by Amy Benson
Even though she knew she was officially the “bad sister,” she had a hard time knowing where she stopped and I began. So sometimes she hated us both. She wanted me to know—really know—that my body was too ugly for any boy to really love me, that I acted like I was forty and eight at the same time, that most nights she didn’t want me anywhere near her. She wanted to scald me with words that made her own mouth blister. I didn’t know where she stopped and I began either, so I mourned her lost innocence as I would have mourned my own. I imagined those boys’ hands on me, their spit in my mouth. Only, I added too much smirk, beer, fumbling, averted eyes. And I didn’t know to add joy and the delicious liquifying of tongue to tongue, part to part. And I didn’t know to shimmer like something exploded, flung and showering, unmindful of place and name, a million glimmers at once, big.
I’d sit waiting in a car, on a picnic table, around a fire. Often the sparkling-eyed boy would be sitting next to me, both of us with our hands in our pockets, very, very small inside. It was as if we could see the whole of our lives at once, all around us, and wanted to get it exactly right. Only, we were so careful our lives evaporated.
Once, in the second summer we went out, he asked me if I was really a virgin. He said so-and-so said I couldn’t be with a sister like mine. I should have told him that my sister was a blue flame—the beautiful, pure heart of fire. I should have told him it was none of his fucking business. But I said, “That’s exactly why I am. I don’t want to be like her.”
The sparkling-eyed boy may have loved me, but he didn’t love my sister. And I, I didn’t love her enough.
Sociology, That Soft Science in Us All
There is something deep in our American culture that says what is new is what is best—the fresh maverick, the urbane newcomer. Like teenage anarchists, we were founded on the leveling of old and ancient cultures—Native American, English, African, French—and the installation of replacements—genocide, democracy, slavery, industrial invention. We were, are, blinded with newness. In my generation, if you haven’t moved away from home, or if you return home to live, you are a loser. At best, you feel you must apologize for your stuckness. We who leave arrive at our next place and size up its social disharmonies, never feeling as if they are our own.
Divisions of race and class often flower malignantly out of attachment to place—the other group occupies a place or province (mental, physical, cultural) we would like to have for our own, and so we hate them. Or they remind us of our past usurpings and so we hate them. And for a visitor, these divisions are terribly easy to diagnose. I could see that the locals I grew up with in the Upper Peninsula had to import their hostilities because the real conflict—the one with the locals, Ojibwe and Ottawa, who had been there before them—they couldn’t look directly in the eye. It was too close. Instead, they talked about blacks and how they could never live in Detroit. However, these locals, relative newcomers, were left with boatfuls of quiet resentment over the Native Americans’ government-funded reservations and special fishing rights. They seemed to have an unspoken set of beliefs: Indians could fish out of season, use nets that caught fish at the gill, just behind their panicked eye. Indians didn’t care if the fish was big enough; they’d keep it out of spite, its belly tight with unused eggs. And they would eat anything: bones, scales, bowels. If only the Indians realized, the locals seemed to imply, how much they didn’t deserve, how unnecessary their bird talk, clicking tongues, and smoky breath, their deadly memories. I gleaned this from a look here, an eye roll there, a sticky, targetless curse.
Though many of the locals lived below or near the poverty line, they weren’t violent in their sense of injustice. What I noticed, even as a girl there, was a quiet gulf. A second cousin of mine who lived up there, a redhead with skin the same color as the whites of his eyes, married a tribeswoman. Nobody treated her badly, not even behind their backs. But they stopped talking when she walked among us, almost as if she were already a spirit or a sleek wolf, and they looked at her with wonder, unable to work the hinges on their jaws.
What I heard locals mouth off about in my summer visits were the problems with which they had no experience—“white flight” and the crumbling urban centers of places like Detroit and Cleveland, Baltimore, St. Louis. When I returned for the first time after college and saw some of the old crowd, I mentioned that I would be going to graduate school in the South. Someone said, “Why would you want to go down there? Aren’t there a lot of blacks there?” And, though I had worn an alarmingly sanctimonious button, “Poverty Is Violence,” on my coat for much of college, “So what?” was probably all I said in return. Instead, I later thought about those words sadly, angrily, smugly. And then I thought of something else.
Last summer some friends of mine from New York City came to the Upper Peninsula with me for a week’s vacation. One night we went to the reservation casino outside of Sault Ste. Marie in a ha-ha, ironic gesture. And to play fifty-cent roulette, of course. In the green, forested U.P., this reservation seemed oddly parched and tree impoverished. To the locals, unfamiliar with the depressing uniformity of suburban track housing, I imagined, the reservation houses would seem uniquely claustrophobic. They looked fragile, as if the mold with which they’d been formed had grown thin with overuse. I don’t know how the houses looked to the people who lived in them every day.
Once inside the casino/hotel/concert arena, the social chasms opened themselves easily to the eye:
The tourists come from the hotel, the tour buses, or the monstrous RVs in the parking lots. Their clothes are generally beige and too neatly pressed, and they check and recheck their hair with their fingers. They have a game, I’m-experiencing-something-new look about them as they consider purchasing a miniature tomahawk trailing turquoise and yellow chicken feathers. They split off to the slots or the highest stakes tables.
The locals—at least those who would consider themselves true locals, having not made too much money or chosen a too-fancy drink—sit under stiff polyester baseball caps, usually at the blackjack tables. They toss their chips on the felt, throw down their hands when the cards betray them, and lob comments toward each other, terse, witty little word chips. They don’t meet the dealer’s eyes.
And my friends and I are there in our comic shirts to emphasize the wackiness of being in a casino, on a reservation, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We have thought of every angle and we can’t be fooled.
None of us here can help looking out of the sides of her eyes at anyone with burnished skin and cheekbones that could gut fish. They are the dealers and bartenders in shiny purple uniforms, and the tribal council in the enormous portraits hanging on the wall. I wonder what they think of the necessary tackiness of a casino, the way it bloats and dwarfs everything around it. Of all of the foolish white people and our tense version of fun.
Driving through blighted neighborhoods in Detroit as a teenager, I imagined how the city could be transformed if everyone who graduated high school from the metro area had to devote one year to fixing up the city before moving on to college or jobs. We could rebuild the burned-out mansions along Woodward, plant gardens, construct playgrounds, and raise money. The idea seems obviously naive now. Who would stay that long, who would know well enough what needed to be done? And who would be forced to have a stake in the city that raised them? It is far easier to move on than to be insinuated in the problems of your place.
I’ve never talked with anyone up north about these painful apertures between people. It’s been my assumption since becoming transitory that you cannot see enough unless you are outside; and you cannot care enough unless you are inside. A lose-lose scenario.
But perhaps this isn’t the case. How far back do you step before you lose the frame entirely? Perhaps being new means you see nothing accurately. How could we, with our campy, casino grins? The other day, walking through my own city neighborhood, I thought, This could be filmed as a portrait of “Urban Despair,” and no one watching would know that we are mildly hap
py.
You, Only Worse, Summer 1993
Wedding videos are not meant for ex-girlfriends, girls who were inexorably part of you and then left and never came back. And they are not meant for strangers. Wedding videos document an impossible moment in which you publicly make a decision to be a particular someone for the rest of your life. The video should be made so that privately you can watch the moment over and over until it is real to you, but it should never get into the wrong hands.
The video is grainy, of course, the attendees awkward. But who is ever at his best at a wedding? Even the clergy often seem startled, scripted though they are. In the broad shots I recognize his father, who looks like a Scottish fisherman but is a high school teacher. I see a few of his friends from high school either lathering tinder a tie or trying not to touch their anomalously slicked-back hair. And I recognize the hole where his mother should be but isn’t. She was the first one to leave him, and she stayed gone.
But I am twenty-one and having the fact of the sparkling-eyed boy’s marriage made rather absurdly clear to me for the first time. I had carried with me a ludicrous faith, unconfessed even to myself, that he would have waited for me to come back around. Of course, I had heard of the match a year before, but part of me couldn’t believe the sparkling-eyed boy would marry someone else, and only three years after I left. But there is his bride in brown sausage curls and a dress of sculpted meringue. The groom is nowhere in sight.
I did not set out to see the video, had not even known there was such a reel ten minutes before. My best friend at the time and I had shown up unannounced at the sparkling-eyed boy’s best friend’s house one evening four years after I’d last seen them. I suppose he didn’t know what else to do with us, and so he made the most awkward, or perhaps the most spiteful choice—“Do you want to see a tape of ——’s wedding?” My friend, with a sharp eye for drama and the parts of the psyche that hurt the most when pressed, answered for me instantly.
We’d been close friends for years. But recently, we’d slowly broken each other’s hearts into tiny shards ill-equipped for kindness. This would be her first and only trip up north with me, and we were pretending as if we were still trying to love each other like friends should. So, on our last night here, looking for some way to lay her hands on this part of my life I hadn’t shared with her, she insisted that we look up some of my old friends.
We got only as far as the sparkling-eyed boy’s best friend, still living with his parents. I believe none of us knew how to handle our losses with anything like grace. My friend was making me watch the video. And here I am, exacting my price. Do we have any moments on which we can look back with pride? I can’t help but think that just by being, just by wanting and crying and smiling at the right moment and getting others to love us and need us and prop us up and carry us on and keep us from even five minutes of loneliness, we have already sullied our moments before we even live them. I’m talking not about god and original sin, but about nature—it holds too few examples in which the triumph of one is not a crime against another. We can’t help but try to cast the world in our own image, but there is always a cost for willfulness, desire.
The sparkling-eyed boy suddenly appears on the screen, reliving the moments of commitment again. He shifts his feet from side to side and looks as if he is trembling. My worst impulses hope the trembling comes from terror or reluctance or some premonition that I might someday watch him mouth these vows, the vows I imagined he once might have wanted to take with me. The sparkling-eyed boy’s friend is stretched out on the shag carpet of his parents’ den, not looking at me, though I know my friend is studying my face closely, looking for weakness in the shadows across my mouth. It was as if we’d had a contest throughout college to see who could be the least vulnerable. I was hopelessly in the red.
On the screen, the sparkling-eyed boy has turned his face toward me and I see his eyes and dimples and then—a mustache spreading across tanned skin, and I know it can’t be the face of my sparkling-eyed boy. The mustache looks to me like a cheap disguise, taped to his shaking upper lip so he could shift his way to the front of the church and accept a life I don’t want him to need. I see in the mustache on this boy’s face how achingly he wanted to believe himself a man. But I could not imagine myself next to this man, sincerely kissing his nearly obscured upper lip, his ring heavy on my hand. Something had happened to him, but I felt I knew his better, clean-shaven self, and I could have saved him had I not been watching the ceremony on tape more than a year later.
Later, the night would get worse, seedy even. I would become more silent than usual and would watch my friend take over, aggressive with her brain, her body. We all drink too much at the one local bar, and my friend seems to make fun of the sparkling-eyed boy’s best friend without him knowing it, and then flirts with him so that he can’t miss it. We select the countriest country songs on the jukebox and play pool, circling each other like novice wrestlers in a ring. Still later, she presses us to go swimming, though it is after midnight and we have no swimsuits and all I can think of is the sparkling-eyed boy asleep with his wife in their marriage bed a few miles away, the hairs of his mustache pressed into her shoulder. My friend swigs from a bottle of Baileys, climbs down into the water in her underwear, and flings her wet bra up onto the county dock. I keep my sturdy underwear on, soaking them in lake water as I tread in the shadow of the big dock. I hiss at her to keep her voice down—sound travels so clearly over water—and she calls me a pussy for not having dropped my bra to the gravel. She floats her breasts on the water and turns them, round and impossibly white in the moonlight, their nipples pinched tight and purplish with cold, toward the boy. He laughs hard and mutters drunkenly to himself, saving up each detail for an apocryphal story to tell the sparkling-eyed boy the next day at their construction site—the one about what had happened to the girl he had once loved. And the sparkling-eyed boy, I imagine, would hear the story and think he had never really known the girl at all.
The world is treacherous, and we think we save some part of ourselves safe from other people. We are always better than they might imagine, the list of our hidden virtues and depths thick and cross-referenced. We always have some secret that would hurt them if only they knew. But who else knows this self? Who can corroborate our stories?
I thought the sparkling-eyed boy would always love my best self best, but here he is, in disguise, making a promise to love someone else for the rest of his life, his surface caught at it on film. I want to be good, I really do. I want to believe in the absurdity of my expectations, but I can’t help but think the good part of me disappeared when he stopped loving it best. And I can’t help wanting it back. So, the truth for now is this: We have no best self; we are what other people see, all of them, only worse. And the things we promise ourselves and the curses we whisper at one another are not enough to keep us for our whole lives.
The Moment After the Moment It Would Have Mattered
I was, as always, conscious of my body. Bronzed Europeans sat around me on a beach on Crete, many of the women in bikinis, the top folded or flung to the towel beneath them. The women in one-piece suits had popped the straps off their shoulders and rolled the suits down past their bellies. Some of the breasts hung to the side, slightly deflated. I could see Greek men on the periphery, falsely deferential, cool and leering. These men and I had something in common. We watched—the men shrugging and smiling, me with my straps firmly in place. They felt the air on their breasts, these women. And those who swam? The salty Mediterranean dripped from their nipples and down into their bikini bottoms. It dried in sparkly streaks across their breasts. I saw it all, behind my sunglasses.
Didn’t they know themselves interesting, watchable—maybe vulnerable in their skins? I would be hard-pressed to find one picture of myself in which I did not look as if a teacup would crumble to chalk in my hands. I am that cautious, tense, and poised. And I am not alone. Don’t many Americans feel under surveillance, on audition, stalked? The face
s of these women are different. They have built an independent meaning for themselves; they are not always about to be discovered.
But the sun set low, as suns do, and the women covered their bereft nipples, gathered books, blankets, baskets, and families, and left through hills of azaleas. Even the Greek men packed up their drink stands, and towels, and trinkets, their need, scorn, and boredom, and went home. I was alone with my blue-veined breasts and the poised tension of my hands. No audience.
In every landscape there is a focal point, and after the women left the point was a rock rising up like a fiery forehead, cooled, just breaking the surface of the still Mediterranean. People had been jumping from this rock all afternoon. They looked as if they were having fun. Now that they were gone, I paddled out to this rock. To my left the sun was bleeding into the water, but I could still see in the water on the other side of the rock where people had been jumping and diving all day, rocks under the surface, dark places where briny creatures could curl. I was simultaneously afraid of diving into this unknown under the darkening sky and of not diving and the subsequent withering of my life. This was a test, a precipice. If I could not bare my breasts or dive from this rock, I could no longer be an authentic person, a person who acts without thinking of a present or future audience. So I swayed on the rough pumice rock for a long time, watching my life shutter closed in the water below. Finally, I reached up and pushed a strap off one shoulder, then another, and then my cotton suit fell below my navel. I glanced quickly over my shoulder, but the beach was empty and the sea in front of me was one unbroken skin to mainland Greece. I dove in. I felt the velvet water palm my breasts and stomach, and the rest of my suit flutter against my thighs. I told myself I was saved, brand new. But as I paddled back to shore, pulling my straps up, the empty beach bespoke the emptiness of gestures. I knew I was long past the moment when any of this would have counted for bravery, for soul, even for nonchalance.
