Carry

by Toni Jensen

  The mother and the girl and the girl’s child and the auntie are waiting in the alley for the mallet to come down. Or they’re walking The Shopping Mall halls or the road’s edge or the bottom of the ditch. Maybe they’re watching for the hawk, waiting for it to stop its pigeon feast. Maybe they’re in charge of themselves now at long last or at least in charge of this narrative. Maybe at long last the curtains are flung wide, and the sun is shining into the house, into all of the houses. Maybe at long last, the story is being told from the inside out—even if the snow is coming back tomorrow, even if the snow arrives the next day and the next and the next. Maybe they’re sailing the high seas or driving safe down a lone highway, nowhere near the edge, nowhere near the hawk or its catch, the view in the rearview only the brightest of skies.

  City Beautiful

  I.

  Our first year in Orlando, we live in a rental house in what’s considered a good part of Orlando, College Park, bordering Winter Park, but we live in the under-the-freeway part. Our house is constructed of concrete blocks, is low-slung and small, with a long, narrow backyard that features lush grass, flowers that bloom year-round, and traffic noise that revs and blooms and belches.

  This day, we’re out looking at houses, at other neighborhoods. I teach at the University of Central Florida, and we’re trying to find a neighborhood in which to buy a house, perhaps, or at least, one to rent where the backyard air is not filled with the exhaust of car upon car upon car.

  The traffic stop, at first, seems ordinary, seems everyday, though all we’ve done is turn left across a double yellow stripe into a McDonald’s parking lot. Our daughter wanted ice cream. The officer is young, Latina, and she speaks first to my then-husband in Spanish. He replies in kind, and it’s then I notice her hands, how they shake a little, how one of them never leaves the gun at her hip.

  My then-husband is a self-identified white man, a gringo, who grew up in Olmito, Texas, close to Brownsville. He’s dark-skinned and dark-eyed with straight black hair. In Pennsylvania, everyone assumed he was Italian. In Texas, Mexican. Here, in Florida, in Orlando, he’s Cuban. He enjoys speaking Spanish back to the telemarketers and evangels of varied faiths before shutting the door of our rental house in their faces.

  My then-husband’s family for years were self-identified Cherokee, and his family does feature surnames that are known in Cherokee country, that are featured on the Dawes Rolls, which the National Archives defines as “the lists of individuals who were accepted as eligible for tribal membership in the ‘Five Civilized Tribes’: Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles. (It does not include those whose applications were stricken, rejected or judged as doubtful.)” His family members identify less and less as Cherokee as the years pass, as one family member takes a through-the-mail DNA test and becomes discouraged, after.

  My then-husband, then, is one of the men America considers brown, foreign, other in some circumstances, and in other circumstances, he’s a gringo. He’s white adjacent. Urban Dictionary defines white adjacent as follows: “A person who is technically a minority, but has access to, utilizes and sometimes benefits from white privilege. This is usually accomplished by said person distancing themselves from the socio-political problems their ethnic group commonly faces.” I’m reduced to Urban Dictionary because Webster’s is mute on the subject.

  I understand my idea of the term is an Urban Dictionary reversal. I’m suggesting another way to be white adjacent is to be white ethnically and be considered non-white visually by those around you. I’m suggesting our categories for whiteness are contradictory, backward, easily turned inside out, easily seen for what they are, if one bothers to do the looking. I’m suggesting they serve no one other than their creators, other than their enforcers.

  Today, the enforcer is a young Latina officer. Our world is equal parts complicated and strange.

  In the back seat, my daughter cries and fusses a little. She can see the golden arches, and where is her ice cream? She may be thinking this or she may be simply reading in the air the tension.

  The young police officer is having trouble with the registration, has called in backup. She’s put my then-husband in the position, arms and legs spread, arms on the car’s hood, and she’s checked his pockets with the one free hand. She’s instructed me to stay in the car and to be quiet.

  We’ve been in Orlando less than a year, have been married only a little longer. The previous fall, back in Texas, we exchanged vows at the courthouse gazebo in Lubbock. It was Halloween. I wore a wedding dress like the costume it was. The judge who married us wore a witch’s hat and threw down firecrackers at the end, startling our daughter.

  This day, as we wait and I work to stay quiet, our daughter cries a little more and kicks at nothing in her car seat in the back. I understand the sentiment.

  If the young officer would let me speak, she would learn this car is registered to me, that my then-husband and I have different last names.

  Her body posture tells me she’s both inexperienced and afraid of my then-husband. She holds her shoulders rigid, but her head and eyes swivel almost continuously.

  It’s possible, of course, that she’s reading him as white—that as a brown woman, she’s afraid of a white man. But white men are not often treated this way at routine traffic stops. It’s equally or more possible, from the statistics, that she’s afraid of him because she reads him as brown, as Cuban or Mexican or from who knows where.

  Later, after the older, white male cop shows up, lets me speak, releases us to ice cream and an expensive ticket, I wonder over the young officer’s fear. What or who in her life developed this in her—an uncle, a teacher, a father, a brother, a first or last boyfriend? Or some terrible mix of most or all? In addition to wonder, I hold my own fear. If one-third of all stranger homicides are committed by police, how many of those officers also were afraid? How many were driven to shoot by their own fear? There are few things as frightening as the fear of an armed officer.

  Even later, when I ask my then-husband about his recollection of that day, he’ll say she wasn’t that bad, he wasn’t in the position that long. She was just green. He may be right, of course. But while he was facedown, I was face-to-face with her, with the fear and anger in her eyes. He dismisses my observations and says I’m just still mad about how much the ticket cost.

  There’s an expense absolutely to this day—on this we agree. He may have forgotten or tried to, but I also remember that his hands shook when he assumed the position, that he kept his head down a moment or two after she released him.

  II.

  Eight years later, as we argue over the Latina officer, I’m waiting for the list of names. It’s June 2016, and forty-nine people have been shot and killed and fifty-three more wounded at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, in our former city, one of the few in this country I love. In Spanish, Orlando means “famous land.” Now in this moment, Orlando is famous for all the wrong reasons.

  When we lived there, in our under-the-freeway house, my creative writing students and some of my colleagues, too, went to Pulse on a regular basis. UCF is the kind of school where students, of course, come from all over the country and world, but a good many of mine were from the Orlando area or had good jobs there and have stayed.

  During this time, in summer 2016, I’m not sleeping well. All spring and into the summer, I awaken each morning either at 3:14 A.M. or 4:14 A.M., and then I’m awake for three or four hours before falling back to sleep for a few brief hours in the regular morning time when everyone else is waking up, going to work, or, say, driving a daughter to school.

  I’m exhausted from the interrupted sleep but also from the eeriness of the timing—the exact nature of when I wake—if not one hour, then the next, down to the minute, exact and strange in equal measure.

  The house where we live together as a family in the Arkansas countryside is a remodeled and
expanded log cabin, whose original rooms were built in 1846. It’s one of the oldest homes still standing in the county. It sits on an acreage that includes a pond, walking trails around the pond, an overgrown blackberry thicket, a plethora of hummingbirds, sparrows, wrens, and ravens, one fat groundhog my daughter names Sir Num Nums, and many, many ticks.

  We bought this house together and moved into it as a family, but I’m not there long before I know my marriage is ending. Part of me certainly has known this for some time—my body with its eerie waking certainly is trying to convey something.

  When I learn about the shooting in Orlando, I’m in my office, a small, rectangular room just off our bedroom. I like its cozy size, its shape, which holds just enough room for my small desk and long mid-century couch. The space holds knotty pine walls and painted concrete floors that stay cool to the touch in the humid-thick of Arkansas summers.

  The window next to my desk features a good view of the old barn and the connecting sheds, one of which has been tunneled under and claimed by Sir Num Nums. The first time I see him, I’m certain my then-husband and my daughter have put out a statue and forgotten to tell me. Standing on his hind legs, stretched to his full capacity, he sits with his front paws tucked in front, a doofy look on his face. After some time, when he unfolds himself and shifts back to ground, I startle and let out a small scream.

  This day, the bedroom TV is the bearer of the bad news from Orlando. I hear it through my office door and then come out and turn up the volume. My then-husband has been attempting to fix the broken ceiling fan. This is a task I’ve been asking him to do for weeks, maybe months.

  When I hear the news, when I see the first images from this city I know well, he turns to me and asks what I think Hillary and Trump will have to say. It seems so long ago now—so impossibly long and far since we were back in this time. Trump has been the presumptive Republican nominee for about a month, this day, and with about five months left till the election, many of us still believe a Trump presidency to be impossible.

  I hate crying in front of other people, and even though we’ve been together at this point for more than a decade, my then-husband has almost never seen me cry. But between not sleeping well and now, with the news, I feel spinny, like the world is moving under me or like somehow I’m drunk despite how it’s early morning, despite how I’ve not been drinking.

  When he asks again what political points I think Hillary and Trump will make of this news, I can’t arrange my face. I tell myself, Do not pick a fight with your husband when he says he can’t fix the ceiling fan and begins a conversation about the shooter, about the ramifications for the election, how and what each presidential candidate might say. I work to summon my best self from wherever she is hiding.

  I know myself well enough to know I usually do love conversations about all things geopolitical. I tell myself he can’t be expected to know today is not the day. I still, of course, do expect him to know, but I tell myself anyway.

  Anger is good for pushing me past the impulse to cry, at least for the moment.

  “I can’t talk to you,” I say, “with all that fan shit in your hair—I can’t.” I go back into my office and both shut and lock the door.

  Later, I will work to forgive myself for my tone, for that thing I know my mouth is doing that is not smiling.

  I would have been up for a conversation about nostalgia. I would have been happy to have talked about the Cuban restaurant, Numero Uno, our favorite, which sits four blocks from Pulse. I would have been happy to have talked about the piano player there and how he opened the door for our daughter and bowed to her that time and how she curtsied back, even though neither of us knew she knew how to do that particular maneuver.

  We could have talked about this while we waited for the list of names.

  We could have talked about my students, about Ashley, who is not answering her phone or marking herself safe on Facebook—how she’s just moved back to town, to Orlando, how she has posted so recently about looking forward to going to Pulse.

  We could have talked about Curtis, who meets his spoken word friends at Pulse, or Pedro, who sometimes shows up there in drag or for other people’s drag shows.

  This is a truncated list, but I worry over my longer list while I wait for the TV newspeople to deliver theirs.

  While I wait, I find I have nothing to say to my then-husband, at least nothing nice. Probably the last time he saw me cry was when we drove away from Florida, leaving for yet another job, in yet another place. That last year in Florida, we lived out at Cocoa Beach, and when my daughter and I, on our last day, drive to the strip mall where we return our cable TV equipment, we park the car close to the water, to a public access point. When we return to the car, we go past it, to the water’s edge, and there at the edge are three manatees, their whiskered snouts poking out, their faces set in what appear to be perpetual smiles.

  That night as we drive off, our daughter waves to the neighborhood and cries a little and then falls asleep. In the front, in the passenger seat, I try to cry quietly but I probably don’t manage it.

  This day, as the TV grows too loud but still offers no new information, I take my grimace/smile to the park. My grief is still there from the last time when I’d run around and around, when, halfway through the second lap, I knew I couldn’t stay in this marriage any longer.

  This late afternoon, the grief meets me on the sprint up the hill. No one knows the difference between sweating and crying, anyway, and besides, look, it’s starting to rain. And now I’m laughing at myself a little on the downhill, the kind of laughter that’s close to hysteria, that could turn into practically anything.

  III.

  When their list comes, none of my names are on it, and I am sorry for those, including people I love, who’ve lost dear ones. I watch with the rest of America as family members and doctors rush in and out of hospitals, as family members exit, some of them collapsing in grief against the trunks of palm trees out front or onto the soft and waiting grass, that thick-stemmed Florida grass that is lush and prickly all at the same time.

  I come to realize one of the hospitals where the wounded are being treated, and, yes, where the dead are being collected or counted, also houses a wing that used to include my doctor’s office. I rarely like a doctor. Perhaps this feeling is a byproduct of our treat-and-street healthcare system in this, our America. Perhaps this feeling goes back further, to childhood. Doctors are people to whom you could tell some truths but not others. Doctors, like policemen, could separate a family, could make an already bad situation worse.

  But I like very much my doctor at this clinic in Orlando. He’s young, the second-generation son of Chinese immigrant parents, and his father is refusing to take his thyroid medication. I take the same medication, and he’s asking me how I remember.

  “I just get up every day and take it,” I say.

  “That’s what I tell him,” he says. “He’s too busy, he says to me,” reports the doctor. “He says he forgets.”

  “It’s important, though,” I say.

  “I’ll have him talk to you,” he says. “I’ll put it on the schedule,” and we both laugh.

  Pulse sits on the same block as this hospital, with its doctors’ office wing, where they took some of those who were shot. It is a tall brick building but is not modern, is the seventies style you see in so much of Orlando—outdated and square, not notable—but with palm warblers strutting under the two palm trees out front that flank the sidewalk like sentinels.

  My doctor has black hair that looks as if he’s received a static shock. We talk several times about our fathers, and I imagine his has the same hair as his son.

  On the day he takes my medical history, he asks a question no other doctor has asked before, at what age had I grown to my full height, and I say twenty-two. He pauses and says, “Do you mean twelve?”
and I say, “No, twenty-two. I was just over five feet tall from twelve till twenty-two, and then that year, I grew almost four inches.”

  “Eating disorder?” he says.

  “No,” I say.

  “Sexual abuse?” he says.

  “No,” I say.

  “The other, then,” he says in a clear but soft voice. “Physical abuse.”

  When I do not say no, when I look at the wall instead, he explains to me, quietly and well, that sometimes a body will shut down this way, and once it’s out of the bad situation, the body will remember itself—will literally allow itself to resume growth, but only after it feels itself safe.

  At twenty-two, I’d been out of my parents’ home for almost four years. It took my body four years to be sure it wouldn’t have to go back.

  When I get the news about Orlando, then, I am thinking of my students, their beautiful bodies. I am checking my phone, refreshing my newsfeed, crying as each one marks him- or herself as safe. But I know, of course, they are not. Not really. They are alive, yes—we all are. And I am grateful for this fact. I am. But their world is changed. They are not safe, not exactly.

  I think of my doctor, who is most likely there at the hospital, with the victims’ families, with the living.

  That past day when he records my history, I must have a look on my face—a trying-not-to-cry look. On the way out, he stops me.

  “Are you using your nose spray?” he asks.

  “What?” I say.