It Occurs to Me That I Am America

by Richard Russo

  • • •

  When you get home that evening you walk the dog along the Charles River and notice that the dog’s hair, once white at her chest, is turning orange, almost red. At the grocery store you see the woman from the dance floor the night before. Lacuna. She tells you she has just come from yoga class and you start rambling on about mandalas and how at the four gates there are eight different graveyards and in the graveyards are jackals and crows and sometimes zombies but also sometimes something called clear understanding and they are supposed to represent individuation and how your mother took you and Henry to graveyards as children and you are starting to feel like you are having an out-of-body experience when she puts her hand on your wrist and asks you if you want to come over for dinner. You let out a breath and in the same moment you get a text that your friend across town has gone into labor. You drop your phone and when you pick it up there is a crack across the frame that you study for a moment then realize Lacuna is still looking at you waiting on an answer, and that you like it when she looks at you and you say, Dinner, yes.

  After she leaves you buy wine and a chicken and you walk slowly to the address Lacuna gave you. When you reach it you walk around the block again and again in a circle which is actually a square and it feels as if you are walking a labyrinth, and you do this until you understand that your circumambulating is in direct conflict with time and the minutes passing, which crush down on your shoulders until you finally stop in front of her house and press the buzzer.

  Inside, Lacuna shows you a drawing her father made. It is blue and compass-shaped and you immediately feel affection for it. You and Lacuna grill vinegar chicken on the fire escape even though it is very cold outside. Later, she invites you into her bed. She sleeps and you stay awake. Her apartment is level with the elevated trains that run late into the evening. There is something about the train that reminds you of high school, the feeling of being awake forever, of always trying to undo some puzzle inside while your brother slept soundly on the bunk bed above your head. And there is something about Lacuna’s hesitation, and yours, that puzzles you. Hesitation, you think, is intimate because its origin is fear and that makes you think you may never be here with her again so you try to imprint the night onto your mind: the feel of her fingertips tracing your ear as she drifts into sleep; the way, in her sleep, she shakes her fist in the air as if angry at someone you hope is not you. When you gently press your nose into the soft place at the back of her neck her body moves into you. You think of your friend giving birth, air flooding the baby’s tiny lungs for the first time. Across from the bed is a Langston Hughes poem tacked on the wall and you read it over and over again by the streetlamp’s light until it feels like a kind of mantra. When you finally close your eyes you dream of the sun’s corona, of garlands, of heat and boundlessness.

  • • •

  The next morning you are still high from holding her as you walk home to find Henry on your stoop holding a cat. He shoves it into your arms and says, Here. I found it in a dumpster. I’ll die if something happens to it. You are about to ask him in for coffee when he gets back into his car and drives away. The cat licks your shoulder and tries to bite at your ear. Inside, the red dog seems taken with this new creature. You think about Henry’s growing attachment to the wounded. You pour some milk in a bowl and add cat food to the list on the refrigerator that reads: spatula, paint for the living room, box grater, call the electrician about the fixture in the hallway, find a surgeon who takes your insurance, milk, and now cat food. You cross off a few things; ones you think about every day and never do. Last time Henry had been over for dinner he had scrawled at the bottom of the page in red ink: Having a list is almost as good as having.

  At the supermarket to buy cat food you stop in the cafeteria to eat lunch and catch up on reading. You are at the corner of a long table sitting beside a quiet Middle Eastern family. There are four of them, father, teenage boy, a slightly younger girl, and a young boy who seems perhaps seven or eight. You watch as the younger boy reaches for his father’s food, the old man slapping his slender fingers away from the cardboard box of tabouli. When the boy hangs his head in shame the father beckons him back, fills a spoon, and hands it to him. None of them have said a word, which makes you curious about them, but to learn anything you would have to look directly at them and that feels strange, invasive. Still, you glance at them from time to time.

  The young boy is now playing with his plastic spoon, his older sister obviously annoyed, and then he loses control of it and the spoon slingshots through the air and lands, lentils splattering, in the center of your book. You pause, knowing he is watching, wondering how you will react, and you slowly reach down, pick up the spoon, and raise it to your lips as though you are going to eat the lentils and you and the boy both start laughing almost uncontrollably and the laughter breaks the silence and words come tumbling out of the boy, racing out of his mouth, his body shifting with each one as though words themselves were at the very heart of what animates him. He wants to know, Do you like movies? Have you seen any scary ones? Do you know about Chucky? He asks you if you are a boy or a girl and you shrug and he teaches you an elaborate handshake ritual that ends with the two of you pulling on each other’s earlobes. The girl tells you how much she loves Michael Jackson, gets up, and does a pretty good moonwalk, her slight form gliding across the cafeteria floor, sneakers squeaking on the tile. The teenage boy leans in and asks you what you are reading. You look down at the books; there are always two, as though your brain needs to be able to move in two divergent directions at all times. One is The Melodious Plot: Negative Capability, Keats, Axis Mundi, and Learning to Love Beyond Logic; the other is a dog-eared copy of Self-Esteem for Dummies that you picked up at a tag sale last summer. You can’t help but blush as you read the latter title out loud but when you look up the family is nodding thoughtfully. It occurs to you then that the father may be mute, that until you interrupted the family had been communicating in his language, a language made of gesture. For a moment you feel bad, as though you have inadvertently created a situation in which he might feel excluded. But when you nod back at him the father smiles and silently offers you a box of cookies.

  • • •

  That night you are in Jamaica Plain for the monthly queer hip-hop dance party. You meet a trans man tattoo artist and he shows you his scars from top surgery, thin reminders of where his breasts used to be. He gives you a number for a surgeon and as you fold it and slip it into your wallet you stop and think again about hesitation.

  You think of you and Henry racing through a field of sweetgrass when you were children, your shirts off, your bodies nearly indistinguishable save for the long braids your mother made you wear; you think about last night in bed and how you didn’t want to take the binder off your breasts and how you don’t often wear a binder because your breasts are too large and it hurts your chest and feels even less natural, but that afternoon you had felt especially loose and chaotic in your body so you had put it on; you think about how, when your breasts are bound, you breathe differently; you think how fight-or-flight roils constantly inside your body and you think about how, when you were small, you were afraid of houses and how you hid in the field, stayed in the lake, and how it must have been hard for Henry, the way you were always missing.

  Was there some kind of monster inside of every house? Perhaps it was the feeling that there was a monster inside of you. But you don’t feel monstrous. You feel like part of a lineage that has never been recorded. You feel like . . . an interval.

  It begins to snow again as you walk to the store to buy bread and salad greens for dinner and another tin of food for the cat. In the bakery you run into Lacuna. You see a nervousness wash across her face. She tells you of the dream she had while you were holding her. She dreamt that she had found you at the end of a road that disappeared into brambles, that you were obsessively digging into the dirt at the end of that road and that you were muttering something about omens, and that she w
as trying to reason with you, and shaking her fist in the air because in her dream she was afraid you would dig so far that you would fall through the earth and never stop falling and nothing would ever contain you again and when she said this you stopped digging and she thought she had finally reached you but instead you had found what you were looking for: a tiny perfect blue cube. It was mesmerizing, she said, and it glowed from the inside and just when she was reaching out to touch it you threw it into the air and the cube turned the world of the dream into night and then all the stars started to shift around in the sky and from your pocket you produced a dried flower for her, one you said you had carried across the ocean.

  You tell her how you used to stuff flowers into the books you read as a child and how they were always falling out, and that you were disappointed as it wasn’t the form but the fragrance and the color, the grace you wanted to preserve, and about the letter your father has just sent you about physics and the imagination, which has sent you into a minor fugue state. And you say when you used to study music you became obsessed with fugues because you wanted to know more about imitation within variation. You tell her that you love the dream because you’re not sure you’ve ever come across a problem that you could resolve.

  You think about finding your brother Henry in the stranger’s house and how you thought you had just witnessed him becoming a man and the strangeness of that phrase because you have never felt as though you were becoming more or less of a woman or man, and you realize that what you saw was Henry becoming more human, you saw your brother finally taking in and holding some of the trouble in the world, and you remember your father when he was a postman, coming home from work in the middle of a storm, carrying three kittens he’d found in a snowbank on the side of the road, two orange and white and one calico, and how suddenly everything ceased to exist as you and Henry sat on the rug watching the kittens rumble and scratch, shaking off the snow.

  ANNA DUNN was born in Western Massachusetts and greatly appreciates Bruce Springsteen, rescue pups, mezcal, and Murder, She Wrote. Early on, her mother threw the television out when Anna let it slip that she aspired to be Magnum P.I. when she grew up. She is the coauthor of two cookbooks, Dinner at the Long Table and Saltie: A Cookbook, and served as editor in chief of Diner Journal, an independent food, art, and literature magazine, for a decade. Most nights you can find her mixing cocktails at Roman’s in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, or tucked away above Marlow & Sons collecting recipes and artwork for a forthcoming cookbook. She won the Dirt Press Poetry Award and has been published by Brooklyn Based, the Center for Fiction, FAQNP, and Famous magazine. For at least twenty minutes every day she is hard at work on her first crime fiction novel and/or concentrating on her breathing.

  LOUISE ERDRICH

  * * *

  Balancing Acts

  In 2001, I decided to open a small bookstore. Birchbark Books. We’ve gone through rough times, but we have survived. Democracy evolved along with the printing press. In fact, I think that democracy is made of books of all kinds, but as poetry expresses the ineffability of freedom best, I think the strongest link is there. A well-functioning democracy reminds me of a Leonard Cohen quote: If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. When democracy is burning well, poetry and literature and independent bookstores are the ash. We are beautifully there but not desperately there. We get taken for granted. People love us, but don’t seek us out with the sort of intensity that occurs when democracy is visibly, viscerally faltering. When democracy is not burning well, poetry burns harder. Literature becomes dangerous, independent bookstores are bonfires that light the mind. (Or we are democracy cells, an Amy Goodman phrase.) In recent times, underground bookstores, writers, presses, have set flares for people’s revolutions. But the horsemen of the apocalypse have ridden through the flames in China, Egypt, Libya, Hong Kong, Turkey. When that happens, when autocracy or fascism descends, literature and bookstores and booksellers are the first to go.

  Maintaining a healthy flow of information, nurturing the brilliance of the individual, the iconoclast, the eccentric, the ever-fragile status of those who use words to illuminate human truths, is a bookstore’s job. It is always important; it is always a labor of love. Selling books is less a business and more a way of life. Large online or big-box retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Target have undercut the relationship between people and what they read by making books into loss leaders, that is, by cynically using the fair price of a book against the book itself. The loss leader is basically a fishing lure to obtain consumer information or to sell other stuff. Truly caring about books, choosing them thoughtfully, selling books to people who are hungry for books, is joy to me and to other booksellers. Among other things, democracy is about respect for joy, and books are joy. They are satisfying objects. As well as selling books, we give away a lot of books. Yesterday I gave a book to someone, and the first thing he did was breathe in the scent of the book. I loved that moment. It was like seeing a hungry person bend over a plate of delicious food to get the fragrance before eating. The smile on his face was like that too. Rapt with anticipation. Of course, he was going to read the book, not eat it.

  But then again, maybe it’s the same thing.

  Here is a story about what a book can do to center a heart.

  People surprise me by making our bookstore a destination stop when they come here—sometimes from faraway cities and countries. Maybe they see pictures of the birchbark trunks that make up our loft, or like the birchbark baskets on the shelves, or the rows of notes our staff fixes to the shelves to recommend books. Sometimes, maybe, they like my books. Other times they hope to make a connection with the Native world because our bookstore focuses on Indigenous literature in every genre. One day I blundered into the bookstore, dressed in saggy sweats, weary. I was slipping in to do some chores back in the office, when I overheard a woman talking to a book. She was holding Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, a novel of magnificent humanity.

  Thank you, she murmured to the book. You taught me how to balance.

  Let the Great World Spin centers on the story of a French man, Philippe Petit, who walked a tightrope between the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center in 1974. The art of his balancing walk resonates down the years, casts a strangely beautiful and painful shadow on 9/11, and is the subject of other books and movies. McCann’s stories, reeling off the day of Petit’s transcendent performance, are filled with emotional truth and a stark sense of what the city was like in those years.

  I like people who unbalance me, says one of McCann’s characters.

  In an afterword to the book, the author says that when telling stories we are engaged in a democracy like no other.

  After 9/11 and after the last election, people came to the bookstore for solace, calm, and balance.

  We are a still new country coming to grips with a bloody and divided history. Falling is part of balancing. Books are where we learn to do both of these things.

  LOUISE ERDRICH owns Birchbark Books, in Minneapolis, and Birchbark Branch, an online bookstore. Her latest novel is Future Home of the Living God, a science fiction novel in which pregnant women are hunted down and incarcerated. Her other books include Love Medicine and LaRose, both winners of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Round House, winner of the National Book Award. Her favorite flower is monarda, also known as bee balm. One of her all-time favorite books is Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann.

  ANGELA FLOURNOY

  * * *

  The Miss April Houses

  After a survey of University trustees, experts, faculty and community members, the Committee puts forth the following recommendations:

  In literature associated with the property, prior occupants of the “Miss April Houses” should be referred to as “people” or “inhabitants.” In special circumstances approved by the Committee they may be referred to as “workers.” Under no circumstances should they be referred to in any other fashion.

  The committee la
cked a librarian, they explained. I was new to campus. So new that my badge wasn’t programmed yet. For the first month, I had to stand out front of the Jefferson Building in the humidity before each meeting (twice weekly, at lunch) and wait for another committee member to swipe me in. It was usually Becca Samuels, from University Counseling Services, with her enamel pins and cat’s-eye glasses and shaved side making me feel like I hadn’t moved to a new place at all. Then we’d sit around a conference table in the Office of the General Counsel. My job at these meetings, as it was explained to me, was to vote when called, but mostly to listen to the proceedings and at the very end consider how the library might set up a web page with links to supplemental information and research suggestions for interested students and visitors. That wasn’t the only reason I was there, I suspected, but it was a fancier job than I’d had before and fancy jobs always have their particular requirements.

  Nobody wants to be stuck in meetings during their lunch break after just having moved a thousand miles and not even having time to get the lay of the land, or buy a microwave or figure out where to get decent towels, but I figured it could have been worse. We could have used parliamentary procedure and meetings could have gone on forever. Instead Dr. Gander, the co-chair, kept the meetings under an hour each time, no matter what.

  The Committee endorses the Board of Trustees’ proposal to continue calling the structures in question the Miss April Houses, and approves the following language for a commemorative plaque at the site:

  Miss April Lee-June Walters (1902–1974) was born in House #2 and lived in both houses with her two sons and first husband, John Binker Walters (1897?–1955), then with her second husband, Woodrow Gendry II (1920–1981). Miss April was a cherished part of the University community and a longtime member of the hospitality and dining services staff. During the Great Depression vegetables generously shared from her small farming plots were often the sole source of fresh produce that students and faculty ate. Following campus expansion in 1963, when the houses were moved from the southeast to northwest corner of campus, independent community members replanted Miss April’s garden, ensuring that she enjoyed sustainable, locally grown produce for the rest of her life.