June 28, 2018 First Person What Comes After Idealism? By Heather Abel “Class of ’36, I guess we did something wrong.” This is what my grandmother wrote to her Barnard College classmates fifty years after they had all graduated. My grandmother was charismatic and uncompromising, equally critical of capitalism and sentimentality. In her life as a Westchester housewife and radical leftist, she’d planned protests, played tennis, and published mystery novels. When her children were grown, she moved to Manhattan, waking every morning at five to walk briskly around Central Park (she was mugged only a few times). She spent the rest of the day writing and tending the ivy she’d planted to beautify the trees along her block. Every Saturday, she organized against U.S. atrocities in Central America. Days before she died in 1992, while attached to an IV, a blood transfusion, and oxygen, she dictated the final paragraph of her eighteenth book to my mother. The book was, she explained, the first in a new series she planned to write. At her memorial a week later, held in a classroom at Barnard College, her five children yelled and laughed and interrupted one another. She’d taught them to rebel against society’s mawkish ceremonies, like memorial services, as well as its unjust institutions. Her children all inherited her radical politics, and they raised us, her twelve grandchildren, in the same mode. You can be anything, they joked, as long as it’s a public defender. Interpreting this broadly, we complied. Read More
June 27, 2018 First Person On Writing Letters to Famous Strangers By A. M. Homes John Templeton Lucas, The Letter Writer, 1877. As a teenager, I wrote letters to strangers. I was trying to write my way out of my parent’s house, where I was psychically trapped. Like an alien seeking contact, I started by doing research. I went to the Bethesda Library, where they had phone books from all over the country. I remember being surprised by the number of well-known names one could find in a New York phone book in the 1976–1978 time period: Art Garfunkel, Mikhail Baryshnikov—those are just two I recall, but I know there were dozens. My inability to leave home, my separation anxiety, was all-encompassing. It wasn’t just about leaving my mother, though that would have been enough. It was about house and home—family—in the largest most literal sense. If I left the house, something might happen. It might not be there when I got back. This soul-crushing sense of impending doom was crippling. It started in nursery school, when my mother would drop me off at the little house at the top of the hill. They’d have to hold me back while my mother drove away, never looking in her rearview mirror at her sobbing child. I didn’t write to strangers because they were famous. I didn’t want an autographed eight-by-ten. I wanted to tell them about my life, my day at school. I wanted to drive a wedge between my childhood and the larger world that I hoped I might join one day. I wanted a way out. Read More
June 11, 2018 First Person Toothless: On the Dentist, Powerlessness, and Pnin By Adrienne Celt Otto Dix, Mädchen vor dem Spiegel, 1921. Sometimes I wonder what I’d look like without any teeth left in my head. Lips turned inward on themselves, gums a shocking pink. My throat a cavern that empties forever downward, and my body hollow, without purpose or power. Mine would not be strong gums, like a baby has, with nascent teeth budding just below the surface. Mine would be a mouth of death, as soft and pliant as dirt tossed loosely on a grave. Clearly, I have some feelings about my teeth. When I was a teenager, my parents divorced and stopped making dentist appointments for me—I’m not sure whether this was a miscommunication between them or if, as I distantly recall, they both decided I ought to take on the responsibility myself once I reached fourteen, even though I couldn’t yet drive and was afraid of making phone calls to strangers. Either way, I didn’t go, and my teeth have been a mess ever since. Read More
June 4, 2018 First Person A Taxonomy of Wind By Ben Shattuck Jean-François Millet, The Gust of Wind, 1871. Alone and asleep last December, I woke to two men standing in the doorway of my bedroom. I saw their guns held by their thighs. A flashlight blinded me. “Everything all right in here?” one said, stepping into the room. I held out my palm to block the light. “Police,” he said. “There was an alarm going off.” I knew there wasn’t an alarm going off because it had been deactivated months earlier. I thought, This is not the police. This is a home invasion. When I turned on the bedside lamp and saw their uniforms, I thought, Those are fake uniforms. He told me to get out of bed. I stood between them in my boxers and T-shirt. “Why are there no clothes in here?” the other man said, pointing to the open drawers across the room. “What, you just move in?” They holstered their guns. “Yes,” I said. I’d just returned home to Massachusetts after half a year away. Rain crackled on the roof and lashed the windows. The day had been warm because of a southerly storm shoving up against the underarm of Cape Cod. Out the window I saw a third man standing on the patio, perhaps guarding the exits. “Come with us,” one of the men said. The house is down a long driveway on a fishhook peninsula. On one side is the ocean; on the other is a river that shares my middle name. The house is a loft my great-grandfather built for my great-grandmother. Hardwood floors. High ceilings. Wooden chandeliers hanging from wooden beams and permanently covered in a frost of dust. There’s a cluttered centuries-worth of old books, shells, and antique souvenirs and no insulation. When I walked into the main room, I saw that the overhead lights and lamps were on. The men had been there for some time. I’ve lived in the house since before I walked, and could lead a tour blindfolded. It’s not easy to find the bedroom. You go into the house, take a U-turn to a back hallway, pivot to another hall, and go through a door. You’d have to spend some time looking around for it. Read More
May 11, 2018 First Person All I Want for Mother’s Day Is a Goddamn Drink By Lauren Elkin A tipsy Klimt This Mother’s Day, I’d like to raise a mocktail to all the mothers-to-be, to all of us united in suffering the joys and the indignities of pregnancy, stone-cold sober. As my own mother tells it, she knew she was pregnant with me, her firstborn, when she got disproportionately sick from one gin and tonic. When I, in turn, pushed away a glass of Côte de Beaune at the dinner table, I knew something was up. Now, twenty-one weeks in, I wish I could go back to that night, back when it still didn’t count, and finish my glass of chardonnay. What was I thinking? I just wasn’t thinking. Read More
April 25, 2018 First Person Becoming Spring Brucesteen: My Quest to Meet the Boss By Toniann Fernandez This is a story about getting in the getaway car, driving fast toward your dreams, and then turning the car around. In this case, the getaway car was New Jersey Transit. One day, I was eating a can of chickpeas and drinking Aperol in my living room, and the next, I was on a train from Penn Station to Asbury Park, New Jersey. It was January, and we were in the midst of the bomb cyclone. I had received a hot tip from a loyal informant in the form of a text message: “This is tomorrow at The Stone Pony,” she said. Attached was a flyer for the Big Man’s Bash, a concert in honor of the life and work of “Big Man” Clarence Clemons, the musician and former saxophone player in the E Street Band. She went on, “A friend of mine (and more importantly, a friend of the Boss) says she would bet $$ that Bruce Springsteen will be there if he is in New Jersey.” I wondered how much money this friend was willing to bet and decided I would wager the seventeen-dollar train ticket. The NJ Transit North Jersey Coast Line train is one I have taken many times. I grew up in Manasquan, New Jersey, a beach town, alternately known as “Bruce nation.” Asbury Park, of Springsteen’s famed Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., is just a short bike ride down the boardwalk, and during the summer months, virtually every bar hosts a Bruce Springsteen cover band performance every night. This sojourn, however, was the first NJ Transit ride I took in search of the Boss. My fandom was recent. The sound of “Born in the U.S.A.” used to conjure images of the muscular white boys of my high school years, drunk with testosterone and Natural Ice, clad in denim and American flags. They screamed along with E Street imitators in bars we were all too young to patronize. I had always found the Springsteen omnipresence in coastal New Jersey offensive. Read More