This Is the Place

by Margot Kahn

  Leigh Newman’s memoir about Alaska, Still Points North, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. Her fiction, essays, and book reviews have appeared in One Story, Tin House, the New York Times, Fiction, New York Tyrant, Vogue, O: The Oprah Magazine, Bookforum, and others. She has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Corporation of Yaddo. She currently serves as Books Editor of Oprah.com and editor-at-large at Catapult Publishing. She teaches in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College.

  The Explorer

  Tara Conklin

  You spend forty years saying that you never felt at home there. You tell people it’s a small town, claustrophobic, provincial. Three hours from New York City, two hours from Boston, stuck in a minor mountain range at the tail end of the Massachusetts turnpike. The summers are too hot, the winters too cold. Only autumn, those brief days of gold and blue, seem worth the fuss.

  You grow up in a house that is 250 years old. It is painted red with blue trim. Often, the toilet does not flush properly. The hot water demands short showers, a careful hand on the tap. Every winter, you huddle before the wood stove and claim you are freezing. The house is small but contains snaking crawl spaces and cavernous closets inside which you often hide with a flashlight and a book. Mysterious indentations mark the wood floor around the upstairs toilet. From the old woman’s cane, your father says. She’d knock when she was done so her servant would come and get her. When your father refinishes the floors downstairs, he finds a large dark liquid stain soaked into the wood. From the school children, he says. Someone must have spilled a pot of ink. Your mother believes that within the house lives a ghost who finds lost objects and leaves them helpfully in plain view. The ghost comforts your mother, she explains, because it is evidence that ours is the kind of house that provokes an enduring attachment.

  You have two parents and two sisters. You are the oldest. For much of your childhood, your parents fight about money and each other and your mother’s depression. One night your mother throws a plate of spaghetti and it cracks and splatters against the wall. One afternoon your sister locks you out of the house and you break a window with your palm. The cut is not deep but it bleeds dramatically onto the floor and the window sill, all over your shirt and the snow on the ground. Every Christmas, you hang stockings over the mantelpiece with push pins. One year you notice dozens of little holes in the wood and you are unsure if your family has made them all or if they belong to other families, other stockings. That night, you crawl deep inside a closet with a flashlight and a pen and secretively, carefully you write your name on the wall in your childish curving script.

  Every day, you walk to school. Most of the children in your classes are second- and third-generation residents of the town. Their surnames adorn businesses and street signs; they are cousins, friends since infancy, known to the same teachers who once taught their parents. In the fall, boys are released early to hunt deer with their fathers. In the winter, half the class empties out to take ski lessons at the local resort. It is now, as a young child, that you begin to see yourself as an outsider. Here are people who have chosen this small pretty place, this bucolic way of life. To ski, to hunt, to claim this place for themselves as their parents did and grandparents too. You decide that the town and the people do not fit you; you do not fit them. There is no wrong or right. It is simply a bad match, like putting on a sweater that is too tight at the neck. It itches and pulls. You feel as though you cannot breathe.

  After high school, you decide to travel. You work two waitressing jobs to earn enough for airfare and then you go. Your parents permit you—what else can they do?—and they say: you can always come home. Home? You realize that for you there is no enduring attachment. You spend a summer riding the trains in Europe. The next year, it is New Zealand, then Costa Rica, then Paris and Madrid. You move to Moscow for two years, to New York for four, to London for seven. From the ages of twenty to thirty, you visit thirty-seven different countries and live at eighteen different addresses. You live with roommates, flat mates, boyfriends, colleagues, strangers. In Moscow, in a two-bedroom flat with a single woman, her young daughter, and elderly mother. In Quepos, with an unmarried couple in a cement-block house with no hot water, no refrigerator, no stove. In Madrid, with a family in a lush, gated community surrounded by desert. Beyond its steep walls, a community of gitanos light fires at night and sing in strange, ghostly voices. Each new place makes your mind hum, your fingers tingle. None of them feel like home, of course, but this is irrelevant. No—this is for the best.

  While you are abroad, your parents divorce. Your childhood house is sold. Your mother moves to a nearby town, your father closer to Boston. You avoid going back to visit them. When you do go, you feel itchy, restless. Everything seems small and dull. Every view looks stunted. Sometimes you drive past your childhood house and slow to look at it but you never stop. You drive the route you once walked to school and remember the dip in the sidewalk, the falling-down house with the dog, the yellow fire hydrant, the chestnut tree. You slow but you never stop.

  Your grandfather says to you, shortly before he dies: I never felt at home. You wonder if perhaps your dislocation is genetic. Your grandfather was the son of immigrants, orphaned when he was eight years old, shuttled between friends and relatives for months, perhaps years, it is never fully clear to you. He tells you a story: one Christmas, he and his brother are staying at a family friend’s house. The other children receive their presents, gaily wrapped packages, sweets and toys. Your grandfather receives a pencil. Another story: after he fought in Europe, he returned to New York and could not find a job. He begged, he said. He applied for anything, it didn’t matter, and finally he found work selling shoes. Later, he owned a construction company on Long Island that made long, flat, unremarkable buildings for commercial use. Your grandfather is your favorite person in the world. After he dies, you wish in a selfish, childish way that he had not told you his feelings about home. It makes you indescribably sad to think of him with that burden. It also seems a prophecy. A fate.

  You return to the U.S. and settle in Seattle with your English husband and children. You buy a house big enough for your family. There is a backyard with a swing set, flower beds in the front, neighbors with children, a library branch and coffee shop down the street. Seattle does not have old houses, not in the way of your hometown. In this house, there are no hidden ink stains. The toilets work fine, the cable TV, the wireless. Seattle does not get very cold in the winter nor excessively hot in the summer. You try very hard not to fight with your husband about money or each other or your depression. But you wonder why it is that, after six years in the Seattle house, you still have boxes to unpack. The light fixtures you called ugly the moment you first saw them still remain on the wall. The kitchen is still painted the same dark, oppressive red. After six years, the house bears no mark of you.

  But your children? They have claimed it. They never want to leave. They say it’s too rainy or too sunny or too early or too late to go outside; they want only to play with their toys, to build forts, to color at the rickety kitchen table that is scarred and bumpy from marker stains, dried glue, stuck-on food. Dirt from their fingers and faces mark every wall and you try to wash it off but still the stains remain. One day your daughter, who is eight, asks if she must leave home for college. She says: I want to live here forever. Your three-year-old asks: Is planet Earth inside our house? It is his whole world.

  You think about your grandfather. You think about your old childhood home and wonder if the ink stain was accidental or a mark made with intent? You consider the ghost, the possibility that it did not choose to remain but instead found itself trapped. You remember the Moscow metro, the beach in Quepos, the place in Paris with hot chocolate so thick you had to eat it with a spoon. Soon you begin to itch. It is not the same itch as before. You are different now. You are a mother, you are a wife, you cannot shake off the life you have built, the city where you live in the same way
you once did. But the longing fills you. You think maybe your marriage is over. You think maybe you need a new place to live, a place that is yours alone but not yours. A blank. A starting over. You realize that this is the exhilaration of a move. The idea that in a new place anything might happen. The idea that nothing has yet been ruled out. A true home requires choices, the taking of this over that, a loss of possibility. Once you paint the kitchen white, it will no longer be red. Once you claim a home, you are no longer an explorer.

  Your mother sends you a link to a blog maintained by the newest owner of your childhood house. These people, a wealthy retired couple from New York City, have decided to undertake a complete renovation. They are very excited about the project, which represents to them a change of life, a dramatic fresh start after their frenetic jobs in the city. They post their architect’s plans. They post photos of the gutted living room, of a large orange back hoe sitting in the front yard, of a board found in a closet upon which your name is written in a curving childish script. You visit the blog irregularly, usually at night, but you read every word and study every photo. On the day they post a picture of a crane lifting out the large window from the wall of your old bedroom—a window where you sat and looked out to the magnolia trees and apple trees, a window out of which you climbed to sit on the low pitched roof and imagine the places you might go—you begin to cry. You are as surprised by your reaction as you are by the image of the crane, which is a brilliant red and seems improperly built, the arm too long, the base too narrow, as though it will topple over at any moment. Do these people from New York know what they are doing? Do they understand the antiquity of the house, its delicate floorboards, its intricate molding, the fretwork of tiny holes in the mantel?

  You remove the blog from your favorites tab. You vow never to visit it again. You want these new owners to have a fresh start in your old home. More than anything, you want to believe that you can too. You walk down the stairs of your house in Seattle. From the kitchen come the sounds of your children playing a board game, their voices impassioned and fierce. An orange late-afternoon sun cuts through the front window and illuminates the swirling, busy dust that fills—you see it suddenly, so clearly, so much—the hall. You wonder if an explorer must by definition remain adrift. You consider that home is nothing more than a choice you make to stay and place your mark. Lift a window. Paint a kitchen. Write your name upon a wall. Perhaps in the staying you find not the widest world but the best. Want to play? your son calls and you tell him yes.

  Tara Conklin’s first novel, The House Girl, was a New York Times bestseller, #1 IndieNext pick and Target Club pick, and has been translated into eight languages. Her second novel, The Last Romantics, is forthcoming. Her short fiction has appeared in the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology and Pangea: An Anthology of Stories from Around the Globe. She is the recipient of a 2015 Artist Trust GAP grant. Before turning to fiction, Tara worked for an international human rights organization and as a litigator at a corporate law firm in London and New York. Tara was born in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands, and grew up in western Massachusetts. She holds a BA in history from Yale University, a JD from New York University School of Law, and a Master of Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School (Tufts University).

  Annotating the First Page of the First Navajo-English Dictionary

  Danielle Geller

  Annotating the First Page of the First Navajo-English Dictionary1

  ’ąą’, well (anticipation, as when a person approaches one as though to speak, but says nothing).2

  ’aa’adiniih, venereal disease.

  ’ąą ’ádoolnííł, it will be opened.

  ’aa ’áhályánii, body guard.3

  ’aa ’ą’ii, magpie.4

  ’ąą ’ályaa, it was opened.5

  ’ąą ’ályaa, bich’į’, it was opened to them; they were invited.6

  ’a ’áán, hole in the ground; tunnel; cave; burrow.

  ’ąą ’át’é, it is open.7

  ’ąą ’át’éego, since it was open.8

  ’á’ádaat’éhígíí, the fundamentals, elements.

  ’áádahojoost’įįd, they quit, backed out, desisted, surrendered.9

  ’aa ’dahoost’įįd, t’óó, they gave up, surrendered.10

  1 The first, incomplete Navajo-English Dictionary was compiled in 1958 by Leon Wall, a BIA official in charge of a literacy program on the Navajo reservation, and William Morgan, a Navajo translator. The dictionary was published by the United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs.

  2 I could begin and end here. My mother was a full-blooded Navajo woman, raised on the reservation, but she was never taught to speak her mother’s language. There was a time when most words were better left unspoken. Still, I am drawn to the nasal vowels and slushy consonants, though I feel no hope of ever learning the language. It is one thing to play dress-up, to imitate pronunciations and understanding; it is another thing to think or dream or live in a language not your own.

  3 Aug. 15. ’15. I move to Tucson from Boston to join an MFA program in creative writing. I applied to schools surrounding the Navajo reservation because I wanted to be closer to my mother’s family. My plan: to take rug-weaving and Navajo language (Diné Bizaad) classes; to visit my family as often as I can. It will be opened: the door to the path we have lost.

  4 Magpies are the one bird I have not seen on the reservation. Birds I have seen in my grandmother’s backyard: Cliff Swallows, Inca Doves, Sharp-shinned Hawk, Western Bluebirds, Western Scrub Jay, Phainopepla, Northern Flickers, Ravens, and other carrion birds.

  5 It was opened: a PDF version of the Navajo-English dictionary. Curious which librarian from the University of Northern Colorado decided to digitize the dictionary. Most government documents, after they are shipped to federal depositories around the country, languish on out-of-the-way shelves and collect decades of dust before being deaccessioned and destroyed. I have worked in these libraries—I know.

  6 One of the reasons Navajo soldiers were recruited as code talkers during World War II was because there were no published dictionaries of their language at that time—and because the grammatical structure of the language was so different from English, German, and Japanese. They were invited to: a world beyond the borders of the reservation. My mother always told me: the only way to get off the Rez is to join the military or marry off.

  7 One of the first typewriters that could adequately record the Navajo language was built for Robert Young, a linguist who also worked with William Morgan and published a more comprehensive dictionary and grammar guide (The Navaho Language) in 1972. In the 1970s, a Navajo font was released for the IBM Selectric, an electric typewriter, which would serve as the basis for a digital font on early computers.

  8 Navajo fonts are now available for download in multiple typefaces: Times New Roman, Verdana, and Lucida Sans. It is easier to write when 1:á, 2:ą, 3:, and so on.

  9 Spring. 1864. The “Long Walk” begins. The US Army forcibly relocates the Navajo from their homeland to Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico. Those who do not resist learn to walk, but death follows both paths.

  10 There are many reasons parents do not teach their children the Navajo language: US monolingual policies, violence experienced in boarding schools, and perceived status. Those who speak English well will have a better chance for escape.

  ’aa dahwiinít’iį’, into court (a place where justice is judicially administered).11

  ’áád’, from there (a remote place).

  ’aad’, from there.

  ’aa deet’, transfer (of property, or ownership).12

  ’áádeisįįd, they discontinued, stopped, or ended it.13

  ’aadi, there.

  ’áadi, there, over there (a remote place).14

  ’áádįįł, it is progressively dwindling away; disappearing.15

  ’áadiísh, there? thereat?16

  ’ąą dinéest’, they increased, multiplied (’ąą has the meaning of extension
or spread).

  ’aadóó, from there.

  ’áádóó, from there on; and then; and; from that point on; from there. Shash yiyiisx ’áádóó shí níseł’ah. He killed the bear and I skinned it.

  ’áádóó bik’iįį’, after that.

  ’áádoolzįįł, I shall discontinue it.

  ’aahasti’, care, respect; care or respect toward a fragile object; fragility.

  ’ąąh ’azlá, pawn.

  ’ąąh ’dahaz’, illness, sickness, an ailment.17

  ’ąąh dahoyooł’aałii, disease.

  ’ąąh dah sitání, license plate.

  ’ąąh háá’á, debt.

  ’ąąh ha’ajeeh tó da’diisoołigíí, chicken pox.

  ’ąąh háát’i, fringes (saddle).

  ’ąąh naaznilę, the pawns.

  ’ąąh nahóókadd, disappointment.

  ’ąąh ni’ít’aah, cast (plaster).

  ’aa hojoobá’í, poor.

  ’aahoolzhíísh, to be one’s turn.

  ’ąąh sita’, cervical.

  ’á’áhwiinít’, kindness.

  ’aa hwiinít’, trial (at law), molestation.18

  ’aa hwiinít’ bá hooghan, courthouse.

  ’aahwiinít’įgo, during the court session.

  ’aa hwiinít’įįhígíí, the court session that is to come.19

  ’hyiłk’as, body chill.20

  11 Sept. 13. ’15. My cousin-sister is scheduled to testify in court in one week; she isn’t sure if she wants to go. I pick her up anyway. Bring her back to Tucson with me.

  12 My aunt tells me we have land on the reservation, just off I-40. We’ve inherited it from our great-grandmother, Pauline Tom, one of four heirs to Hostan Tsi’najinii. Only, Pauline Tom had many children, and their children had many children, and after she died in 2008, all those children started fighting. It’s a common problem, and it isn’t unique to the Navajo Nation. Federal land allotment policies have resulted in too many heirs for too few acres.