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It was not a metaphor: it was an actual replica of the Titanic, with a mini museum on the lower level, though most of their business came from weddings and children’s birthday parties hosted on the upper decks.
That seems like an ominous start to a marriage
There was always something they wouldn’t tell everybody, and she wanted to be told, which meant she had to look like a real person to them, like a person whose mother deserved to live, like someone who loved somebody.
Whatever information they weren’t going to give her, whatever medicine they didn’t bother trying on Black women, she would have to ask to get, would have to ask for directly so that it went in the file if they refused, but ask for without seeming stupid or aggressive or cold.
This
some of the video of the incident had been censored and some had not, and it was hard to know how much horror you were about to see before autoplay showed it.
Aesthetically, it was not her best work, but JT, handsome, tanned, and blond, was what the public wanted as a symbol of America in the small and shrinking world, the boy-next-door on the other side of the world. Boy-next-door, Rena knew, always meant white boy next door. When America has one natural blond family left, its members will be trotted out to play every role that calls for someone all-American, to be interviewed in every time of crisis. They will be exhausted.
The idea that Americans are only white
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The land of the blind would be built for the blind; there would be no expectation among its citizens that the world should be other than what it was. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man would adjust, or otherwise be deemed a lunatic or a heretic. The one-eyed man would spend his life learning to translate what experience was his alone, or else he would learn to shut up about it.
Have you spent much time with your bridal counterpart?” “Only met her briefly.” “See if you can get out of her what she did.” “What she did?” “You have seven color choices; you don’t put a redhead in orange unless you’re angry at her. Girl is being punished for something. Must be some gossip.”
she is too old to be giving anyone a hickey, she knows, but she is determined right now to leave a mark, to become part of the temporary map of his body, to place herself briefly along his trajectory as something that can be physically noted,
they are at that age now, a few years older than the bride and groom, youth waving at them from the border to an unknown territory. Rena can tell that if she saw Michael again in two years, he would be starting to look like a middle-aged man, not unattractive or unpleasant looking, but it has snuck up on her, that time of her life when age-appropriate men remind her of her father, when you go a year without seeing a man and suddenly his hair is thinned in the middle, his beard graying, his body softer.
Perils of Aging
All of her adult life people have asked Rena why she goes to such dangerous places, and she has always wanted to ask them where the safe place is. The danger is in chemicals and airports and refugee camps and war zones and regions known for sex tourism. The danger also sometimes took their trash out for them. The danger came over for movie night and bought them a popcorn maker for Christmas. The danger hugged her mother and shook her father’s hand.
This is powerful
“You know,” says JT, “I used to think you were so brave, and sometimes I still do, and sometimes I think it’s just that there’s nothing in your life but you, and you have no idea what it means to be scared that what you do might matter.”
But Rena can see already everything wrong with that future. As a teenager, she prized her ability to see clearly the way things would end. She thought that if she saw things plainly enough, she could skip deception and disappointment, could love men not for their illusions but for their flaws and be loved for hers in return. She did not understand how to pretend.
No wonder they had sent her off—who wants to be loved for the hole in their chest when there is a woman somewhere willing to lie and say she can fix it, another prepared to spend decades pretending it isn’t there?
When Rena would not have looked at the water and thought of E. coli, of hantavirus, of imminent drought, of a recent news story of a child who drowned in a pool like this because his parents sent him to the water park alone for free day care and no one there was watching for him. When it was still her job to keep Elizabeth’s swimmies on, when there was still Elizabeth’s laugh, when there were still seas to be crossed, when the whole world was in front of her. Wish you were here. Wish you were here. Wish you were here.
This really is beautiful writing
Mrs. Hall has been Claire’s second mother most of her life, and Claire fears that she will lose both her mother and her other mother, but it turns out that it is worse to lose only one, when it’s the one that counts.
Claire has come prepared for an argument. She does not know how to resist this enveloping silence. It is strategic. It hums in her head. But the room is still half full. The microphone is still on. There are three reporters from the student paper, and ten from national news outlets. There are still ten feet between her and the echoing sound of her own voice, telling her she can still be anybody she wants to.
“They are not my family,” my mother said. “We’re just related.”
“You have no idea how much you take for granted,” my mother told me the first time I’d brought a white friend home to play. But she was wrong about that—you take nothing for granted when the price of it is etched across the face of the person you love the most, when you are born into a series of loans and know you will never be up to the cost of the debt.
The internet did still feel like a kind of mysterious magic then, a new power we had all only recently been granted and were still learning to use.
He wrote to whom it may concern, but it concerned no one.
All that history, bleeding into itself in the wrong order.
History is layered
“You don’t have to treat them like they’re visiting royalty,” I muttered to my mother as we approached the entrance of the main prison building. “They’re just people.” “I’m treating them like they’re people. They aren’t props, Cecilia. You can’t just order them to show up and expect the rest to take care of itself. But don’t worry, keep up the attitude and no amount of convincing will make them like you. Be exactly what they were expecting, if that makes you happy.”
You are entitled to food, clothing, shelter, and medical attention. Everything else is a privilege.
I kept the running tally for years after that afternoon, did the math annually, out of habit, even after my mother had stopped requesting it, even after I had stopped thinking of the world as a place that kept track of what it owed people, even after I stopped thinking of myself as a person who had the power to make demands of the world and learned to be a person who came up with her own small daily answers like everyone else. There was something comforting about imagining I knew exactly what I’d been cheated out of.
To the Long-Suffering Ex-wife, a three-page typewriter-typed letter that used the words “I’m sorry” exactly once, in its conclusion, in the context “I’ve done the best I can here and I’m sorry if even after my attempt to apologize, you are unable to forgive me, although I have, clearly, forgiven you for giving up on me in the first place.”
“He says to tell you he’s sorry about whatever’s going on in your life, but you need to stop making shit up about him when he barely remembers you and never touched you.”
He had always counted on being good enough in the end. He had counted on absolution. He had counted on love. “Thank you,” he was going to say when everyone was appeased, while he stood on the platform and dramatically revealed the volcano’s violent core. “Your generosity tonight has saved my life again.” He thought the Forgiveness was his to declare. It was right there in the title.
The correction was so minor that four-years-ago-me would have decided it wasn’t worth it.
She thought the insistence on victims without wrongdoers was at the base of the whole American problem, the lie that supported all the others.
There had never been a lynching in the state of Wisconsin, the heyday of the Klan was over, and Wisconsin had stayed so white for so long that for decades its local Klan mostly harassed Italians, but no place remained unwelcoming through innocence.
Midwest nice was a steady, polite gaslighting I found sinister, a forced humility that prevented anyone from speaking up when they’d been diminished or disrespected, lest they be labeled an outsider. I was bewildered by the pride the region took in these pathologies.
The problem is everyone, even Black people, believes that Black poverty is the worst poverty in the world, and Black urban poverty, forget it, and all urban Blackness always scans as poverty, which means people only love us as fetish. No one is sentimental about poor Black people unless they’re wise and country and you could put a photograph of them on a porch with a quilt behind them in a museum. There’s always a white person out there who wants to overpronounce a foreign word, or try an exotic food, or shop for crafts, but no one wants to do that for Black folks. Once white people started
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That my country might always expect me to audition for my life I accepted as fact, but I trusted the public charter of national government more than I trusted average white citizens acting unchecked.
I had abandoned the actual religion I was raised with as soon as I got to college, but when in moments of despair I needed the inspiration of a triumphant martyr figure who made me believe in impossible things, I thought not of saints or saviors but of my mother.
when we’d tried to have a friendly drink, he’d chastised me for leaving my position at GW, accused me of both wasting my talents and working in the service of empire, which seemed contradictory: my job could be menial or it could be gravely problematic, but not both.
Such was his level of charm that it was hard to be disgusted by it: Nick expected a door to open and it did; he expected to be adored and he was.
It was a revelation to move through the world with Nick, to see how little attention a white man needed to devote to that kind of performance, how much of his worry about how other people saw him could be consumed by the frivolous, how easy it was for me to be assumed respectable merely by association.
I intervened brightly to suggest that I too sometimes worried my funniest jokes might offend, for example, A white man walks into a room. While everyone waited for the punch line, I excused myself and headed to the porch. That’s it, I called behind me. That’s the whole joke. Everything else disappears.
It was the winter after the most depressing election of my adult life, a low point for my faith in the polis, and I had started keeping an unofficial tally in my head of how much I trusted each new white person I met.
It was a pitiful tally, because I had decided most of them would forgive anyone who harmed me, would worry more about vocal antiracism ruining the holiday party season and causing the cheese plates to go to waste than about the lives and sanity of the nonwhite humans in their midst.
people made me feel like I was being asked to speak a language I’d never learned and in which I was constantly misunderstood.
“You know how to be careful and you know how to do the right thing, but you’ve never known how to do both,” Genevieve said.
“Do you know anything about whether or not this guy is dangerous?” “Maybe he’s the kind of harmless white supremacist who threatens genocide for fun,” I said.
“It’s Wisconsin. If he isn’t armed with more than a paint can he could be in five minutes.
could. I was jealous, of course, partly that by avoiding the academic race beat, Genie had sidestepped the daily trauma of the historical record, the sometimes brutality and sometimes banality of anti-Blackness, the loop of history that was always a noose if you looked at it long enough.
I had the strange experience of hearing myself say something I knew to be true only once I’d heard it come out of my own mouth.
It felt unfair, how absurd someone could be and still be terrifying. I watched video after video of white boy and “white” boy, cherub-faced and angular, blond and brunette, sharply styled and scruffy, all mangling their country’s history in its purported defense, promising to fight for the return of an America that, as they described it, was as real as Narnia.
