December 2, 2019 Detroit Archives Detroit Archives: On Haunting By Aisha Sabatini Sloan In her new monthly column, “Detroit Archives,” Aisha Sabatini Sloan explores her family history through iconic landmarks in Detroit. Inside the Whitney Mansion in Detroit A few weeks ago, I met up with my mom and her friend Judy at a Detroit brunch spot, the garden of the Whitney Mansion. Billed as “an oasis in the heart of Detroit,” the outdoor courtyard is the site of wedding receptions and concerts. A bustling crowd of diners clapped politely as a revolving line-up of indie and jazz singers performed in a corner of the garden, their backs facing Woodward Avenue. Built in 1894 by a lumber baron who was celebrated, I guess, as “the wealthiest man in Detroit,” the ornate mansion has been restored to its original splendor. On this morning, the garden was abloom with smiling people and their garden-themed summer wear. The maître d’ had a podium. Our food arrived overlaid by fancy covers. After we ate, we walked around to the front of the mansion. “I remember the homeless woman who lived there,” Judy said, tracing the lines of the nook that woman had made for herself on the porch. Judy and my mother had worked together at the Whitney Mansion in the late sixties. Gawking mansion-goers drifted in and out of the ornate doors. Upstairs in the bathroom, Judy and my mom pointed out the architecture of their memories, bisecting the bathroom stalls with their pointer fingers to show where the wall of their office used to be. Downstairs, they gestured at the restored fixtures, at the parquet floors, the paintings on the wall. “This is where I pierced your ears,” my mom squealed, pointing to the spot where Judy sat while my mother pushed a needle through her lobes to meet “a potato or an apple” on the other side. The two of them giggled as they moved from room to room. “I wonder if we can go in the solarium,” Judy kept wondering out loud. They stood in the place where a switchboard used to be. Sometimes, Judy would relieve the phone operator, pulling chords and pushing buttons to connect callers. “Don’t you remember that Lily Tomlin sketch?” She said, bringing the old technology back to life through her best Tomlin imitation. “One ringy dingy?” We encountered a tour group gaping at a gigantic safe on the wall. The tour guide gestured vaguely at its mechanics. “I know how it works!” Judy piped up, and the guide ushered her forward to pantomime how the wall-size safe door would have been opened. The tour group seemed intrigued, and Judy and my mom warmed to their audience. They explained that they worked here for the Visiting Nurse Association. “The FBI interviewed me in that room over there,” Judy said, pointing in the direction of the plant-filled, sun-drenched solarium. Read More
December 2, 2019 Re-Covered Re-Covered: The Mischief By Lucy Scholes In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Let’s play “guess the novel”: It was written and first published in French in the mid-50’s, and is set over the course of a single summer. Its heroine is one of the jeunesse dorée, dissatisfied and bored despite her wealth and privilege. She drives a fast sports car, and idles away her days sunbathing on Mediterranean beaches and flirting with her boyfriend. She’s a capricious enfant terrible, and she’s stricken with jealousy at the happiness of a couple close to her, so she amuses herself by sabotaging their relationship, with unexpectedly tragic consequences. Surprisingly, I’m not talking about Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, but a lesser-known work by the Algerian writer Assia Djebar. La Soif was first published in France in 1957 (three years after Bonjour Tristesse) and nimbly translated into English by Frances Frenaye, as The Mischief, the following year. There are plenty of parallels between the two novels. Both were debuts written by precociously young women writers—Sagan was eighteen and Djebar twenty-one—a description that also applied to their heroines: Sagan’s seventeen-year-old Cécile and Djebar’s twenty-year-old Nadia. However, while Bonjour Tristesse remains famous, recognized today as a mid-twentieth-century literary sensation-turned-French-classic, The Mischief is barely remembered, out of print in both the original French and the English translation. Read More
November 29, 2019 The Last Year Ghosts By Jill Talbot Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year, traces the moments before her daughter leaves for college. It has run every Friday this month, and will return for a month each in the winter, spring, and summer. The next installment will arrive the first Friday of January. My mother bought the kitchen table in 1969. It’s dark maple, four chairs, their backs a row of five slats. The etchings of my math homework mark the wood, but the busiest scratches cover the space between my parents’ seats, like the ghosts of all they passed across the table and what they must have said. My mother always sat across from me, my father to my left, and eventually my daughter, Indie, sat across from my father. When he died suddenly in 2017, my mother sat in her chair at the table calling friends, one by one, to tell them he was gone. I don’t remember eating at the table after that. On the morning after my mother’s funeral a little over a year later, I sat in my chair at the table writing checks, paying her bills, signing her name. In January, Indie and I left my parents’ house for the last time. A house built when I was nine, in 1979. I remember walking through it when it was only a concrete slab and a fireplace. That afternoon, as I moved to stand in the door of each room, I kept saying thank you as if my parents were there, as if they could hear me. All the furniture and the décor was still intact, the way I wanted to remember the house. Indie and I packed up my childhood bedroom suite, my father’s chair, his cherrywood stereo console, boxes of my mother’s belongings, her two white suitcases (a high school graduation present from 1963), and the kitchen table. Left the rest for the estate sale. When I closed the back door for the last time, I was forty-nine. Indie considered it her childhood home, too, the only one that had been consistent throughout her life. She was sixteen. Yesterday, for the first time since we had moved the kitchen table into our apartment, she and I sat down to eat at it. It had taken us ten months. Indie stood with a hand on the back of her chair and asked, “How do the seats work here?” I set down the placemats: “We sit where we always sat.” In 2007, when we moved to Stillwater, Oklahoma, Indie was five. Back then, her bright blonde bob was always tousled. She had her own room in the duplex I rented, but she never slept in it. For four years, she slept close to me on the futon a friend had given us on his way out of town. The day I signed the lease on the hood of the manager’s truck, she looked over at the front door and muttered something about the past tenants, a brick through the front window. Later, Indie picked up half a brick in the yard, and for as long as we lived there, we’d find the glass, piece after piece. Read More
November 25, 2019 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Mary Heaton Vorse By Joanna Scutts Our column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Originally begun by Emma Garman, it will now be written by Joanna Scutts. Mary Heaton Vorse. Mary Heaton Vorse, prolific novelist, journalist, and labor activist, spent most of her long life trying to escape her upper-middle-class origins. The heroine of her 1918 novel I’ve Come To Stay calls the inescapability of a bourgeois upbringing life’s “blue serge lining”—a reference to the practical fabric that protected the inside of coats and suits, forming a barrier between the self and the world. The lining stands for the inevitable conformity of class, getting, if not quite under the wearer’s skin, then next to it, holding her upright, constraining her imagination and her freedom. Camilla is constantly on the run from it. She embraces the pretensions of bohemian Greenwich Village—anarchist friends, artistic aspirations, a Polish violinist lover, and nights spent in smoky bars. She repeatedly rejects her neighbor and suitor, the equally middle-class Ambrose Ingraham, out of fear that he will wrap her up in blue serge once again, and strangle her with it. Subtitled A Love Comedy of Bohemia, the novel is more of an archaeological find than a timeless classic. Yet its ironic depiction of young people caught between ambition and gender-based expectation dramatizes the central conflict of its author’s life, and that of her generation of American “New Women.” Mary Heaton was born rich and rebellious in 1874, and spent most of her childhood in Amherst, Massachusetts, a place that was, by contrast, rural and religious. She was close to her bookish father and idolized her distant mother, Ellen, who paid more attention to her five older children from her first marriage. Mary watched her intelligent, energetic mother struggle to fill her days with meaningful activity. Other women of her era and class threw themselves into social reform and the fight for women’s suffrage, but Ellen believed too many people already had the vote, and that a woman’s place was in the home. This did not preclude plenty of European travel and culture to burnish her daughters’ marriage prospects, and Mary had a rich, if haphazard education, bolstered by voracious private reading. Although she belonged to a generation of women who were breaking down the doors to academia and the professions, she had no interest in submitting to the rules of a women’s college. She longed for a greater freedom, and begged to go to Paris to study art. Read More
November 22, 2019 The Last Year A Corner Booth By Jill Talbot Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year, traces the moments before her daughter leaves for college. It will run every Friday this month, and then return for a month each in the winter, spring, and summer. I’m sliding into the corner booth when Steve sets down a water with two limes, the napkin already damp. About once a week, I drive two towns over—twenty minutes along the backroads beyond I-35—to write here. I call it my Writing Restaurant, and the only person who knows it’s this restaurant is my daughter, Indie. I text her before I take off, let her know where I’m headed. I’ll stay here for most of the day. A year ago, Indie got her first job here as a host, so I stopped coming to let her have this space for herself, but now she works at another restaurant a few miles from where we live. I’m glad to have my booth back. I like the drive, the disappearing, the secret. No one knows that while I’m sitting in this booth, I’m pulling into a gravel drive in Colorado or stepping off a bus on Michigan Avenue or playing Uno with Indie in a restaurant miles and states and years from here. When Indie was about three, she woke in the middle of the night unable to sleep. I turned on the kitchen light, and she and I sat on the floor eating cherry sours and talking until we were sleepy enough to wander back to our beds. It felt like a secret world. That night, I realized that as a single parent, I could let Indie eat cherry sours in the middle of the night if I wanted to. I was the only one around to say yes or no or—as she’s gotten older and the questions have become more difficult—Let me think about it. That night, the joy of those cherry sours: simple. Read More
November 21, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Sex with a Famous Poet By Sarah Kay In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This month, Sarah Kay is on the line. Dear Poets, My romantic life has been a series of almosts. Something always intervenes—poor timing, too many miles, someone else—to prevent the early intimacy from flowering into something more. I am deeply thankful for each and every one, but I’m so tired of almost. How do I stay patient as I wait for a love that finally, forcefully blooms? Sincerely, The Not-Quite-Ex Read More