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One night, after your husband has gone to bed, after you’ve convinced yourself that anonymity is a devolution, after your second homemade martini, you send explicit and easily identifiable images to a “banker with a swimmer’s build.” You accept that you are not cut out for elected office.
Sometimes, the timers were made of leather. But those were different times, I’ve heard people say. I assume they meant different income brackets.
“Would you like another drink?” I ask almost instinctually. In this way, I am exactly like my mother, who doesn’t like people but is an irreproachable host.
They were unwitting ESL instructors at the peak of their training, steeped in the esoteric rules of this most arbitrary of Western languages—Who or whom? Had or had had? Use to or used to?
Let me be clear: I am uncomfortable with the race and class implications of all this. Being denied a cab is hardly the Indian Removal Act of 1830 or a poll tax or the NYPD. But does my mundane, middle-class experience with interpersonal racism not deserve redress because it’s a somehow more civilized offshoot of systemic, state-sponsored racism?
I felt penned in by the driver’s posture and my proclivity toward decorum. Even so, I was besieged by a base desire to tell him off, to let him know that whatever potato famine or religious persecution had inspirited his great grandparents to abandon their leeward-facing, bluff-situated stone cottage and risk their lives on a transatlantic voyage was no longer. That he could probably apply for any number of EU citizenships and return to his ancestral village, where he would be welcomed (arms open, eyes blue) because of its stagnating population growth. That his family line had gone stale here,
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“He talks to her. In the morning. In the evening. It’s odd. I tell him so. All he says in return is, ‘Odd is someone disappearing suddenly after always being there.’ ”
The way I see it, there are jokes that intend to harm and there are jokes that don’t. I guess what I’m saying is that if everyone who made jokes in bad taste, as opposed to those who were fueled by hatred, simply apologized and never made those jokes again, I think it would be okay to move on from the past, as long as the apologies were sincere, well crafted, and accompanied by some sort of restitution, like a retroactive tip jar or a constitutional amendment. Jokes, after all, add up.
“I bet it was his friend—the Latin guy,” said Mr. Peterson, who then glanced at me with the guilt of a hundred men, while he assembled sardines and pickles on a wooden serving board. “Dad!” Halvar shouted in response, “It’s Latinx!”
The children have blond eyebrows and exhibit the sort of inoffensive confidence one expects of democratic socialism, where people aren’t afraid of one another.
An odd thought enters my mind, one that suggests that even an atheist can be Catholic: This woman died so that my aunt might live. Somewhere they have traded places.
I don’t respond because I know Alan won’t want to hear my answer: I am able to hold out for a long time. I’ve been, for most of my adulthood, inching towards this very isolation: seeking out carefully curated spaces where I might retain agency over my life; avoiding the arenas of over-encroaching whiteness to which I’d previously aspired; realizing, better late than never, that being outnumbered is a terrible way to live.
Whatever comfort I might derive from soft loose-fitting cotton, would be no match for the flock of pointy-arrowed assumptions piercing me all over.
And my old ass can confirm for you exactly one thing: being allowed into a party is no fun if nobody wants you there.”
Something doesn’t have to be true just because it could be.
running away from situations where one might encounter a conflict isn’t a healthy way to live either.
