by Toni Jensen
We got a little bored, she reports, and I have never been more grateful for how easily thirteen-year-olds shift into boredom. But, again, this is not about me or my daughter or her easily bored friends.
This is about Stephen Carr, about an assault on a police officer, and perhaps also about the man who shot and killed Carr.
I report these details like they matter, much in the way some proponents of contagion theory report more mass shootings seem to happen after a mass shooting. We are, all of us, trying to contribute to the narrative, trying to make the narrative matter.
What’s true is that I did not start this life, this year, or even this essay thinking I would become one of those people who finds the answer to this violence is simpler than we are trying to make it. But it is. People who kill other people with guns have to have access to the guns. The more access, the more violence. We have in our country almost entirely unfettered access.
We can study and report and study some more, but increasingly, I think studies and reports and even narratives should be the province of civilized nations that might respond to the studies, the reports, the narratives with subsequent, substantive action. We are no longer a civilized nation if ever we were.
The day after the shooting, my ex-husband texts about returning my daughter and her things later this afternoon. She’s going to spend time around the corner from my house at a friend’s first, and we arrange logistics, and so soon he’ll drive north on Highway 71 or the interstate beside it. He’ll head west on MLK Jr. Boulevard, that Trail of Tears.
I don’t know of any greater reminder that our country is in crisis than how when the information started rolling in about the shooting, I was sorry that lives were lost but grateful the shooter didn’t take his guns to the square, to the lighting ceremony, to the celebration. I was sad and a little afraid and I also was unsurprised.
* * *
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When the news began to report the new coronavirus in China, South Korea, Italy, and then in America, I was sorry for all of us. I was also sad and a little afraid and unsurprised that this other contagion is bringing out the worst in many of us—the xenophobic, the racist.
This March morning, my mother’s birthday, she and my daughter both report to me the news of a man in Midland, Texas, who attacked an Asian American family with a knife. He blamed them for the coronavirus and responded while shopping at a Sam’s Club with the least sensical sort of violence—by lunging close to a family he seemed to believe carried contagion, by stabbing the adults and the children, ages two and six years old.
“What is wrong with people?” my daughter asks, and I have no answer.
I tell my mother I’m glad the man didn’t have a gun.
That sits for a while, our conversation settling, until she remembers to tell me about the celebration. At five P.M. her friends in town and across the country all are going to raise a glass to her, and she’s telling me to feel free to join in. I ask about the various technologies—Zoom, Skype, FaceTime—and she says not everyone has the technology or knows how to use it. She’s been on the phone already most of the day, talking to friends and texting them, reading her cards and opening a few presents, celebrating.
I have so few answers for my daughter’s question—What’s wrong with people?
This is America now and arguably always has been. The contagion has been here from the beginning, and it’s growing and we seem unwilling to stop it.
What’s right with people, though, of course, sits alongside what’s wrong. What’s right is found in the simple ways we work despite contagion toward connection. It can be found today in my mother’s opening of cards, in all of us at five P.M. raising a glass in small but vital celebration.
Ghost Logic
I.
In recent days, my father worries over the people he spots on his property. They’re in the driveway, by the barn, crouched low beneath the second-story deck too close to the petunias. He likes to sit out on the deck to watch birds—the cardinals and blue jays who fight over birdseed, the nuthatches and titmice, who peck and sing, respectively.
Sometimes the people down by the barn do things, too, he says, like take the long curve of the gravel drive, making their way toward the barn. The barn houses the dogs, barkers both. My father reports there is no barking. My father reports his perplexity over the dogs’ failure to bark.
“Sons a bitches must be getting old,” he says.
“Yes,” I say. “The sons a bitches.”
I long have patterned like this when talking with my father. I agree, repeat a phrase; agree again, repeat a phrase—this back-and-forth forming a regular rhythm. In earlier days, the patterning helped to avoid conflict. I could listen to twenty minutes about the glories of the NRA and say, “Yes, the NRA really is something.” Or “The NRA is not dull.”
In the last few years, now that he has Lewy body dementia, his mind so often rests in the past. I can listen to him talk about the intricacies of the pearl inlay on his favorite pistol, how it was handcrafted in 1894. How it is a work of art. I can agree, “They really don’t make things like they used to.” I can pattern my way past sense or meaning but toward love, perhaps, toward a sort of listening that approximates love or mimics it, to a moment or thing that smells like one of those old Xerox sheets—fresh and stale, chemicals and crisp air, shiny and tainted in the way of everyday things that no longer exist in our everyday.
My father reports that sometimes the people crouch next to the bushes he planted underneath the carport’s overhang. His house sits atop a lovely hill and is built into its side. The acreage is ringed with CRP land, Conservation Reserve Program land, which means the government pays landowners not to over-farm small parts of their land. My father’s CRP land features tall, waving grass like the original prairies.
He doesn’t know them, these people, who hide down by the barn with the CRP grass waving and waving in between. He doesn’t understand why they’re there, why they’re not coming up to the house to ask him a question. He reports the people to my stepmother who reports these details to my brother who reports it to me.
“He’s seeing things,” my brother says.
“He’s seeing people,” I say. But what I think is, He’s seeing ghosts.
II.
When I’m seventeen, for a time I live at my boyfriend’s house with him, his parents, and their ghost. My boyfriend and his parents are kind, gentle people. My own house sometimes features our town’s one police car parked out front, the lumbering body of our one policeman lingering, embarrassed, on our back porch.
My boyfriend’s family gathers for dinner and television, and mine gathers for court testimonies and witness statements. We have a ghost, too, of the basement-pipe-rattling, attic-walking variety. Not notable. An ordinary ghost with a paucity of ghost game.
At my boyfriend’s house, without human assistance, magazine pages flip and fan on the coffee table before settling themselves. The living room curtains are made of thick polyester that looks like velvet but is not, no matter how many times I touch their edges, expecting them to have grown soft. At night while we occupy our recliners and sofa corners, the ghost sets the curtain bottoms to sway. There’s no heat register, no open window. Only the ghost with the accelerated ghost game, the winning game, the game I grow to anticipate.
I should say here, perhaps, for the skeptical, that I have not been raised to fear ghosts or to think them notable or to think about them, really, in any depth. They are as regular and unpredictable as the living. It’s better for them if they move along, but if not, then they live with us. We’re to be considerate of them just like we’re to use coasters when setting down a glass on certain pieces of furniture. I had always thought of ghosts as everyday. My grandmother each day placed a clean, dry dishcloth over drying dishes to keep the ghosts from rattling them.
My parents are regular rural American parents in most other respects. We’re a regular American family. My father has two or three or maybe four guns in the house. My parents don’t get along, and when they fight, they turn their fists on each other or at least their open hands. My father is bigger. My father always wins, at least until the estrangement, until the inevitable, long-overdue divorce. I suppose there are other ways their marriage could have ended. But in any of those other ways, probably not all of us get to live.
Webster’s defines this word, estrange, first as “to arouse especially mutual enmity or indifference in (someone) where there had formerly been love, affection, or friendliness.” Eventually, in the case of my parents, the secondary definition will come to apply equally: “to remove from customary environment or associations.” First my mother will ask my father to leave. She will change the locks.
After, my father will break into the house through the kitchen window, will evict my mother and a friend by force. There will be little to no remaining friendliness for the sake of the children; there will be no indifference, only removal and court testimonies and more and more enmity.
My friends, in the before, when they slept over at my house, which was built in the early 1900s, all were afraid. They thought the bumps and creaks of my childhood home were ghosts. I never saw a ghost in that house, at least not of the spectral kind, but there were unexplained noises, especially from the basement.
Their fear in those moments amuses me until I see in their faces, for a few of them, it is not the sort of screamy sleepover faux fear but is genuine. At their houses, I think, they must not have real things to fear, like fathers. At my house, ghosts are not extraordinary, and neither is violence.
My grandmother saw ghosts, as did her grandmother before her, as have I, as does my daughter. I named my daughter after this great-grandmother, who in the 1900s divorced the man she married, more than once. She moved her family back and forth to and from Canada, several times.
I don’t know a better way to explain home and later homecoming than this.
III.
At my boyfriend’s house, I sleep with him in his bed, and other than the living room, his bedroom is the house’s only ghost space. If I stay the night on a Tuesday, I wake Wednesday morning at first light with a pressure on my chest, a weight, a heaviness, an inability to lift my arms, to rise from the bed, to speak. The sensation surprises and startles. I feel, not fear exactly, but instead, curiosity and perhaps something close to wonder.
The ghost at my boyfriend’s is a jealous ghost, I think, and jealousy, of course, is a sort of violence. This is, however, the first sort of violence I’ve experienced from a ghost. But ghosts, after all, are everyday, and already, at seventeen, I know violence to be everyday, to be regular.
Once my parents began what would become the long, ugly divorce process, for a time I lived in my childhood home with my father, who had physically removed my mother from the house by throwing her down the back stairs.
One night, a few months into living with my father, I come home from my waitressing job, and the locks have been changed, and I no longer possess the correct key. I come home in my short-sleeved waitress dress, smelling of grease, and I know at first only that the door is locked.
It’s dark, fall. I’m not wearing my jacket, and goose bumps rise on my arms in the night chill. I’ve worked the late shift, so it’s after eleven P.M. My father’s truck is not in the backyard. I want out of the smell of this dress so badly I have the urge to strip and leave it here on this back porch, under the stars. Upon my father’s eventual return, the dress would greet him, would, perhaps, provide a thing about which he would have to think.
It’s cool that night, and I stand on the back porch, my arms prickling in the night air. It’s late, but my father clearly is out. No amount of knocking brings him to the door. This happens in the pre-cellphone era, so I get back into my car, where I am trapped with my uniform’s grease smell.
Sometimes because of cheerleading practice or shooting hoops at the grade school or going out drinking, I have an extra set of clothes in my car. This is not one of those times. I drive the twenty minutes to my boyfriend’s with the windows rolled down.
He lives with his parents, who are some of the most loving, most decent people I have encountered or will ever. He lives also with his manic depression, his borderline schizophrenic tendencies, the rise and fall when he decides to forgo his medications.
It is not the first time I’ve stayed here with the boyfriend and the family and the ghost. But usually I arrive with him, not on my own. It’s not usually this late. Usually, I have my things.
That night I am welcomed and made comfortable. His father is still up, and I say, “Ugh, this dress smells,” and he smiles and says, “You’re fine,” and he says it like he means it.
I put my contact lenses into water in juice glasses that once were jelly jars, the kind with the intricate patterns carved into the glass on their sides. My boyfriend gives me two different glasses with two different patterns so I can know by feel which one is the right contact and which one the left. This is what I mean by decency. This is what I mean by care. This is what I know of love.
Once my contacts are out, everything is tactile. I’m so myopic that even though I know this house, I feel along the banister, along the walls from the bathroom to his bedroom.
We fall into sleep, our limbs tied together, and no one thinks to call to check that I’m there, so we are not interrupted by the phone. We sleep the sleep of people who are loved and safe.
I awake in the early morning hours, with the feeling like there’s a weight on top of me, and my arms are not cold like the night before but also are not mobile.
I wait. Once my arms begin to loosen, to be again regular arms, I shake awake my boyfriend.
“Oh, yeah,” he says. “She’s like that.”
“Like what?” I say.
“Jealous.”
The whole thing is made more strange by how I can’t see, not really. Still, the ghost has left me once my boyfriend awakens. Still, I remember which jelly jar is for left and which one for right. Downstairs, his parents are up, and we all eat breakfast together, and everyone at the table is quiet and regular, laughing together and reading the paper, making jokes that are not at anyone’s expense.
I think this is how people are supposed to act at the breakfast table, and I start to plan for a life where all days will start like this.
IV.
Before the jealous ghost, there was a jealous ex-girlfriend who worked as a lifeguard at the local swimming pool. After my boyfriend and I first met, after we fell for each other fast and hard, one afternoon he delivered to me his complex diagnoses. We sat in his pickup truck, which shuddered and rumbled, the vents hissing out what passed for cold air.
I’d been to the swimming pool, my hair still damp, still holding in the smell of the chlorine. This man had painted the outside of his truck in pink-and-black zebra stripes. He wrote songs and played electric guitar. We were in the years when heavy metal and hair ballads reigned, and locally, he was, if not king, then minor king or demigod.
The interior of the truck held equal parts comfort and disappointment in its regularity. Its bench seat was not, for example, zebra- or otherwise striped. With his arm around me, my boyfriend said the phrases manic depressive and borderline schizophrenic.
My hair stuck to the back of my neck and tops of my shoulders, pool-damp. The pool today also included his former girlfriend. All afternoon, every touch of my toes into the water was accompanied by her whistle, blown in a staccato rhythm to a tune maybe only she could hear.
I swam lap after lap to the accompaniment of this music. Stroke, bleat, stroke, bleat, like we were making our own sort of song, until a laughing friend took away her whistle and steered her considerable shoulders toward the concrete building
where the lifeguards took their breaks.
She was Amazonian, this ex-girlfriend, and I was small. I was glad all she did was blow a whistle. It was just hot air to go along with the hot air of the day, the sky the cornflower blue of Midwestern summers, the air retaining every ounce of humidity.
I was in charge of watching my younger brother, who the previous year I almost let drown at a lake that held no ex-girlfriend Amazonian lifeguard.
To be clear, I meant no disrespect when I noted her broad shoulders and long, strong legs. She was entirely beautiful, with those legs and spectacular breasts. Somehow I’d grown up thinking of women’s bodies as their own, each individual, none a reflection on mine, and mine not a reflection on anyone else’s. I didn’t envy her those breasts. I didn’t covet the legs. She was equal parts voluptuous and strong, but I didn’t feel superior or inferior in my smallness.
It’s a violence when women make those sorts of moves against each other. Or at least it’s the start of violence. I felt then and now lucky to have grown up mostly without that sort of mindset. It’s one of the ghosts many women have holding them down.
“What?” my boyfriend said. “Do you have like a book in there?”
He had his arm around my waist, his hand near my front jeans pocket.
