Why Visit America

by Matthew Baker

  I can’t explain what happened with the unicorn. I obviously should have known better. I should have shown more restraint. I was wandering the field with my hands stuffed into the pockets on my dress, trying to avoid thinking about the speech, trying to avoid glancing toward the stage, and failing, and the size of the growing crowd in the stands terrified me, was even bigger than imagined, was even louder than imagined, and noticing the sun was sinking toward the scoreboard, I realized that the ceremony would be starting soon, any time. Even after all of those years of bullying, I’d never had a feeling like that before. A sense of being truly in danger. I wasn’t even on the stage yet and was already trembling, experiencing simultaneous bursts of anxiety and dread and fear so intense that my legs felt weak and my stomach felt queasy—and in a state of panic, on instinct, without thinking, I calmed myself the only way that never failed me.

  Shuffling through an aisle of tables, past heaped mounds of donations, I noticed a sparkle—light twinkling on the glittery horn of a plastic unicorn.

  I paused and gazed at the figurine. There was nothing special about the unicorn in particular. I had similar figurines back at home.

  Nevertheless, in the grip of that silent hysteria, I suddenly found myself slipping the unicorn into a pocket.

  The panic subsided immediately. I felt a sense of relief. I was in possession of a new belonging. I was not alone. I was not alone.

  That brief solace was interrupted by the cry of a girl with a pixie cut holding a box of hats.

  “Her Highness just took a donation!”

  I backed away from the table with my heart pounding as her cry was joined by a chorus of others.

  “Even Heinie wouldn’t dare!”

  “I swear, she did, right off of that table!”

  “Hear ye, hear ye, you won’t believe this fucking shit!”

  “The majesty has imposed a tax!”

  “The majesty is stealing from the needy!”

  A mob of kids swarmed me, led by the girl with the pixie cut. Already irritable from having to lug around heavy boxes, the kids looked furious. The girl with the pixie cut set down the box of hats and then stepped forward, rifling through the pockets on my dress. Triumphantly, she pulled out the unicorn.

  “Thought you were entitled to this, eh?” she sneered, brandishing the unicorn.

  The others looked scandalized. Mortified, I spun around to flee and bumped straight into Cody. He was wearing his scarlet windbreaker, his usual jeans, his usual sneakers, and an expression of contempt. He had witnessed everything. At that moment—seeing his look of disgust—I discovered a hope, some pitifully desperate hope, had been nesting inside of me: that maybe he was beginning to think of me as a friend. I became aware of the feeling at the exact instant the hope died.

  The speakers above the stands suddenly screeched with feedback as the principal called us onto the stage.

  “Can’t wait to hear what you have to say,” the girl with the pixie cut smirked, tossing the unicorn back onto the table.

  Minutes later the principal was leading us up the steps onto the stage. The stage was vast and intimidating and utterly empty except for the podium. The walk to the podium was terrifying. I glanced sideways at the crowd and immediately regretted looking, because now that the stands were full, the crowd was immense and frightening, a mass of shirts and blouses and jackets and ballcaps and snapping cameras, hands shading eyes from sunlight, hands fanning cheeks with programs, seemingly endless rows of familiar faces. Cody strolled ahead of me in his scarlet windbreaker with his notecards clutched in a fist. I trailed behind him with my head bowed low and my notecards tucked in a pocket. I had practiced so many times for that speech. I had never practiced that hard for anything. I had the speech memorized by heart, my lines and his lines, and was glad to have the speech on notecards anyway, just in case my mind blanked from the terror. My heart was racing. As we reached the podium, turning to face the crowd, I remembered to smile. My smile must have looked fake and petrified. The orchestra standing on the track between the stage and the stands finished playing a processional march, capping off the song with a dramatic burst of trumpets, and then even the orchestra turned to stare at us.

  I remember thinking that if we could just get through the speech, everything would be over, everything would be fine.

  After some brief remarks about the wonderful turnout and the favorable turn the weather had taken, the principal introduced us to a round of halfhearted applause, then strolled back down the steps, leaving us alone on the stage.

  Taking out my notecards, my hands were quivering. I had seen most of the people in the audience before somewhere, but never all at once. Being stared at by so many silent expressionless people was like a scene out of a nightmare.

  Cody was supposed to speak the first line. Standing next to me at the podium, he leaned toward the microphone, then opened his mouth, then shut his mouth, gave the audience a strange smile, and looked down at his notecards, cocking his head as if reconsidering something. He stared at the notecards. He frowned at the notecards. Glancing from him to the crowd, nervously waiting for him to speak, I was struck by a sense of foreboding.

  Somebody in the audience coughed.

  Cody glanced up at the crowd.

  “We wrote a speech, but, uh, honestly it’s pretty boring,” Cody said.

  Somebody laughed at the back of the stands and then fell quiet.

  “It’s probably better just to speak from the heart anyway,” Cody said.

  The audience stared at us.

  “I like rich people,” Cody said.

  I glanced sideways at him without swiveling my head or moving my body in the slightest, desperately trying to keep smiling, and then glanced back at the audience, which was utterly silent.

  “I think there’s something beautiful about owning lots of junk,” Cody said.

  Somebody laughed again at the back of the stands, a hearty chuckle, while the rest of the audience held blank expressions.

  “I think it’s awesome,” Cody said.

  At the back of the stands, somebody laughed and then whooped enthusiastically, while faint grins began to appear in the crowd.

  “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having extra stuff,” Cody said.

  I stood frozen on the stage with my ears ringing and my skin crawling and the notecards shaking in my hands. Across the stands, kids were now grinning with delight. Always so trusting, always so naive, I suddenly realized something that had never occurred to me before. I had originally assumed that the election had been rigged by the usual bullies—maybe Dolly, even Madison. But none of those kids had experience organizing a scheme on that scale.

  There was somebody, though, who did: Cody.

  “I mean, there’s nothing inherently unethical about owning multiple homes,” Cody said, to scattered laughter.

  I’ll probably never know what he intended. Only years later did the possibility occur to me that he genuinely might have been trying to defend me by what he said that day on the stage. In retrospect, he did seem like the type of person who might have empathized with an outcast, who wasn’t afraid of breaking rules or rebelling against social norms. I like to imagine that after spending time with me, he might have come to pity me, might have come to care about me, and that witnessing the incident with the unicorn had somehow upset him, provoking him to try to protect me. That he was only trying to help me by what he said. At the time, though, standing there on that stage, I assumed that he had been the one to rig the election, and that he had never planned on giving the speech on the notecards in the first place. That he had planned to use the ceremony as an opportunity to attack me all along. I was trapped on that stage, and now he could mock me with an audience of hundreds of people. All for the sake of getting some attention. The sake of pulling off a legendary stunt. He seemed like that type of person too.

  Regardless, whether he intended what he was saying to be sincere, whether he intended what he was saying to be sarcas
tic, the audience clearly interpreted what he was saying as a joke. As yet another prank by a notorious prankster. Out of politeness, some of the parents in the audience were trying not to smile, even looked disapproving, but as he continued to speak, insisting he thought greed was attractive, scattered laughter passed through the stands, then ripples of laughter, then waves of laughter, until finally every line that he delivered was punctuated by a roar of helpless laughter from the crowd. Cody spoke nonstop for over a minute. I never got to speak a word. I just stood there, mortified, trembling, no longer even able to fake a smile, horrified by the sight of all of those laughing faces, my entire community. Having to make a speech about charity and goodwill would have been humiliating, but having to stand there while he made a speech about wealth and excess made me feel stripped bare. The crowd saw straight through me, all of the greed and the narcissism and the ugliness. My morbidly bloated assets. I was what made the speech so helplessly funny, standing awkwardly next to him as he professed approval of hoarded wealth. I might as well have been a mannequin. I was there as an exhibit. I was there as a prop. When the principal rushed onto stage with a furious look to take the microphone, the crowd erupted into applause, whistling and cheering, a standing ovation. Kids were weeping with laughter. Cody didn’t smile, didn’t wave, didn’t bow, didn’t in any way indicate that the speech had been a joke, just glared at the audience as the microphone was taken.

  I was already moving, dropping the notecards onto the stage, rushing down the steps to the grass, hurrying back across the empty football field, past all of the tables of heaped donations, trying to see through the watery blur of tears in my eyes, feeling nauseous, feeling hideous, leaving the crowd behind. I broke into a run at the edge of the parking lot, ran back through the streets and across the intersections with my dress whipping with gusts of wind, ran until my lungs were burning and my legs were aching and my mouth tasted like blood. My neighborhood seemed horribly peaceful compared to the feeling inside of me. I had lost my flats on the way home. I came walking into my house with dirty feet. Panting, sweating. My hair was wild from the run, with strands hanging down around my eyes. I could still hear the laughter. I was still holding back tears. I slipped past the doorway to the great room, where my parents were watching television with my sister, calling hello to me without turning to look. Walking calmly into the kitchen, I rooted through a drawer, found a matchbook, grabbed the matchbook, strode down the darkened hallway to my turret, climbed the spiral staircase, marched into my bedroom, and tore the clothes in my closet down from the hangers, tossing the clothes onto the rug at the center of my floor, a heaping mound of lush fabrics, seersucker and linen and gingham and silk and paisley and denim and lace and cashmere, a tangled mess of sleeves and legs and collars, and then grabbed bottles of essential oil, lavender, eucalyptus, orange, rose, then dumped the oil onto the clothes, and struck a match. I dropped the flame onto the pile. In the dim twilight streaming in through the windows, the fire was strangely beautiful, burning radiantly through the clothing, consuming the belongings at a breathtaking speed, converting the objects to heat and light, growing in intensity as cars with lit headlights occasionally drove past the house out on the street. I remember coughing as the smoke began to cloud the air. How the space suddenly brightened as the canopy on my bed burst into flames. By the time my parents came running into my bedroom, smelling the smoke, the flames had spread to my cedar chest, my stool, my vanity, the rafters on my ceiling.

  “What happened?” my father cried, glancing around the room with a look of terror.

  “I don’t want to be rich anymore,” I said, as if somehow that would help my parents understand.

  * * *

  I can imagine now how we must have looked to other families. On a cool spring weekend that year before, torrential rains had fallen across the state, whole feet of water in a day, and the river had surged over the banks, flooding neighborhoods across the city, stadiums, theaters, the honky-tonks on Broadway. Streets had been flooded. Alleys had been flooded. Houses had been flooded. Basements. Bathrooms. Kitchens. Bedrooms. Lawn toys and porch furniture had floated away with the murky water. Thousands had been left homeless. Before the floodwaters had even receded, other families had organized charities to feed and shelter the victims, to fund the replacement of essential belongings, to help to rebuild the destroyed homes. My parents hadn’t donated to the relief efforts. My parents did donate to charities, but only for tax deductions, to maximize income after taxes, and not ever a penny more. Other families donated every last penny possible. There was nowhere in the country as spiritually healthy as the South, nowhere in the nation with such low rates of affluence as Tennessee. Volunteers delivered loads of canned goods to food pantries. Volunteers presented boxes of assorted clothing to new immigrants. Volunteers chipped in to finance the construction of trailer parks for the homeless. Architecturally breathtaking pedestrian bridges spanned the river, crowdsourced by volunteers. Bright daisies and hydrangeas bloomed in enormous flower beds in public parks, tended by volunteers with sun hats. Vibrant berries and squashes ripened in community gardens on every block, watered by volunteers with suede work gloves. Artists funded by volunteers stood on ladders alongside buildings and in plazas, installing colorful murals and gleaming metal sculptures. Engineers funded by volunteers walked about in hard hats, surveying the construction of glorious statues and magnificent fountains. Optometrists and dentists and physicians funded by volunteers held daily clinics, distributing eyeglasses and toothbrushes and medications throughout Nashville. Living among people devoted to the spirit of social cooperation, we must have seemed monstrously antisocial. We spent staggering sums of money on superfluous belongings, sums of money we could have given to charity, and as much as we spent on superfluous belongings, we had even more money sitting in the bank, accumulating interest like dust, pennies to the dollar. By voluntarily financing infrastructure projects, and housing initiatives, and healthcare programs, by financing the construction of art installations and grand monuments, other families were creating countless jobs, ensuring the health of the economy. We ensured only the health of our personal fortune.

  I remember once sitting on a carousel at an amusement park as a child, surrounded by the neon lights of the fairground, gripping the mane of the pony for balance, overhearing a group of kids arguing behind me.

  “Why don’t we just force people like them to share?”

  “That’d be, like, communism.”

  “So?”

  “So communism’s, like, crazy.”

  “You can’t force people to be charitable.”

  “That’s like the fundamental principle of volunteerism.”

  “Charity has to be voluntary.”

  I didn’t have to be there in the car, days after the fire, when other teenagers drove past my house, gawking at the blackened ruins of the burned turret, the massive tarps covering the holes in the roof, flapping in the wind and the rain. I didn’t have to eavesdrop on the gossip. I knew what the kids must have said. Burning the belongings was the same as throwing the belongings into a trash can, the same as buying the belongings in the first place. What a waste.

  * * *

  I had always been a spectacle at school, and must have been a legend after that. I’m sure that people from home still talk about me, telling the story of the fire. I’m sure that when people back home tell the story, the fire is portrayed as tragic. Sad. And yet for me, setting fire to the turret was a turning point, and was what finally freed me from the cycle of binging and purging. The turret had been gutted. My parents took my credit cards afterward, leaving me no way to binge, and my belongings had all been destroyed, leaving me no reason to purge. I felt fantastically light, like a tremendous burden had been lifted from me, and simultaneously fantastically empty. My sister eyed me at meals with a look of fear, as if expecting me to set fire to the house again at any moment. I was too ashamed to look my parents in the eye. My father barely spoke a word to me. My mother no longe
r reached to embrace me. I spent a week sleeping in the spare bedroom next to the laundry room, and then my parents came to me with a brochure for a boarding school. My parents claimed to be sending me away for my sake, to spare me the embarrassment of having to attend a school in the city, where everybody would know me as the freak who set her house on fire. I knew even then, though, the true reason that my parents were sending me away. I had crossed a line. I had put my family in danger. My family was afraid of me. My sister especially. My parents bought me a new set of clothing. I had no other possessions to pack. I remember standing in the rain on the patio of the boarding school, watching my family drive back toward the road during a thunderstorm. I knew even then my parents wouldn’t pressure me to come home for holidays. I’ve seen my parents less than a dozen times since. My sister even less.

  The boarding school was in the countryside, surrounded by hills and meadows, miles from the nearest store. I had to share a room with a chubby blond girl who snored. I was given no closet, just a dresser for clothes, with only enough space for a spare uniform, underwear, socks, pajamas, athletic apparel, a raincoat, and a casual outfit for weekends. A desk by the window, with a shelf for textbooks. A bed with a pillow, with a blanket for winter. I became accustomed to inhabiting nearly empty spaces. I was forced to learn to do without. On weekends we volunteered on local farms, building fences, repairing sheds, bagging dirt-crusted carrots and beets and potatoes to be donated to needy families. At night we watched movies together in the common room, or held dance parties in the dining hall, or traded comic books and fantasy novels from the library. I took walks alone through the countryside, tramping through the weeds and the mud. I cried myself to sleep almost every night that first year, silently. My roommate was gruff but kind to me. Eventually the sound of her snoring became familiar, even soothing. So much so that when sleeping with my husband for the first time in college, I was strangely comforted to find he snored too.