Dear Building Residents,

I grew up underneath you. Some of you made a show of knowing my name, would call to me and wave if you passed me in the lobby. Some of you didn’t even know your building superintendent had a daughter. My father, when he was still your super, used the computer in our basement apartment to write you letters a little bit like this one—notices telling you to please be advised about upcoming hot-water outages and elevator-maintenance work, which always ended with an apology for any inconvenience and a note of thanks for your patience and cooperation. He would often tell me there were lots of worse jobs out there. But last year, when he announced at sixty-six that he was leaving the job, one of you, surprised, asked him why. You thought he’d stuck around the building for over thirty years because he loved being a residential super, or working for you, or the Upper West Side location. 

Please be advised: he was mostly there because he wanted health insurance.

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Photo: Klaus Franke. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1989-0731-318 / CC-BY-SA 3.0 / CC BY-SA 3.0 DE (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en).

There is nothing better for a child than to grow up at the ends of the earth. There’s not much traffic there, so the asphalt is free for roller-skating, and parents don’t have to worry about any bad guys roaming around. What business would a bad guy have on a dead-end street?

The apartment that we’re living in when I’m first old enough to go down to the street on my own is on the third floor of an elegant old building with elegantly crumbling plaster, bay windows, enormous double doors for an entrance, and a wooden staircase, the monstrous head at the end of the banister has been worn to a shine by countless hands. Flora Strasse 2A, Flora Strasse 2A, Flora Strasse 2A. The first words I learn after mama and papa are this street name and this house number. That way if I ever get lost I can always say where I belong. Flora Strasse 2A. Squatting in the stairwell of that building, I learn how to tie my shoes. Just around the corner, on Wollank Strasse, is the bakery where I’m allowed to go shopping by myself for the first time in my life, at age four or five, when my parents send me down with a shopping bag and the magic coins that they’ve counted out to buy rolls for breakfast. The bakery has hand-carved wooden shelves and a cash register where the cashier turns a crank before she puts the money in. A bell chimes when the drawer is opened. Wollank Strasse comes to an abrupt end a few hundred meters farther down, at a wall. That’s the end of the line for bus number 50. My parents don’t have to worry about any bad guys roaming around, what business would a bad guy have on a dead-end street? In those days, they send me down to the courtyard to play by myself in the sand, a large fir tree casts its shadow on the sandbox, and when dinner is ready my mother calls down to me from the window. There’s a dance school on the second floor of our building, from the courtyard you can hear the tinkling of the piano and the voice of the teacher instructing her students in the steps. Read More

Photo: Kerri Arsenault.

My father always stooped to pick up pennies he found on the side of the road. If he found one heads up, he considered it good luck and would tuck it in his hand. Tails up, he would leave the penny alone. To him, superstition was superior to religion; he thought he could control the output with steady input. If he stood in the batter’s box a certain way, he’d deliver a base hit. If he worked hard, his impoverished past would disappear. If he rolled the Eisenhower silver dollar he carried in his front pocket, as he did for decades, some unforeseen jinx would never occur. In the end, Eisenhower’s slim hairline and bald head wore down, leaving only a wish of an outline, adumbrated by my father’s own hand.

He held such talismans close. The square nail he took from a fence in Colonial Williamsburg became a story he could tell. His P-38, a small metal multitool that used to be part of U.S. Army rations kits, became a tactile vestige of his youth. Stones he plucked from lands he’d never see again became references to who or where he’d like to be. He even gave me a charm of my own: my first year at Beloit College in Wisconsin, he picked a metal nameplate off a paper machine with BELOIT pressed into the design and sent it in the mail. They make our paper machines in Beloit, he wrote, to remind me of the small Maine paper-mill town where I was from. I wish I knew what happened to that nameplate and its emotional residue once held close by my father’s hand.

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The next time I’m home, my mother gives me a small veneered box topped with a silver metal figure frozen in a bowling stance that looks a little like my father as a younger man. It was the prize he won in 1970 for earning the highest bowling average. Inside, his expired licenses and membership cards, a wooden nickel, a tiny gold heart-shaped earring he must have found on the side of the road, and his father’s matching black onyx gold-plated bracelet, tie clip, and signet ring. Read More

Ewald Rübsamen, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, 1910. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Way down deep, in the perpetual electric night of the water column—a place where sunlight doesn’t register time or silver filament—the vampire squid glides in search of a meal of marine snow. These lifeless bits of sea dander are actually the decomposing particles of animals who died hundreds of feet above the midnight zone. The vampire squid reaches for this snow with two long ribbons of skin, which are separate from its eight tentacles. If it is truly hungry, it trains its large eye on a glow, the lure of something larger—a gulper eel, perhaps, or an anglerfish waddling through the inky water. The squid’s eye is about the size of a shooter marble, but this is nevertheless the largest eye-to-body ratio of any animal on the planet.

If the squid feels threatened or wants to disappear, perhaps no other creature in the ocean knows how to convey that with a more dazzling yet effective show. When the vampire squid pulse-swims away, each of its arm tips glow and wave in different directions, confusing for any predator. To make an even more speedy getaway, the squid uses jet propulsion by flapping its fins down toward its mantle and simultaneously blasting a stream of water from its siphon—all of its arms in one direction. In the next stroke, the squid raises all of its arms over its head in what is called a “pineapple posture.” The underside of these arms is lined with tiny toothlike structures called “cirri,” giving an appearance of fangs ready to bite down on anything that wants to chase it down for a snack.

As if that wasn’t enough to shoo away a predator, the vampire squid discharges a luminescent cloud of mucus instead of ink. The congealed swirl and curlicue of light temporarily baffles the predator, who ends up not knowing where or what to chomp—while the vampire squid whooshes away, meters ahead. It’s as if you were chasing someone and they stopped, turned, and tossed a bucketful of large, gooey green sequins at your face. Read More

Lion of Venice, Photo: Didier Descouens. CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0).

In maps of the brain, the central cortex is shaped like Venice. The amygdale, the locus of emotion and fear, is the quarter of the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo; the hippocampus, the site of long- and short-term memory, is the entry into Venice via the Grand Canal; the cerebellum, which regulates balance, the lagoon bordered by the Lido; the hypothalamus, which controls circadian rhythms, the Piazza San Marco. The first summer I came to Venice, I was nineteen. I was with a boy I thought I might marry, and we sat on the steps of the baroque basilica of Santa Maria della Salute, which is a short walk from where I am writing now, at the Pensione Accademia, in the quieter environs of Dorsoduro. We ate sandwiches made of pressed veal, and drank cans of aranciata. It was too expensive to stay in Venice; we took the train from Padua, where we had gone to see the Giottos in the Scrovegni Chapel, and stayed in a gimcrack boardinghouse where the walls were paperboard painted to look like wood. The ceiling of the chapel was flecked with gold stars. Now, in Padua, you walk into an air-controlled chamber and have fifteen minutes to look at the frescoes. Then, you stayed as long as you liked. We sat in the pews and read letters that Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote from Italy. It was hot and I argued with the boy—I did not want to hear any more about Savonarola, with whom he had become obsessed. He had written a senior thesis on Jonathan Edwards, about whom I had previously listened. To annoy me, because I would not listen, he was rude to an old friend of mine who had come up for the day from Florence, where she was studying, to meet us.

It has been years since I spoke to either of them. Perhaps it is better for me to come to Venice alone; there is no one with whom I have been to Venice that I am now on speaking terms, as if one caprice of the city is to induce fever dreams from which there is no return. On June 4, 1851, Mrs. Browning wrote to a Miss Mitford:

I have been between heaven and earth since our arrival at Venice. The heaven of it is ineffable. Never had I touched the skirts of so ineffable a place. The beauty of the architecture, the silver trails of water … nothing is like it, not a second Venice in the world … But now comes the earth side: Robert, after sharing the ecstasy, grows uncomfortable and nervous, unable to sleep or eat, and poor Wilson, still worse, in a miserable condition of sickness and headaches.

On the earth side, from the man whose face was like a portrait by Bronzino: “Would like to report something amusing yet I have really overstretched myself and am paying for it … Today high blood pressure, splitting headache, not enough sleep, and all the usual tension.” Perhaps my own instinct for complication, for the rococo, for situations that cannot possibly resolve themselves, can be traced to an inability to keep track of a thought a sensible person would heed—a grain of millet blown over San Marco, which, left to fall into the canal, swells and bursts? Read More

© Hamdan / Adobe Stock.

The eighty-four days I spent in a relationship with my rapist were days filled with music. We met in a nightclub, Schoolboy Q pulsing around us as he held my waist and I yelled my name into his ear. After our first date, I let an awards show replay in the background as I squealed into the phone with a friend. Earlier that evening, he kissed me deeply as he dropped me off at my car. “I shouldn’t let you leave,” he whispered before parting my lips with his tongue. I recounted these details as Beyoncé belted “Drunk in Love” in a performance taped only a few weeks after her self-titled album’s release, when the world was abuzz with her fuller, post-baby body, her unapologetically sex-positive lyrics. My rapist made me feel the way Beyoncé looked on that stage, her heavy thighs peeking through glittery fishnets as she reclined backward on a chair with the microphone so close to her lips, she could have licked it.

One night, my rapist asked if I’d heard of Gregory Porter. “There’s a song of his that reminds me of you,” he said, and that was the first time I heard “Be Good (Lion’s Song).” It’s about a couple, except the man is a lion, and the woman has trapped him in a cage because he can’t be trusted to roam freely. In the first verse, when they meet, the lion is brushing his mane; by the second, he has trimmed his claws and cut his hair, and the woman has already told him that lions are meant to be caged; if they’re left to walk around, “they might just bite.” The woman’s name is Be Good, a phrase she also repeats to him, though it is he who sings that refrain to us. He is both her amanuensis and her accuser. “Does she know what she does / when she dances around my cage?” he asks again and again, each time more plaintive than the last.

My rapist compared me to Be Good because the tenor of our relationship had changed. I had become a difficult woman where I had been so simple before, wanting only his body—nothing more. We had a lot of sex, and my rapist had few inhibitions and even less predictability. In one moment, he could be gentle, almost tearful. In another, rough, commanding, and I liked it. I’d spent much of my life doing the things I believed people expected me to do. Sometimes, I was successful in pleasing them. Other times, I failed miserably, and I thought of those failures constantly. It was nice to let someone else be responsible for making decisions. Read More