniature pinwheel one might only find in the country of Lilliput – small but all-powerful, and capable of mass destruction – and put it inside my mouth, into the dark red cavity of bone and gum and tongue, and flipped the switch. There was the sound of a motor running, a salty, chilling spray when he removed the silver machine, a sharp sucking noise as he thrust a thin plastic tube with a rubber-tipped end into the warm, moist hollowness. He continued with the motions.

I recalled how, a few days after my father almost died from the metastasized tumor in his brain, he told me over the phone from his hospital bed that he saw the Grim Reaper standing in the doorway, “You know, with the cape and the scythe?” he said. “He just stood there, and then he left.”

Was he saying he had been visited by Death? That Death was at his door? I wondered. Was he saying that he had outsmarted him, as in a game, escaped his grasp? Was he warning me he would be back?

My heart began to pound as if all my blood was pouring out, I felt my eyes widen into a silent scream. My body was giving up, I was losing myself… this time it was for real, I was dying. Stop, stop, I commanded myself, thinking such thoughts is enough to leave anyone gasping for air like a fish out of water, they will not help you.

“Trace,” Dr. Bogart was calling me again, firmly. “We’re almost done.”

It was happening again. There wasn’t much of an event sequence, just this pervasive sense of impending disaster. I was in the passenger’s seat of a car, my father was behind the wheel, driving, despite his blind spot, the vision damage caused by the brain tumor. “I don’t have vision problems,” he said, “my eyes are fine, it’s my brain that isn’t getting the message.”

On a curve in the road, my father lost control of the vehicle. There was the slow-motion skid, and then we crashed. I felt myself dying. I heard a voice – it sounded like my mother’s – saying “oh no,” with sheer morbidity. Then it was over.

I saw Dr. Bogart and the nurse with the red hair exchange concerned looks once more across my body. “Turn off the nitrous, give her some more oxygen,” said Dr. Bogart. The nurse did as she was told. Dr. Bogart peered at my face. He tilted his head and looked down at me through his surgical microscope glasses, which made him look not only handsome but intelligent. “It’s all oxygen now,” he said, “just focus on breathing.” He inhaled. I followed his lead. We exhaled together. He cracked a small smile. “I think you’ve had enough of the mask,” he said, removing it from my face. I could feel the air cooling the damp sections of my cheeks, the edges of my nostrils, the bridge of my nose uncovered.

I was in the chair but I was not. I was lost in my mind, which rewound, went back in time, searched desperately for the exact moment when it all went wrong, as if finding the root would allow me to go back, take control, flip a switch, reconfigure history.

My life flashed before me.

“What, did the surgeon remove part of your brain when he took off part of your breast?” my father yelled with bite. I was seventeen and standing in my bedroom doorway, listening to my parents argue in the kitchen in our house. I could hear silverware sparring with food on the dinner plates. I imagined my father was cutting his meat with the jagged-toothed edge of his knife. There was silence. I imagined in the silence that my mother was answering by dishing more peas onto her plate, letting them tumble in circular patterns, poking their middles with the points of her fork.

I heard the smash of pots and pans, perhaps thrown, hitting the floor. I wondered if my father had caused the noise or if my mother had, in response. The sound, and my sense of the consequences, terrified me. I decided to get into the shower, drown it out with the water. I prayed it would be over when I got out, but when I did things had only gotten worse.

Without the mask on, now, the scene was not distorted by curved plastic, and I caught a sharp glimpse of the hands, Dr. Bogart’s, which were covered in latex, the palms splattered with my blood, the fingers drenched with a glimmering, vivid, deep red as they prodded and probed and maneuvered in and out, within my mouth, pulling down on my jaw, the sockets, stretching, opening wider, wider, loosening the joints, which were like the rusted hinges of the Tin Man. My bad habit of gnashing my teeth at night had worsened over the past year: this might loosen the clenching mechanism, Dr. Bogart thought aloud, kill two birds with one stone.

It was happening again. There was this pervasive sense of impending disaster. I was in the passenger’s seat of a car, my father was behind the wheel, driving despite his blind spot, the vision damage caused by the brain tumor. “I don’t have vision problems,” he said, “my eyes are fine, it’s my brain that isn’t getting the message.”

Through the windshield I could see in the distant sky ahead a jet plane taking off. Up, up, up it went. Then there was the nosedive. Then it exploded. It happened in slow motion. I felt my stomach drop. I heard a voice – it sounded like my mother’s – saying “oh no,” with sheer morbidity. “All those people, dead.” Then it was over.

“It’s over,” Dr. Bogart said. “Thatta girl.”

But it was not over. Dr. Bogart was still breaking the fourth and final tooth. He was breaking it piece by piece, now, determined. He inserted a knife, and another knife, carving at the fleshy gums, reaching for the root. Then, twisting with a wrench-like tool, he turned it like driving in a screw, but really the motion accomplished the opposite as the tooth finally lost its grip, giving out a resounding crack as it broke off the jaw frame. Dr. Bogart grunted slightly then stood back, holding the bone between his forceps, high up to the light.

I was lost in the past.

I found myself at the family dinner table, at seventeen, in an emotional prison, locked in by silence. My parents were dead, though their bodies still appeared in the house, in front of me as tormented spirits in Limbo, tortured and ghostlike. I observed them taking in their meals, my father swallowing his anger, my mother swallowing her self-worth. I could do nothing but wait and watch, watch for the shoe to drop, wait for the imminent end. What I wanted was resolution. What I wanted was for them to make a decision: if this was going to be the way, then end it – abort, abort! like a pilot shouting from the cockpit. Swerve off the runway before take-off, before that point of no return, try, try with all your might, with your judgment, to avoid casualties. Do it for the sake of your passengers, who hold their breaths in your lifelong moment, who depend on you, the pilot, or co-pilots, at the helm, who look to you who are trained to know how to fly aircraft – aren’t you? – you, who they count on to carry them all to safety, to handle emergencies like these. This is your responsibility, this is your job, this is your role. They put their trust in you, they put their lives in your hands.

Once and for all, don’t let this drag on like torture like that endless ride in that cargo train packed with bodies and souls on their way to their final destination: Auschwitz. What, who they wanted to hold onto they could not. Neither could they let go.

“It’s best to stay ahead of the pain,” said Dr. Bogart, as he placed a prescription for Norco, the narcotic painkiller, in my hand. I was to take one pill every six hours. He also handed me a prescription for a bottle of orange-pink pills; these were the anti-inflammatory drugs, two every four hours. “You’ll probably bruise quite a bit, with your coloring,” he continued. “You’ll want to ice it once you get home. For such a little girl you had some pretty big teeth.”

I did not want to be pitied. I was aware I was shaking slightly from within. I imagined that on the outside I looked a wreck.

“Here,” said Dr. Bogart, handing over my teeth, two at a time, wrapped in a mound of gauze. “You can keep them.”

I held these four fossils, my bones, in the palm of my hand. They were oddly-shaped, I thought as I stared, these hooked roots of spiraled corpses. The dead ends were stained a brownish-red. It upset me more than I thought it should have to see these parts of myself, which belonged inside, not on the outside, once attached, now removed, severed from me. Family of four: gone. And yet strangely there I was holding them, together, in my grasp.

My thoughts, my memories, came in dismembered pieces.

I remembered the day I heard the news that my father moved out of the house. It was my freshman year of college, just before Thanksgiving. I had called home. Your father is gone, my mother said, he left the house this morning. Dad took his things, said Neal, the lamp from the family room, the grandfather clock, the television set, he did not even say goodbye, he just left. And that was that. I took it in and when I hung up the phone I thought to myself, how could I blame my father, when I had just left too?

(And now, I thought, now, how could I blame him now, he was not liable now that he was sick.)

I remembered how he had asked me so many times the months after I hit puberty, the summer I was thirteen, he said, You know I love you, don’t you? And I answered so many times, always, Yes, but he kept asking as if the need for this affirmation was insatiable. Maybe he left because I did not love him enough. Maybe he left because I loved him too much. Maybe he had not really loved me at all. Even if he had wanted to, perhaps he just couldn’t, or he had tried and it just was not possible, because of something about me, within me. These questions ate at me like children of want, swallowing me with their unmet needs and hopes, with love’s beggary.

“The good news,” said Dr. Bogart, “is you won’t ever have to go through this again. The bad news is you’re going to be in a lot of pain when that Novocain wears off.” He leaned on a padded stool. “I want you to rest here for a while, you’ve been through a lot.”

I did not reply, mostly because I couldn’t with all that cotton and gauze he had stuffed in my cheeks, but also because I had decided answering no longer mattered.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes to check on you,” Dr. Bogart said. He put one hand on my shoulder as he walked away.

“Thank you,” I managed as he left the room, forgetting the wads in my mouth, my words muffled and dazed. Numb. I felt nothing at all, except a little sorry for Dr. Bogart; I hadn’t done very well in there. I hadn’t been able to control my fearful reactions. I hoped I hadn’t upset him. I remembered that dentists had the highest suicide rate of all people in America. It’s because they don’t know what to do with all that pain.