This Is the Place

by Margot Kahn

  At the church, a parent of one of my classmates nods hello. Others offer handshakes. Still, others look at us politely but curiously. By the beginning of the service, the church is full. A clutch of women line the pew in front of us, their hair teased up into cotton-candy bouffants; my mother and I crane our necks so that we can see over their heads. I accidentally kick the back of their pew and one of them turns: a pale profile, heavily rouged, skin pulled taught over high cheekbones. I spy some of my classmates with their parents, but they don’t look in our direction. Maybe they don’t know we are here.

  At the beginning of the service, everyone rises. The woman next to us shows my mother where in the program to find the hymns. My mother doesn’t sing and, later, during the prayers, she doesn’t pray. She stares ahead. At one point, she places a hand on my thighs to keep me from fidgeting and shushes me when I ask why I can’t sing with everyone else. Everyone around us knows what to do—which hymn to sing, what line of the psalm to repeat in response—and as my mother watches she wonders why she has come.

  The minister walks up to the pulpit. He is wearing a blue polyester suit with wide lapels and a tie with blue stripes that match his suit. He is massive and ruddy. The minister pauses, seems to consider his words; then he runs his hand through the sparse tufts of blonde hair. I can imagine his deep Southern drawl. My mother also remembers and can recount in detail all that is going on in the culture at the time that disturbs and frightens the minister so much that he feels he must speak out passionately. These events frighten my mother as well. Gerald Ford has just survived an assassination attempt by Squeaky Fromme, a member of the Manson cult. The police have apprehended Patty Hearst, scion of an iconic American family, victim of a brutal kidnapping, member of the Symbionese Liberation Army. The trial of Jeffrey MacDonald, the charismatic and very possibly sociopathic Green Beret who is accused of murdering his family, is about to begin. A perfume branded with a boy’s name, Charlie, is being hawked in local drugstores and women proclaim, with no hint of bashfulness, that they wear short shorts.

  The minister feels a deep need to speak out, to bear witness, to warn his congregation. He must lead them out of this wilderness or they too might end up like Patty Hearst—brainwashed by the forces trying to hold them captive. He rails against women who want to act like men and proclaims the word of someone named Paul who warns of the importance of the sexes knowing their place. He grips the side of the lectern and leans forward, “Look out around you. You are surrounded by Legion, living among you. Look at what they do. They cut their hair short? Paul wrote in Corinthians ‘if a woman has long hair, it is her glory.’ Your glory!” A round of no’s rumbles through the audience. “And these women, they disobey their husbands, they disobey God and his desires for them. They choose to wear…” he pauses a moment for effect, “They choose to wear pants.”

  Pants? My mother blinks, not sure at first if she has heard the minister correctly. He repeats the last line as if for my confused mother alone. My mother looks around the church and notices that all the women sport dresses or skirts. She imagines suddenly the woman next to her looking surreptitiously at her, the women sitting in front sneaking glances at her. She looks down at me. Had I noticed? But I was concentrating very hard on swinging my legs as close as possible to the pew in front of me without actually touching the wood.

  In Sri Lanka, by 1975, women wore pants, even jeans. But here she sits believing one thing—America is where women live emancipated existences, go to college, work jobs—while being told by a man what she shouldn’t do as a woman. She, who for so long did exactly what her father, and then later her husband, asked of her, is the most liberated person in this church full of Americans.

  We imagine the move from a developing country like Sri Lanka to America as a move from oppression to progress, from backwardness to enlightenment, especially for women. The truth is much more nuanced. Many Sri Lankan women of my mother’s generation attended medical school, became lawyers, accountants. The women in my family are strong and forceful. Some even practiced careers before marriage. None of them easily fit the stereotype of South Asian femininity: demure, submissive, ultimately oppressed by the patriarchal society.

  Much of the progress Sinhalese women achieved in Sri Lanka was due to one man, Dharmapala, a Buddhist monk considered by many the father of the Buddhist revival in the late nineteenth century. Dharmapala had contact with American feminists during the time he studied in the West and was aware of the American and European feminist movements. He was also a keen and savvy politician who recognized the need to accommodate the growing political and social clout of Sinhalese women. But there was a dark side to Dharmapala’s ideas. In Dharmapala’s view, the woman as wife and mother was integral to a singular ethnic, national identity. His prescription for the burgeoning women’s movement was particular to the point of counseling Sinhalese women how to drape—wrap and pleat—their saris.

  As a teenager, I noted, with no real understanding of what I was seeing, the change in how my Sinhalese family dressed over several generations. The women of my family, in formal portraits dated during the late 1800s, adopted fashionable Western clothes—long skirts and high-collared bodices. The women in photographs dating from the early twentieth century, however, sported the Kandyan sari. The blouse—the fitted article of clothing that goes underneath a sari—covers the waist, and the pallu—the stretch of fabric that wraps around the body and over the shoulder—is carefully pleated. This contrasts to the far more well-known Indian sari, where the blouse ends at the bottom of the ribcage and the pallu is left flat and arranged so that it conceals the waist and stomach.

  The real significance of the sari is cultural. Kandy is an area of Ceylon revered by the Sinhalese as the seat of successive Buddhist kingdoms and as the home of a powerful Buddhist monastic order. The Kandyan style of draping is unique to this area, so to don a Kandyan sari meant associating yourself with that region and that Buddhist tradition. Dharmapala, when he pushed Sinhalese women in the early twentieth century to wear the Kandyan sari over the Indian, understood this significance. The Sinhalese woman was not simply declaring a national and Buddhist identity, but positioning herself as the distinct opposite of the Tamil woman, who drapes her sari in the Indian style and applies a pottu to her forehead. Dharmapala’s attitudes became embedded firmly in Sinhalese culture. I remember my mother chiding me, when I was a teenager, for expressing an interest in getting a nose ring. She suggested it would make me appear to be Hindu and I imagine, though she didn’t express this explicitly, to be Tamil.

  Dharmapala’s claims of the purity and the primacy of Buddhism had serious political and social consequences for Sri Lanka. Scholars argue about the extent to which Dharmapala’s ideas have been misused and misconstrued. It cannot be denied, though, that they underpin the virulent Buddhist chauvinism that led, in part, to the nearly two-decade civil war between the Sinhalese dominated government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. This nationalist movement also managed to cripple Sri Lanka’s vocal and active women’s rights movement by appearing to be progressive—for example, supporting women’s suffrage—but by promoting what was, in truth, an image of woman tethered firmly to household and home. Yes, women had power; but their agency came from their nurturing roles as exemplary mothers and wives, the inculcators of Buddhist values and traditions. Sinhalese women accepted and internalized this and donned Kandyan saris for their wedding portraits.

  My mother’s course tracks that of her nation. When my mother was twenty-five, she agreed to an arranged marriage—partly to escape her family—and was introduced to my father. She was told she had a choice. She did not have to marry my father. I also know all the social pressure she faced. Both families would have charted my parents’ horoscopes to assess their compatibility. My father was of the same caste and was already a successful doctor, his family successful farmers. My mother is a strong woman capable of considerable resourcefulness when necessary, but she’s also the sort of person w
ho wouldn’t say no when she couldn’t imagine a reason not to, especially back then.

  I admit I spent my teenage years and my early adulthood looking down on my mother. I thought her weak for having acquiesced so easily to an arranged marriage, for being a good mother to us. And I have scorned the idea of home, connecting it to homemaker—a role my mother adopted, in my opinion, too readily. What I didn’t understand then, what I see now, is that home is a political act. How can it not be when so many ideological, religious, and nationalist movements use home as the fundamental building block of social and cultural identity? And while she never verbally expressed any desire to oppose Dharmapala’s vision, I do see her act of moving her family—her three daughters—as an act of rebellion. She did, after all, steal three of the country’s native daughters and allow each to thrive independent of any single image of who she must be and who my mother, herself, was forced to be. My memory of my mother’s home is a place where I was allowed to dress as I wanted—my own hybrid envisioning of British and American punk—choose the career I wanted, and willfully and purposefully declare without approbation that I myself wouldn’t marry and have children. (I’ve done neither.) Her openness seems to me its own type of bravery.

  The word home is, for me, tied to the word land—home, homeland. Like many immigrants, I hold simultaneously two images of home: one feels transient and impermanent even though my family has resided here for forty years, and the other is, by now, almost entirely an imagined construct. And yet that imagined construct has remained potent and formative. From the Baptist preacher’s reactionary strictures, to Dharmapala’s nationalist identity, to the independent state that Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam fought for, homeland, and home, has always felt, to me, a battleground. I cannot deny my ambivalence to the concept of it.

  I’ve read a number of accounts of a poster—a piece of propaganda—distributed in the 1980s during the Sri Lankan Civil War. It depicted the image of a Sinhalese woman breastfeeding an infant. The caption read: “Give Your Life Blood to Nourish Our Future Soldiers.” Propaganda depicting the mother as homeland, as the source and succor for war, is ancient. But this image is particularly troubling to me. I have spent two decades haunted by the Sri Lankan Civil War, and I know what this image of mother and home has cost a country.

  I try to envision what the counter to this image is. All that comes to me is my mother dressed in her brand new pair of black pants, perched on the edge of her church pew, staring past the minister, into the chancel, at the bare, glowing rectangle of light in which floats a single white cross. She pulls me closer.

  Hasanthika Sirisena is the author of The Other One, a collection of short stories. Her essays and stories have appeared in the Globe and Mail, WSQ, Narrative, Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, Epoch, Story-Quarterly, Narrative, and other magazines. Her work has been anthologized in Best New American Voices and named a distinguished story by Best American Short Stories in 2011 and 2012. In 2008 she received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. She is currently an associate fiction editor at West Branch magazine. She is the winner of the 2015 Juniper Prize for Fiction.

  Nuclear Family

  Amanda Petrusich

  I grew up in Buchanan, New York—a tiny, mostly working-class village in northern Westchester County, tucked into a crook where the Hudson River bends, narrows, juts east. My parents were public school teachers, and we lived in a split-level wood house they built themselves on Lake Meahagh, a manmade pond dug by the Knickerbocker Ice Company in the late nineteenth century. It was, by any measure, a sweet place to be a kid. In the summertime, my sister and I fished for carp on the lake’s soft, reedy shores and chased hissing swans through the black mud ringing its perimeter; in the winter, we laced up our figure skates and carved broad figure eights into its big, imperfect surface. There was a dusty corner store up the street—Teresa’s—where we pedaled our rickety, ten-speed bicycles and bought Hostess cupcakes and cans of fruit punch. The village had, somewhat improbably, a sizable public pool with an extra-pliant diving board. I could walk home, downhill, from my elementary school. Its pleasures were small, but precious. Buchanan is a community of just around 2,200 people (the village itself comprises less than 2 square miles); when people ask where I’m from, I usually say Peekskill or Croton, the two closest midsize towns. For the most part, Buchanan is known only to itself.

  But on occasion—after the attacks on the World Trade Center; after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and the subsequent failure of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which led to the meltdown of three nuclear reactors and the discharge of untold amounts of radioactive material—Buchanan becomes a regional fixation. The village is home to the Indian Point Energy Center, a three-reactor nuclear power plant that generates enough electricity to satisfy 10 percent of New York State’s total energy needs. Because the plant sits just thirty-odd miles north of Midtown Manhattan, newspaper and magazine articles bullhorn its precariousness during tense times, detailing the many reasons it should be shuttered, and soon: its vulnerability to terrorism, the 1,500 tons of radioactive waste stored on-site, the implausibility of its established evacuation plans, and so on.

  But to residents—I live in Brooklyn now, but my parents, aunt, and uncle all reside within a mile or so of the plant—Indian Point’s noiseless menace is old news. After all, it’s been there since 1962.

  When I was a child, the plant loomed strangely in my mind. Its reactors—housed in massive containment domes, built with four-to-six-foot-thick walls of steel-reinforced concrete—signified something peculiar and unsettling, something I didn’t entirely understand, although I’d heard, as children do, that it had something to do with glowing in the dark or, if you were particularly lucky, with manifesting a third eyeball. At some point, my sister and I decided Indian Point was funny. Periodically, the plant would test its emergency siren system—a high, violent wail suddenly pierced the calm air—and we would scream “Meltdown!” at my parents before collapsing into giggly heaps on the cold kitchen floor. Fishing with our father on Lake Meahagh—he would stab balls of stale bread or kernels of canned corn onto the craggy points of our hooks when we were too squeamish to pierce a night crawler ourselves—we would gleefully throw back any catch we ultimately deemed a “nuclear fish.” (The qualifications were arbitrary.) Every now and then, with a certain relish, we would attribute each other’s various imperfections (“your face”) to massive and irreversible radiation poisoning.

  The plant became considerably less funny after my sister found an old paperback copy of Hiroshima, John Hersey’s staggering, devastating book on the aftermath of the atomic bomb, and spent the next several nights shaking in her bed in the room next to mine, dreaming of endless flashes of light. Hersey describes the moment of impact as “a sheet of sun.” The aftermath, he suggests, was dimmer: “Such clouds of dust had risen that there was a sort of twilight around.” It only got darker.

  Certainly, there were quirks to a childhood in Buchanan: power lines extended in every which way, a complex web of black rubber. The medicine cabinet always contained a plastic bottle of potassium iodide pills, a salt that helps block the absorption of radioactive iodine by the thyroid gland. When my father took us out on the river in his aluminum canoe, a sickly warmth spread over the floor of the boat as we paddled closer to the plant. Still, signs declaring the plant’s safety (“Safe, Secure, Vital,” they swore) were tacked to telephone poles all over town. The village seal included the atomic symbol with two hands next to it, holding tools. Buchanan was proud of its industry—Indian Point employed around one thousand people locally, and subsidized my excellent public school education, and, by extension, my parents’ jobs—and of the citizens who made it run.

  My father grew up in neighboring Verplanck, an even smaller Revolutionary War town that has since lost some of its historical luster (about 22 percent of its residents now live below the poverty line). In 1779, Stony Point—a port directly across the Hudson from Verplan
ck; the two points were twin termini for the Kings Ferry, a crucial river crossing—was reclaimed from the British by the Brigadier General Anthony Wayne and his Corps of Light Infantry following “a brief bayonet assault.” Gunners from the Continental Artillery re-aimed their captured weapons across the river, attempting to take back Verplanck, too (they ultimately failed, though the British army moved south by the following fall). Verplanck continued to be a crucial outpost in the war (per the Journal of the American Revolution, “Stony and Verplanck Points saw one major battle, a number of amphibious landings, various forts, one treason, almost daily crossings, one Grand Encampment, a mutiny, and even a visit by a future Marshal of France”); in 1781, Washington’s army used Kings Ferry to cross the Hudson en route to Yorktown. Though it has since become something of a pejorative, native Verplanckers still proudly refer to themselves as “Pointers.”

  By the 1830s, Verplanck was being figured as the new “capital of Westchester”—which helps explain its too-broad and grand-seeming boulevards—but it was ultimately bypassed by the railroad, and became something of a blue-collar immigrant enclave. My paternal grandparents arrived there from Croatia in the 1930s. My father’s childhood home was less than two miles from the site where the plant was eventually built, then an idyllic spot called Indian Point Park. In the 1930s and ’40s, stately Hudson River Day Liners chugged north from New York City and deposited smartly dressed tourists at the park, which had a dance pavilion, a public swimming pool, ball fields, picnic areas and amusement rides. My father remembers curling into the branches of the park’s copious cherry trees as a child, and filling his mouth with ripe fruit.