Cynthia Robinson's Blog, page 8

House of Mirrors

House of Mirrors: Al Franken resigns. Roy Moore gets $$ from the RNC.

House of Horrors, I: You’re sitting on a plane and the guy in the seat next to you–he has what looks like a dead, stuffed chipmunk on his head, or is that his hair?–tries to put his hand up your skirt (unfortunately for Donald Trump, Jessica Leeds is for real, and really credible).

House of Horrors, II: After similarly assaulting god knows how many more women–according to him, he’s famous so they like it–said guy with said dead, stuffed chipmunk on his head occupies the Oval Office. A majority of white, married women in this country voted for him.

W.T.F., America? W.T.F!?

I’m sorry, all two of my dear readers, I truly am–I know I post about this stuff way too much. I promise to talk about something else next week. Really, truly. I promise.

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Time for a Deep Breath?

Hands up skirts, on thighs, brushing bottoms. Off-color comments, propositions, power. Roy Moore? Sure. But Charlie Rose?! Et tu, Brute?

The tsunami unleashed by Harvey Weinstein’s fall from grace, the finally-making-public of distasteful truths everyone acknowledged but colluded in keeping under wraps until they didn’t, just keeps coming. The alleged perpetrators just keep toppling. Even liberal icons—Al Franken (though, for the moment, he’s still standing), and Charlie Rose. And Matt Lauer and Garrison Keillor andandand.

Public pressure and #metoo is flushing them out of the bushes in staggering numbers.

Now we need to figure out a way to get to the “…owner of the grocery store, the coach, the teacher, the neighbor, who”—as stated in an interview with Amy Goodman by Tarana Burke, sexual assault survivor, activist and founder of the #metoo movement—“are doing the same things.” #metoo is ten years old: this, to me, was news. To Tarana Burke, this moment must feel like it’s been a long, long time in coming.

And it does appear as though a tipping point may have been reached.

So let’s not waste it. In order for the correction of course to extend its reach beyond Hollywood and prominent national media outlets, something besides name-shame-sack-damnatio memoriae needs to happen. The accusations—often held back for a decade or more following alleged perpetration, and often for very good reason—are coming so thick and fast it’s hard to even keep up. Let alone assess the merits of each case. These guys are named by their accusers—often anonymously, which smacks a bit of the Inquisition, or of the Obama administration’s well-intentioned but misguided overreach with Title IX (I’m a medievalist and an academic in my day job, so I know of what I speak). The news is then picked up by the press, if in fact the initial declaration hasn’t been made to a journalist in the first place, and that seems to be enough to get the alleged perpetrators kicked to the curb by their employers, their lives scorched and burned, all without trial, judge or jury.

I am not claiming innocence for these men. My propensity, as someone who has undergone everything from the hand on the thigh to violent sexual assault, is, frankly, to believe the women. But the unfortunate truth is that, for actual justice to be done, the accuser must have recourse to the justice system, imperfect as it is. Which process can be extremely traumatizing.

When I was assaulted, I did not report it. There were extenuating circumstances, which are not germane here, but bottom line: I made a risk-benefit calculation and decided to keep it to myself.

As I did, two decades later, when two men followed me through the supermarket on a summer afternoon, snapping photos up my skirt with their cellphones from the vegetable aisle all the way to the cleaning products, where the more daredevil of the pair finally stuck a feather duster between my legs from behind. I screamed, they ran, the usual. The curse words only came once they’d rounded the corner, disappearing into a maze of bottled water and soft drink aisles. Which left me yelling at a feather duster, feeling helpless, furious, and more than a little ridiculous.

The supermarket’s security cameras had caught the whole thing—which felt, at the time, like yet another indignity—and I had several interviews with a detective, who pressed me (politely, but he pressed) to press charges.

While seated in his office, I had a flashback of the earlier, more violent attack that left me choking back sobs. The men, as it was his duty to inform me, had a record, involving drugs and arms. By coming forward as a victim, by pressing charges, I would have to reveal my identity, to them. That was the price of justice, and I was not willing to pay it.

The people who assaulted me, both very violently and not-as, were not famous. I would not be able to go to the media tomorrow, anonymously denounce them, walk away, and wait for all hell to break loose. I’d like to be able to do that. I’d even love it. But the result would not be justice. It would be punishment.

The rush to public shaming and hasty sacking, moreover, runs the risk of throwing everything into the same drawer and slamming it shut. Of conflating, for example, a very ill-advised, feigned-breast-grab of a photo op (Franken), with, say, what appears to have been, if accusations are borne out, a calculated and systematic attempt to engage in sexual contact with a series of underage girls over a period of years (Moore), and even with repeated instances of violent sexual assault (Weinstein—again, if accusations are borne out–and a couple others added to the list just today).

These things are not the same. We need to be clear and careful about distinguishing between off-color comments and unwanted touching that should be addressed by a thorough reassessment of workplace environment, and rape, for which perpetrators—even famous ones, or maybe especially them—should do long, hard time.

The liberals, of late anyway, tend to get harsh, swift punishment. Once the Weinstein dam broke, those in a position to publicly wash their hands of people like Kevin Spacey (at least one of whose foibles sounds, to me anyway, like the behavior of pretty much every drunk 26-year-old guy I’ve ever encountered at a party) and Charlie Rose, couldn’t scramble fast enough to do so. It’s worth remembering that these punishments are being meted out by elements of the same media and celebrity culture that allowed the Matter of Weinstein to fester, hidden in plain sight, for—literally—decades.

The conservatives are another matter. Moore has yet to stand down from his Alabama Senate race, despite (tardy, tepid) mumblings from high-profile Republicans that maybe he should. And our President has (also tardily, and tepidly) defended the Senate hopeful—something to the effect of ‘well, he said he didn’t do it…’

Said President, of course, despite recent denials, did do it, and he bragged, on tape, about the sexual-assault notches in his own belt.

Liberals are desperately ashamed of the fact that Donald Trump occupies the White House. Yes, we are furious, and shocked, and disgusted, and offended, but we are—I submit—above all, ashamed. We couldn’t prevent it. We didn’t know we had to. Until it was too late.

And so now, unable to get at the guy we’d really like to topple, it’s tempting to allow anonymous accusations and rush-to-judgment punishment of highly visible men, for unsubstantiated objectionable behavior of varying, and to a large extent undifferentiated, degrees of seriousness—a great deal of which they very likely did perpetrate, but at this rate we’ll never know what, exactly, they did and did not do—to serve as catharsis. Let’s not call it a witch-hunt, though that would not be entirely off base either.

I don’t know if there’s a way to orchestrate a collective deep breath here, but it might be good if we could.

We need better, more victim-friendly accountability, both in the workplace and in the justice system. Women need to feel as though it’s safe to come forward and name their accusers. That their accusations will receive sensitive, fair, respectful and thorough evaluation. That, if appropriate, justice will be rendered in return. That’s not where we are now, and I don’t think the avalanche of anonymous accusations and indiscriminately ruined lives is going to get us there.

What will? Not sure, but we need to think about it, hard.

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Thanksgiving Crossings

Two weeks before Thanksgiving, in Uppsala, Sweden, a beautiful lop-eared rabbit named Stella died. I didn’t know Stella, or her humans. I follow them on Instagram.

Stella’s death was unexpected, as rabbits’ passing through the veil so often are. It brought back the deaths of my own much-loved bunnies: their lives are so short, and when I adopt and fall in love and make a life with these creatures, I always, always forget that. I’d grown to love Stella, even if virtually, looking forward every day to the posts from Uppsala. I would miss her.

The next morning, I found a message in my voice-mail box, from my cousin, who has taken upon herself the thankless task of keeping the disparate strands of our Southern-diaspora family at least nominally tied together. She’d  called while she was driving, as she usually does.

From Huntsville, Alabama, to Memphis, and my uncle’s funeral. He’d died two days earlier, and no one had thought to tell me (or my estranged brother).

That, plus the fact that I don’t know whether the death was expected or not, tells you all you need to know about why I like hotels and foreign countries at Thanksgiving. Making puns on the whole concept by going, with someone I cannot name, and who is usually the reason for my being in a hotel in the first place, especially a European one, for #turkeyday dinner to a Turkish restaurant. Making artsy photos and posting them on Instagram, along with some smart-ass comments about the holidays.

By so doing and so sharing, I deny to myself (and to everyone except the three or four people who’ll read this) that, when my mother was alive, I was absolutely, 100%, totally and completely on board with everything Christmas. Trees, stockings, cookies, presents—I no longer buy them; snowflake cutouts to make snow decorations on the front windows with spray-snow; cooking, cider, pine boughs, you name it, we did it, together. I’ll never again do any of it, ever.

My mother died when I was 25, in early August. I missed her funeral, being in Sicily. That night I got very drunk and had sex with a guy on a boat from Sicily to Naples—we used the linen closet (think about that the next time you opt for a cruise. Or don’t).

I loved my mother to distraction.

The Christmas after my mother died, my distraught father and I were going to escape it all by going on a cruise that got rained out by torrential downpours in Memphis that shut the airport down and made it impossible for us to get to Miami. We’d driven to my uncle’s house the day before, arriving late enough for them to be done with presents but early enough so as not to miss lunch, and that’s where we spent the night. The next morning we had breakfast and then drove home to the silent, empty house. Don’t ask me where my brother was, I have no idea.

The fact that my uncle is now gone feels unreal to me, like it belongs to someone else. Or like he did. Yesterday was the day we all used to gather at his house. Only yesterday, obviously, we didn’t. We haven’t for a very, very long time, and now we never will again. And I am not sure what, if anything, I feel about that.

It’s not that I did not love my uncle, because I did. And my aunt, and their children—highlights of the holiday seasons of my childhood were trips to their house for the huge meal (Thanksgiving, always, and sometimes, barely a month later, Christmas, too). The game of touch football outside afterward, while the adults digested. The roller-coaster excitement in my stomach of finally, at ten, being allowed to play, one of only two girls, the other being my cousin of the long, incomprehensible messages. It was rarely ever cold enough, in Memphis, to need more than a light sweater. If we were very, very lucky, my father would declare himself too tired to drive the 90-or-so minutes home and we’d stay overnight, and have warmed over sweet rolls, my grandmother’s, homemade, for breakfast.

When did the thread break? Are all family ties, at their heart, so very tenuous? Ours were already very, very frayed by the time my father died in 2008. The last occasion I saw most of them, in fact, my brother included, was at his funeral.

I haven’t cried for my uncle yet. I’m not sure if I will. But someone posted a painting of Stella on Instagram today, a gift for her humans, and that sent me running for the tissues.

Made me take a break from packing up my belongings in the hotel room where I spent Thanksgiving, exchanging not a single communication of any form with anyone of any familial relationship to myself whatsoever (I’m adopted: is this why my attitude toward family is so effed?). And it’s not just my family: when, as I usually am, I’m in Ithaca over this holiday weekend, I habitually lie to friends who invite me to join them and their families. Can’t, I’m busy. Can’t, thanks so much, I’ll be away.

This year I was away, in a hotel, halfway around the world. I liked it—perhaps a new tradition.

I like hotel rooms very much. You could even say that I love them. I experience a particular delight on the last morning, with my unnamable person already started along the return path toward where he lives, as I zip the last items into my suitcase, look around the room one final time, and close the door behind me.

No one would know I’d ever been there.

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Served Up

This week: Granada, one of my favorite places to eat and drink. Berenjena frita—fried eggplant, thin slices both tender and crispy, drizzled in molasses. Cogollos a la cordobesa—hearts of romaine tossed with crunchy little bits of fried garlic and the olive oil they rode in on: warm and earthy, cool and fresh. All at once. Both of these dishes to be served immediately after preparation, maybe as prelude to calamar a la plancha—grilled squid, w/garlic and lemon—all it needs, if done right. Accompanied by my stand-by favorite, a tinto de Ribera (del Duero–a region less known in the U.S. than the Rioja for its fruit of the vine; Ribera reds are lighter, happier to hang w/fish, and I far prefer them). Croquetas—croquettes, Spain’s most divine comfort food; tonight’s were mushroom, or spinach, or jamón de bellota. Croquetas put hushpuppies to shame, shamed as I am to admit that, Southern girl that I am.

The idea was to make this a post all about food. I even spent the week snapping food porn (a number of which shots have made their way onto Instagram, or will do so imminently). Moments not spent ingesting the heavenly culinary creations that inspired the food porn, however, have been dedicated to wrapping up a study of the 14th-century Nasrid palace popularly known as Daralhorra—a Hispanized version of the Arabic for “palace of the free (or noble) woman”—located in the Albaicín, just across the Darro River from the better-known Alhambra.

My colleagues and I have arrived at the conclusion that Daralhorra did not belong, as is widely believed, to `Aisha, mother of the final sultan of Granada (Boabdil, the lily-livered one who handed the keys of the kingdom to Fernando and Isabel, los Reyes Católicos, yep, that’s the one, fine to hate him).

Rather, archival sources indicate that it figured among the real-estate holdings of Boabdil’s father’s second wife, al-Zahrā’, the Zoraya of Spanish language and legend. Before Zoraya was his wife, she was Muley Hacén’s concubine, and before that, she was the servant who swept his bedchamber. Before someone handed her a broom and told her to get to work, she was a terrified twelve-year-old girl, snatched up onto a horse by Nasrid raiders galloping through the outskirts of her town, where she’d gone with several other children to draw water from a well.

Before someone at the Nasrid court named her Zoraya, her mother called her Isabel. Al-Zahrā’ can be loosely translated as “splendorous,” which she, by all accounts, was–beauty can be a double-edged sword.

Isabel/Zahrā’/Zoraya bore the Sultan of Granada two sons, who came very close to inheriting the Nasrid throne. She lived by his side for decades. Once they were wed, he wouldn’t rest until his subjects recognized her, rather than his repudiated wife, as his rightful consort.

And yet, she must have been in her very early teens the first time she was brought to the sultan’s bed. Though there are elements of her story that smack of medieval romance—the well, the palace, the silks, the jewels—once those are peeled back we’re left with a vulnerable young girl, in a subservient relationship to a very powerful man, who had little if any choice about the ways in which her body would be used.

My imaginings of Isabel, this week, keep getting interfered with by images of Beverly Young Nelson, the latest of Roy Moore’s victims to come forward. Wiping tears, standing before microphones to take questions from the press, obviously middle-aged, perhaps she doesn’t touch hearts the way a very young girl might. She’s old enough to take care of herself—I even caught myself thinking that.

But she, like Zoraya, was a teen-aged girl—a waitress rather than a chamber maid—when Roy Moore, a regular at the Alabama restaurant (which did not serve cogollos a la cordobesa, maybe not even salad) where she worked–for ridiculously tiny paychecks and tips she had to smile for–grabbed her breasts with one hand, her neck with the other. The same age I was, more or less, when the manager of a fast food restaurant in Tennessee–where I, along w/other female employees, wore a short, tight red dress with a candy-striped apron—announced, one fine day, that he didn’t keep me on salad bar because I was good at it (I was, as I have been at all my jobs). He kept me on salad bar because he liked to watch me bend over. He was standing too close, I could smell his breath. I took a step back, away from him, away from the open walk-in door.

Women in the “hospitality industry,” as it used to be so quaintly called, deal with this crap alllllllllllll the time. And the hot ones get it worse. As Leigh Corfman and Beverly Young well know–both were clearly very attractive in their youth; one is still so as a mature woman (haven’t seen a photograph of the mature Leigh Corfman; like I say, beauty is a double-edged sword, maybe she’d prefer to be ugly)–a lifetime of said crap ends up messing with your head. Zoraya lived to a ripe old age, part of it in exile and in penury–her ‘husband’ was her senior by many, many years, and when he died, the vultures circled eagerly. Wish I could brew her a Turkisn (or Andalusi) coffee and pick her brain…

Meanwhile, in the news, these stories just keep coming—that’s a good thing, right? Sunlight is the best disinfectant?—and I can’t look away (Al Franken, yup, #himtoo: much as I wish this were a Purely Partisan Problem, it ain’t. Even the ones who are okay with a woman’s right to choose [abortion] occasionally show their true colors, tho’ at least they have the decency to own up and say sorry, my bad). This week, they’re messing not only with my head, but with my historical objectivity, as I try to take a scholar’s attitude toward Zoraya and her hard-won palace. Maybe that’s a good thing too.

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In Praise of Airport Hotels

This post was meant to be about Roy Moore and Kevin Spacey and young girls and young boys (and lest we focus on our own sorry age as the nadir point of such abuses, I’ll just remark that a sub-genre of medieval Arabic poetry waxed lyrical comparing the merits of the two… pubescent boys and girls, that is, not Moore and Spacey). But then that post went to The Hill, where people are making comments about it that I don’t think I’ll look at, it’s enough to know it started a conversation.

Or maybe I *will* look at them: a state of acute jet-lag is possibly the ideal condition in which to peek under the Inter-belly and see who hates you. But not now. Later.

In the meantime, a brief post in praise of airport hotels. Those in-between spaces and places sufficiently far from anything cultural or interesting so as to make your 24-hr wallow in fluffy robes and free slippers and room service absolutely guilt-free. In Madrid, for the past several years, on the bleary morning following a transatlantic flight, I always come to the same one, the Melià Barajas. It has a holdover of 70s glam about it—orchids and chandeliers and a baby grand piano. A (really good) restaurant. And it is astonishingly cheap: about $150/night for a “Premium” room that is effing huge and has a whiff of the Mme Récamier about it.

I love that first coffee. I always order a cortado doble (three shots of deepest, darkest espresso, cut—cortado—with just enough milk to help it slip down easy), and a bottle of Vichy Catalan, sparkling water bottled in the environs of Barcelona (come to think of it, given the current political situation around here, it’s perhaps a bit surprising they’re still serving it in Madrid). It has a very slight undertone of a salty, earthy something-or-other that makes it absolutely different from, and in my most humble of opinions, far superior to, San Pellegrino, Badoit, etc., etc., etc., etc. And unlike the aforementioned brands, they do not export. If you want Vichy Catalan, you have to come to Spain to get it. Fine by me.

Early enough in the morning for the hotel still to be coming to life (these are Spanish hours, not American ones), I sit at the bar and wait for my chambre à la Mme Récamier, sip my cortado doble, and, listening to the absolutely inoffensive breathy Euro-chanson audioscape, consider, slowly and deliciously, my options: will I sleep? Read? Write (yes, it is actually possible to write under the influence of extreme jet-lag and excess caffeine, sometimes surprisingly well…)? Will I watch Pay-per-View? Hang out on Instagram? All of the above and then some? How will I delight in this in-between day, neither here nor there, obliged to tell no one where I am and what I am doing?

Tomorrow there will be the bus to Granada, Monday I have to give a paper (en castellano). And then the rest of the week devoted to madly cranking out what remains to be done on a collaborative project w/three colleagues (the deadline was more than a month ago…).

Today, however, I do not have to do one single solitary effing thing I don’t want to.

How many of those days do we get (or: do we give ourselves), in our little human lifetimes? Not nearly enough, people, not nearly enough.

 

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Grooming

There’s a saying down south: you can get away with purd’ much anything, `less you rape a boy or kill a girl. There are a number of regional variations. The Alabama one has been in the news today, but they all amount to the more or less the same thing: watch it with the boys; girls are fine, just don’t get caught.

Over the last ten days, Kevin Spacey has gone from A-list celebrity to having his face erased from films not yet released—banned from Netflix, dumped by his publicist, persona non grata everywhere. Not that what Spacey did was good—it wasn’t—and public condemnation and its consequences were staggeringly quick in coming.

Roy Moore, on the other hand, might just be headed for the U.S. Senate. And I’m not really sure why we’re shocked: Bill O’Reilly got a golden parachute. Trump got the White House. You kind of have to wonder what—if any—the consequences would have been for Spacey if he’d had a thing for young girls instead of young men.

And you’d be well within your rights to wonder, a little, what Leigh Corfman’s mother was thinking when she left her daughter sitting on that bench outside the courthouse with Roy Moore, or let her—if she knew about it—take his phone calls, or go off with him in his car, to his house in the woods.

I think I might have an answer to this last question, or at least a partial one. Leigh Corfman and I are around the same age, and the news today threw me back to a moment when I, too, was fourteen. We were in my father’s Buick, on a flat stretch of old highway. Southern pine barrens, in the southern, coastal part of Mississippi. The family headed from Tennessee to Florida, to spend a week at the beach. This was back in the heyday of CB Radios (if you’re under 40, you might have to Google that one). The ostensible justification for those devices was dodging speeding tickets; the real reason probably had more to do with being good ole boys together on the airwaves.

I was sitting in the back seat, probably next to my younger brother (though I tend to edit him out of most scenes for reasons that are not germane to this post). Probably reading—the default assumption where adolescent me is concerned. In cut-offs (also default assumption), my legs clearly visible from the vantage point of a trucker’s cab.

Comments were coming over the CB, something about a long-legged, red-headed cool drink of water in blue-jean shorts (I was both tall for my age and an early developer), and it gradually became clear that object of the comments was 14-year-old me.

My father whooped and laughed and winked at me in the mirror, like I had just won some kind of prize. “That’s my girl!”

I don’t remember my mother’s reaction. Today, in my mind, it is subsumed with Leigh Corfman’s mother’s probably somewhat flattered trust in the man in a suit who’d offered to “take care of” (he probably said “look after”) her daughter while she attended to business in the courthouse. If my father thought it was funny, then it was okay.

I’ve tried all day long to make contact with the memory of my own reaction to the sudden knowledge that men—men at least as old as Roy Moore was when he drove 14-year-old Leigh Corfman to his house in the woods and loosened her up with wine—were looking at and talking about me in those terms. And I think I have to admit that I was kind of pleased, in a bashful, squirmy sort of way: those comments, after all, had elicited a “That’s my girl!” from my father.

I had to unlearn that lesson, and it took a long, long time.

Fourteen-year-old girls, of course, are sexual beings. They’re curious, they want to try things. Like drinking and kissing. With boys (or girls) of their own age, or maybe a little older. Just not old enough to be their fathers. That’s a male fantasy.

I like to think that, today, girls and their parents would, in such a situation, behave in a much more enlightened and evolved way. That society no longer grooms girls to accept—and even to seek—objectification. But I have a sneaking, nagging, unpleasant suspicion that things haven’t changed all that much. We just have the Internet now.

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Visitation

I saw the little brown rabbit today. Returning from the mailbox—nothing: a no-mail day is a good day—heading back to refill the bird feeder. Up a slight rise, over a little knoll, and there he was, by the deck. Rabbits usually like hovering about the edges of things—the perimeter of a room, the fringe of a carpet, doorjambs. Outside, you’ll see them among the taller grasses and weeds that mark the boundary between yard and field or woods.

But this rabbit hangs out at the edge of my back deck, sometimes even on it. In summer, he flops—a rabbit flopping is a supremely comfortable and secure rabbit—right out in the open, nibbling green grass, exactly in my line of sight from my desk.

He does this because he is Palmer, and Palmer likes to visit.

Palmer was the first bunny I adopted from T.H.E. Rabbit Resource and he was my soul mate. All bunnies are my familiars, and all of my rabbits have been—and are—deeply loved. But Palmer was different. Perhaps he was especially evolved because he hadn’t suffered abuse in his former home: the guy just got caught selling controlled substances in quantities large enough to send him to jail and Palmer was collateral damage.

And he was clearly loved in that home—drug dealers can be nice to animals too: he was well-adjusted enough to immediately take to, and bond with, a very damaged little Petal (a twelve-year-old, a shotgun, some hunting dogs, you get the picture) when she joined us. Palmer litterbox-trained her, not me—she wanted nothing to do with humans for a good long while .

One July night a little more than two years ago, we were descending the stairs, Palmer in my arms and Petal ahead of us. Palmer, as rabbits do sometimes, decided he could fly. He was a big guy, and if he wanted down, down he went.

This time he landed on his hip.

The vet said they could operate, he was in excellent health otherwise, and would Petal mind standing by as a possible blood donor. After the final call to set everything up—surgery was the following morning—Petal and I went out to water the flowers in the patio (Petal perhaps to eat them). When my phone rang and I saw the vet’s number, my heart took a dive.

Palmer had gone into cardiac arrest—a blood clot resulting from the injury—and they were trying to resuscitate. She’d call me as soon as she had news. Such moments present two alternatives: dissolve into tears and weep and wail right there on the patio, or transition to auto-pilot, keep watering, everything will be okay. I chose the latter.

As I watered the flowers on the back deck, I sensed a presence. I turned. Within inches of my feet was a little brown rabbit, standing on his hind legs. Maybe waiting for me. Definitely not afraid of me. When he saw that I’d seen him, he gave a playful flip to his head and scampered off into the woods.

As I rounded the house and opened the patio gate, my phone was ringing. I was not surprised to see the vet’s number, or by either of the things she told me: Palmer had just died, and no, wild rabbits never do what the little brown rabbit had just done.

He’s been visiting us ever since. He waits for me while I water, and I talk to him. When it’s cold he watches me feed the birds. Some days he shows up, others he doesn’t. He’s welcome anytime.

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#metoo: Early Starters

So this week it was more Bill O’Reilly, paying hush-money to the tune of 32 million dollars (what in God’s name did he do? oh, right, sorry, he’s mad at God…), and Mark Halperin wanting women who were not his wife to sit on his lap. Slightly more heartening was the appearance of the Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem duo on MSNBC, expressing hope that we’re about to witness a change, damn-straight-if-they-have-anything-to-say-about-it. From their lips to the universe’s ears.

But this stuff runs so, so deep—how are we going to be sure we’ve gotten the roots out too?

I followed the trail, in my own case, back, back, back, to the very first time it happened to me. First grade, Highland Park Elementary School, Jackson, Tennessee, 1969. At the hands of a boy by the name of Steve Short. R comes just before S, so his desk was next to mine. He walked behind me in line to the lunchroom, or out to recess in Highland Park. Once, on our way toward the open field on the other side of the park, for a game of kickball or something, he deftly pulled me out of line (from behind, he had the advantage of surprise), dragged me beneath a near-by slide, and held my arms tightly to my sides so that I couldn’t fight. Then he kissed me. Two, three, four times, I don’t remember how many. I do remember a blotchy red rash on his neck. It visited my nightmares for weeks.

Once during rest period, when I (possibly exhausted by the red-rash nightmares) had actually fallen asleep on my little foldy-outty plastic mat, he crept across the room, reached up under my dress, and yanked my panties down to my ankles.

I was so ashamed that I never told the teacher (who did not witness the assault—she used rest period to rest in the teachers’ lounge), or my parents.

Let’s hit pause here for a second: *I* was ashamed because *he* pulled my panties down. A six-year-old girl with no previous experience in such matters instinctively knows to just pull her panties up and shut the eff up if she wants no further shaming. Then there’s the matter of a six-year-old boy with a playbook already containing all the classic moves of sexual harassers (and worse) the world over.

And now we have a president in the White House who grabs `em by the pu$$y (NB: a whole lot of women pulled the lever for him), thus enabling (even encouraging) all the little Steve Shorts out there.

I hope Jane and Gloria are right, I really do. But I’m not holding my breath.

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Lost Novel, Part One: #metoo

This was supposed to be my first post in the Lost Novel thread. The one where I tell all three of my readers why they should be interested in my attempts to reconstruct Ophelia Drowned, last seen hanging around on a floppy disk going on twenty years ago, now lost (there is a good argument to be made that all first novels should be lost) somewhere between Manhattan and Albuquerque.

Ophelia Drowned is, or was—perhaps will be—one in a series of manifestations of my fascination with John Everett Millais’ Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece. It was also inspired by the death, when I was five, of my favorite aunt. She was a librarian, in the small town in Tennessee where I grew up. She gave me my first book—Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit—which I drooled on in my sleep, in lieu of a stuffed animal. My aunt was beautiful. She was divorced (uncommon in the South in the 60s). She died from a gunshot wound. A bullet to the head, from a gun fired by her son, my cousin, when he was fifteen. Perhaps accidentally, perhaps not.

Ophelia Drowned was my brain’s attempt to make a story out of what had happened and why. Completely my own invention, made up out of whole cloth, because no one in my family would answer my questions. No one would talk about it. There were no photographs of my aunt in our home, or in my grandmother’s, in whose presence we were forbidden to mention her name—as though the shame were my aunt’s, alone, even in death.

My aunt died a victim of gun violence. One could also say she died a victim of violence against women, a larger rubric beneath which we can also fit the topic that is currently roiling the headlines, daily and sometimes even hourly: Harvey Weinstein and his victims. Bill O’Reilly and his. Bill Cosby and Roger Ailes and Dominique Strauss Kahn and Donald Trump and theirs. Because sexual harassment and assault, when perpetrated against a woman, is but one instantiation—a particularly abhorrent instantiation—of violence against women, something of which the world has been far too tolerant for far too long. Does it take movie stars speaking out to make it change? Is it not enough that it happens to thousands, if not millions, of women every day?

#metoo.

I have been stalked and followed home, groped and catcalled, upskirted and offered $500 to walk on some guy in Central Park with my boots. #alloftheabove and far, far worse. The catcalling, of course, goes without saying: we’re supposed to just shrug it off, or even be flattered. It started for me, as it does for most women, when I was in a training bra, and it continues to this day (one would think that after fifty… well, maybe sixty will be the magic number: sags and bags, bring it on).

I’m sure it was different for my aunt—the times were other, society was other—but she was a woman on her own in a time and place that didn’t much care for women on their own: I’m equally sure that it was #hertoo. I have absolutely no doubt that the same was true for Lizzie Siddall, model for Millais’ Ophelia—another woman on her own, in nineteenth-century London.

Alone, that is, until she finally married the obsessed, stalk-y Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who forbade her to model for anyone but him.

If it takes high-profile actresses (whose suffering I in no way wish to minimize) to draw attention to this age-old problem, then so be it: a debt of gratitude is owed to all who have spoken out. May this ugliest of moments in our culture be a turning point. May we look back, some day, and think to ourselves, yes, it did start then. Things are better now, and that was when they began to change.

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How I Became a Crazy Rabbit Lady, Part One

Bunnies rarely live as long as a dog or a cat. They can be delicate creatures—a rabbit, for instance, cannot breathe through its mouth, so a respiratory infection can be deadly.

Those who adopt bunnies will have their hearts broken, on average, every five or six years.

A hard-core rabbit person accepts this and loves anyway.

Mistreated or abandoned rabbits don’t get nearly the amount of press that dogs and cats do, but they’re out there, and they need help. If you’d like to make a donation, or sponsor a bun currently being fostered, or maybe even foster a bun yourself, please visit http://www.therabbitresource.org/

Rabbits and I were an accident. I didn’t have a rabbit as a child, none of my grade-school classes had them. My father told stories of raising rabbits in hutches in the back of his preacher-daddy’s house in rural Tennessee. One female—or doe, as I would learn, much later, to call them—was especially forthright in demanding attention when he went out to feed them and clean their cages. For my father, raising rabbits was like having a paper route—he bred them (or they probably bred themselves) and then he sold the offspring, and the adults too, once they got too old to breed. I don’t think he sold them as pets. Which, though he never said so, maybe bothered him (he was a hunter, but that was different): we never ate rabbit in our house. 

My first bunny, Tamerlane, was a peace offering after a weeks-long fight with my then-boyfriend, eventual husband, and now ex (I was a bit of a slow learner in that relationship). I lived in Princeton during the week, at the Institute for Advanced Study, and spent weekends with him in his loft, west of Broadway, between Canal and the financial district. I decided that we should adopt a shelter dog (his loft was a fifth-floor walk-up, but that didn’t seem like a deal-breaker to me). In fact, I was insistent that we should adopt a shelter dog. Adamant. I’d talked to a shelter, they had pit-bull mixes that no one wanted. One of those dogs was for me.  I bought a leash and a bowl, and chose a name: Persephone. I made an appointment with the shelter. I was excited (possibly more by the prospect of a dog than by the future ex).

The night before the appointment, future ex brought down the hatchet on my plan. Fifth-floor walk-up, dog couldn’t come to Princeton with me during the week, mess, responsibility, time. All of which, to be fair, were valid points. But he had no idea what he’d unleashed (sorry). 

Ours was a relationship with a whole lot of problems, some still latent at that point but I knew they were there. And I was, I suppose, planning to fix them with a dog.  And I knew very well without calling the shelter to ask (I couldn’t bear to) what had likely happened to Persephone and her litter-mates, which didn’t help with the problems—when I’d had too much to drink (which was practically every night we spent together, thankfully weekends-only), I’d accuse him of condemning Persephone to the needle. Which wasn’t entirely fair, but wasn’t entirely off-base either. All this happened right after New Year’s. The future ex was still trying to appease me on Valentine’s day.

To which end, he made a date with me at an address in Chinatown that I figured was some restaurant he’d discovered. Instead, it was a pet shop, tiny, and filled mostly with raucous birds.

Future ex’s idea: guinea pig. Mine: the adorable bunny in the window, engrossed in grooming his long lop ears, was coming home with me, and future ex could do as he pleased (more than a little bravado on my part: the loft was his and I didn’t have keys).

Pet-Shop Lady Linda—who was a little deaf, because of the birds, so she talked in shouts—removed the rabbit from his grass-filled fish tank and put him in my arms. He immediately nestled into my shoulder and began a chittery bunny-purr.

Linda, loudly: “Hasn’t done that with anyone! Looks like love!”  

Future ex was smart enough to shut up and pay up and that was that.

I had no idea what to do with a bunny and I have spent the last fifteen-or-so years learning.

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