For us, it’s over the moment that energy companies learn how to burn history. I won’t pretend to know how it works, no matter how many times you explain about “massive potential energy stored in past events” and “low boiling points in metaphysical space.” We’re told it’s cleaner than nuclear, solar, wind. Maximum impact, minimal consequences. Who needs to know whether life originated in deep-sea vents or shallow ponds, anyway?
In the metaphysical realm, companies keep samples of everything they burn “just as a safety precaution,” like we don’t all know about the dementia-riddled geologists, and you—you get me an Archivist job. Which I’m grateful for. On my first day, you kiss my nose beside the huge, gloaming portal before hurrying to a press conference a few floors up, your sneakers squeaking. I watch the recording after I clock out, since there’s no 7G in the domain of first principles. You lean into a horde of microphones, addressing what we privately call the “Marty McFly Fallacy” for the umpteenth time. The past has already happened. We aren’t going anywhere. Even on the tiny phone screen, your eyebags are enormous. Reporters argue with you like they know anything. Tonight, you’ll hurl a plate against the linoleum and apologize before the shards stop spinning. It’s okay, I’ll tell you, reaching up to wipe your tears. Forget about it.
Back when we were younger, we argued a lot (was my Classics degree useless, should you take that Tokyo post-doc) and fucked even more. Now, the energy’s flowed out of us. We snuggle on the couch in the dark, and I wonder if the CEOs and CFOs and C-who-knows are aware that their pet Nobel physicist devours Love Island. They expect new miracles during every walkthrough, like you aren’t the woman who set history alight to keep us warm.
If everything goes tits-up, you say when neither of us can sleep, We’ll release the archived material, and everything will go back to normal. Probably. I listen to your fast-beating heart, let the “probably” pass. You’re still a scientist, even if you use much more definitive language at press conferences.
My commute from the Meta-1 archives takes two hours, the first navigating shadowy interstitial spaces, the second nudging the car through traffic made dead-silent by chronobatteries. By the time I get home, most of what I labeled and boxed and shelved that day goes blank, though trilobites’ calico-striped shells emerge in quick gleams. While lifting spaghetti, I recall tentacles spooling around my wrists, a coworker wrestling Goniatites bohemicus into its crate, and I think of a joke to tell you: Not looking forward to Allosaurus! But it’s gone once you come home, and you’re tired again anyway. We spoon on the couch. Onscreen, another dating show host laughs, his teeth sharp. The Allosaurus joke resurfaces. I share it, eager. The TV’s changing light flickers over your frown. You’ll be long-dead by the time we hit the Jurassic. I would disagree—two years ago, we were shaking Snowball Earth’s ice crystals into envelopes, and now everyone’s booking overtime for the Cambrian Explosion—but I don’t remember this until I reach my desk the next morning.
If all of Earth’s history were a 24-hour clock, humans would only appear in the last twenty seconds. The companies say it like it’s comforting, but inside the archives, we’re glancing at our watches, running calculations. 9:38. 9:39. Outside the archives, people are comforted. We’re always just seconds into the day.
In the twilit interstices, we smell smoke, hear turbines churning. Time passes. Nothing changes. My officemate’s daughter has a soccer game on Saturday.
I never remember forgetting. I stumble out of the portal, whole, and then, I crumble. I’m driving home to cook dinner. You’ll be there late. You’ll fall asleep midway through an episode, and I’ll study your face, pale in the TV’s glow like a beloved’s death mask. In natural history museums, all the bones are still there, but guests’ eyes slide past. Once, I call you as soon as I emerge: Maybe we should release some archival material? I hear a keyboard clacking, and you say, What? Why? And I know it has something to do with old bones, so I say, Do you remember that summer I volunteered with the natural history museum? And you say, God, that was boring, and I lose the thread and say, I guess so. But on Monday, I think of our midnight picnic beneath the Mosasaur skeleton, and I sob in the archive’s angiosperm wing.
In the end, it’s a Hylaeosaurus that deals the first fatality. I don’t know the species exists before that day. It’s the first thing I’m glad to forget.
I am grateful for the job, I tell you. I am. But I think you should come in and see the archives for yourself. You refuse—too busy. A week passes, and I ask again, and again, and again. Stop putting this off! I snap. You look at me with distant disgust. You can’t expect me to remember everything.
Appalachia. Water bears. Mycelia. Moss. Ferns. Tiktaalik. Amniotic eggs. Gingko trees, magnolia flowers. Mosasaur. The furcula’s gentle swoop. The K-T line’s bright quartz. Purgatorius. Eohippus. Lucy and all her kind. Footprints in soft clay. Ochre pigment. Seed-gathering. Bone-setting. Burial practices. Dogs. Weaving. A line from Sappho over my desk: Someone, I tell you, will remember us, even in another time.
Remember this: on our first date, you asked the waiter for a pen and tried to diagram spontaneous processes on a napkin. We were both drunk already, impatient undergrads, frustrated but giggling as equations escaped you. Happy hour margaritas melting into lukewarm juice. Freezer-burned tropical fruit, tequila’s gasoline sear. At some point, you give up on the napkin, scrunch it into my hand, hold your sweaty fingers over mine. You tell me about endstates, thermodynamic equilibrium. You say, Entropy is highest when nothing can change. You say, Sometimes there’s no going back.
As a child in Brooklyn, my spirits rose and fell on the tides of a girl named Susan’s moods and disposition. We met in 1958, when both of us were three, our mothers both pregnant with unwanted (by us) younger siblings. We were inseparable—soulmates, I would have said, if I’d known the word—for years. Eight years, to be exact. And then my family moved a half-mile away, into a different school district.
Susan was only the first of a lifelong parade of best and near-best, second-, third-, and close-but-not-best friends (I often maintained a deep bench). I think about them all, whether we’re still close (Hula) or not (Ronnie). Whether we are still in touch or not—whether they are still alive or not. I think about them all—Maria, Amy, Vicki, Debra, Marly, Kathy, et al.—far more often, and with far more feeling (sadness, gladness, longing, love, regret, nostalgia—and, in one case, hurt and grief) than I think about any of my ex-boyfriends.
The truth is that even in my youth—my boy-crazy teens, my heat-missile-seeking 20s/early 30s—my friendships have always been more crucial to me than the romances that came and went. These were the relationships I knew I could count on (until, once in a while, I couldn’t—and then it was more shattering, and harder to get over, than a failed romance). It’s no surprise that I have gravitated all my life to good stories that center friendship. Or that I’ve been writing about friendship since before I published my first story in 1979. My latest book, the essay collection If You Say So, is dedicated to the friends who’ve come into my life in the last decade. It is also populated by them—a whole community that I lucked into in my 60s, a time when it’s supposed to be practically impossible to make new friends. The title essay is about one of them. Others sweep (and spin and leap) throughout. (This is not a metaphor. We take dance classes and perform together, and much of the book takes place in the dance studio.) And since stories about women’s and girls’ friendships—unlike those about romantic love—are not a dime a dozen, here’s a list of books in which it’s friendship that matters most, in every decade of a woman’s life.
I’m cheating a bit with this first one, as the Treasury includes all four of the first books in the Betsy-Tacy series—four of my favorite books of all time. Written in the 1940s, set in the last years of the 19th century, the depiction of friendship may be the most accurate, authentic, loving, nuanced one I’ve ever encountered. In these first four, the girls are five through 12 years old. The books chart their adventures and discoveries—their imaginative play, their lives at school and at home, their differences in temperament, the way they help each other understand the world. Light on plot, rich on characterization, insight, and emotion, these semi-autobiographical novels include moments of gravity and great profundity–including a scene, late in the first book, that dares to reckon with a child’s death. It’s a scene I’ve returned to again and again over the years–it is that beautiful, generous, and comforting.
This extraordinary novel is narrated by the now-adult August, an anthropologist whose research on customs and practices around death takes her all over the world. The slow reveal of her mother’s suicide by drowning, nearly three decades before—and August’s yearslong refusal to believe that her mother is dead—gives the book its shape; the story of her friendship with Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi—four Black girls in 1970s Bushwick holding onto one another for dear life—is at the book’s heart. The narrative weaves in and out of past and present, circuitously tracing August’s childhood from its start, on a decaying family farm in Tennessee—and the coming undone of her mother after the Vietnam war death of her sensitive, artistic brother, August’s Uncle Clyde—through the move to Brooklyn and the years August spends growing up there, “sharing the weight of growing up Girl” with her three best friends. In terms of pages, August and her friends’ teenage years are a small part of this slim, lyrical novel, but they are the book’s focal point, and it is only after the intensely close friendship between the four girls comes to an abrupt end when they are 15 that August acknowledges her mother’s death. (The novel opens with the line, “For a long time, my mother wasn’t dead yet.”)
Absolution is a looking-back novel, too, but of a different kind. It’s mostly written in direct address, as if in letters—or one very, very long letter—by Patricia, to the daughter of a woman who had been her friend six decades ago, when they were young wives and “helpmeets” in Saigon: two white American wives—Patricia, naïve, newly arrived, desperate to have a child, and haunted by an earlier friendship, and Charlene, careless mother of three, recklessly determined, driven by what she fiercely believes is altruism. The narrative, in the first and third parts of the novel, is such that one often forgets Patricia is writing to anyone: whole scenes unfold, in vivid and eventually searing detail, along with Patricia’s thoughts and feelings at the time. The periodic reminders (“the little girl, of course, was you”) serve to gently turn what might have been a more conventional first-person narrative (not that there’s anything wrong with that) into something warmer and more intimate. The epistolary form also complicates the narrative’s intention, as Patricia’s feeling about Charlene—then as well as now—are complex and contradictory, and her avowed purpose in telling this story to Charlene’s daughter Rainey is to help her understand her mother. (The middle third of the book is from Rainey’s point of view.) The story Patricia tells is, as the title suggests, one of absolution. But it is also about friendship—the way it changes us, the way it reverberates long after it is over.
In Their 30s
Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey
The friendship between Alina and Laura in their mid-30s, in Mexico City, is rendered through Laura’s eyes. Part of what has long united them, as other friends from their 20s have fallen away, is their shared conviction that motherhood is off the table for them. When they come to what might have been—what the novel prepares us to expect to be, and what at first seems to be—a crossroads that will separate them (Laura reveals that she’s had her tubes tied—a decision made final; in return, Alina confesses that she has been trying to have a child), Laura surprises us—she surprises herself—by ultimately drawing closer to her friend. What follows is a deeply moving, subtle, and engrossing portrait of a friendship that sustains the two women in it, even as each of their own lives are challenged, even as they find themselves changing in ways they could not have foreseen. Alina’s storyline made me think of Heather Lanier’s beautiful memoir, Raising a Rare Girl(which I recommend as an excellent companion read to Still Born), and the story that unfolds in parallel to it, of Laura’s growing attachment to the troubled child of a neighbor who is too depressed to properly care for him, is so unexpected yet believable and affecting, the empathetic energy that’s generated makes reading this novel a transformational experience.
Here’s an outlier: a memoir, not a novel. I had to sneak it into this list because it’s one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read, and the only book I know of, in any genre, that does full justice to what having a best friend in middle age can be like. Caldwell was in her 40s when she met the writer Caroline Knapp (Pack of Two, Drinking: A Love Story, and other books—all of which are also well worth reading), and the two women—and their respective dogs—fell deeply in friendship-love almost at once. Caldwell writes: “Apart, we had each been frightened drunks and single women and dog lovers; together, we became a small corporation.” The two writers are inseparable: ferociously, determinedly independent women, devoted to their dog companions, holding onto one another for dear life, in continuous conversation. We know from the start that Knapp’s death (far too young, from stage IV lung cancer) is coming: the memoir opens with this information. Yet when the narrative brings us to her diagnosis, the blow is devastating. This chronicle of a once-in-a-lifetime friendship—in a way, the Platonic ideal of friendship—is imbued with so much tenderness, drawn with such lyric precision, it is something like the prose equivalent of a love sonnet.
This is a short, fierce novel sharply focused on a friendship (just as Nunez’s previous novel, The Friend, was). The two women in What Are You Going Through, both writers, are at the tail end of middle age—rough waters for us all. They have been friends for a long time, but it is only now that they’ve become particularly close—so close that one of them, who’s dying, asks the other to help her die, to go away with her and stay with her until she’s ready to take the pills that will end her life before cancer takes her “in mortifying anguish.” The narrator (of most of the novel, I hasten to say; there is a brief, wry, utterly perfect first-person account by a cat of its early, terrible life) reckons with the knowledge that saying yes and saying no are both morally perilous. Empathy, love—friendship—wins.
Now we’ve reached old age and we must brace ourselves (I just turned 70 myself; I’m happy to be your navigator). If the 50s and 60s are still euphemistically called “middle age,” there is no fooling oneself in the seventh decade of a life. Now we are old, like it or not. The friends in The Weekend—Jude, Wendy, and Adele—gather at the beach house that belonged to a fourth friend, Sylvie, who has died. They are in mourning and in full Marie Kondo-mode as they clear out the house, at the same time releasing long-buried old grievances against one another, but they are also worried about their careers, their bodies, lovers who won’t text them back, children and childlessness—in short, all the same preoccupations of women decades younger. This novel came out in 2020 and it thrilled me—I read it in the early days of lockdown, grateful for the company of women older than I (I had just turned 65), pleased beyond measure that these women and their friendship were being given their due. I’d never read anything remotely like it.
Until two years later, when Dark’s novel was published. It’s a very different kind of novel—a thick, sprawling one that grounds big philosophical, political, sociological, and psychological ideas in individuals and tackles its big subjects in dramatic ways (there is a big plot to match—not usually my thing, but in this instance it captivated me). What it has in common with The Weekend is how seriously it takes its main characters, Agnes and Polly, who have been friends for 80 years—since they were babies. There is nothing sentimental or cute in the portrayal of either their relationship or their old age. Agnes is a solitary, never-married, irritable, famous writer of children’s books with a secret identity as the author of a best-selling series of novels skewering the thinly disguised women of her social class—a feminist and conservationist who has been seething with anger for years at her friend, Polly, whose devotion and attention to her husband, Dick, infuriates her, both on principle and because Agnes wants to be (don’t we all?) the most important person in her best friend’s life. There are too many complicated plot lines to describe (trust me: they’re fascinating), but a secondary pairing—a cross-generational friendship that develops between Agnes and an indomitable 27-year-old editorial assistant named Maud—is a powerful force in the novel too. And just as in the great novels of the 19th century that I love most—Middlemarch and War and Peace and Anna Karenina—everything, remarkably, comes together in the end.
No round-up of books about women’s friendship would be complete without this one by Lore Segal. Brilliant, witty, fierce, full of surprises, this book was published a year almost to the day before her death, in 2024, at 96. (Full disclosure: Lore Segal and I were longtime friends.) If you don’t know her work, I urge you to read all of it, but there’s no reason not to start with this final collection, most of which is about a group of friends, now in their 90s, who’ve been close for decades. They meet regularly for lunch, where they tell each other everything. “We are the people to whom we tell our stories,” one of them tells the others. And so, when they can no longer meet in person, they talk on the phone and over Zoom—they persevere. As Lore Segal did.
What happens when you realize all you worked for is meaningless? When you are this close to achieving your goals, only to realize that you have betrayed everything you cherish? Cleyvis Natera’s second novel, The Grand Paloma Resort, explores these questions and more through the relationship between two sisters, Laura and Elena, as well as the staff and guests of a luxurious resort in the Dominican Republic.
Laura, a local woman from an impoverished community in the Dominican Republic, has risen by sheer determination to become manager of the luxury resort encroaching on her family’s home and is on the brink of a promotion she’s been working for all her life. But when Elena, who already doesn’t meet her sister’s high expectations, makes a fateful error, Laura decides to teach her a lesson—one which has repercussions not just on the two sisters or the resort, but on the community at large. Set over seven days on the coast and in the mountains of the Dominican Republic, menaced by an approaching hurricane, The Grand Paloma Resort is a searing exploration of how late stage capitalism impacts race, class, families, and communities, if not our very souls.
I first met Cleyvis Natera at a residency at the Virginia Center for the Arts when she was working on her debut novel, Neruda on the Park, which wasa New York Times Editor’s Choice, among other accolades. The two of us bonded over our love of the Dominican Republic, where Natera spent her early years, and where I was imprisoned during my adolescence at a now-defunct religious reform school. Since then, Natera has gone on to win awards and accolades including the International Latino Book Award, and fellowships from Pen America, Bread Loaf, and Kenyon. She’s also a Fulbright Specialist, and teaches at Barnard and Montclair State University. We spoke in the early summer over Zoom, a few weeks before Natera announced Ballantine will be publishing a sequel set in the Paloma Resort universe. We discussed writing about class, how selling the book on proposal changed her writing process, and allowing stories to end with hope.
Deirdre Sugiuchi: How old were you when you left the Dominican Republic, and how has your experience visiting the Dominican Republic changed since then?
Cleyvis Natera: When I left, I was 10 years old. My family didn’t have very much money. We weren’t people that were going to the beach or going to hotels or vacationing. The first time I saw a beach was after my mother traveled to the United States—my first conscious memory was going with one of my mom’s friends, when I was seven years old.
The next time that I went to the Dominican Republic was after college. I was in my twenties, and, when I went, I wanted to go to a resort.I love resorts—I love being in a place where everything is tailored to your needs. The pool is there, the beach is there, the food is there whenever you need it. Massages on demand. What is there not to love?
However, being a local, I think, and because my class has changed so much since I left the Dominican Republic, very often when I travel to these resorts, I’m aware of the class distinction and who is serving versus who’s vacationing there. I’m also really aware, oddly, about the fact that had I not immigrated, I’m not convinced that I would be able to partake in that kind of activity. There’s something that feels subversive about the fact that my immigrant dream enabled me to live a life in the Dominican Republic that probably wouldn’t have been available to me.
I travel a lot to the Caribbean with my husband, not just to the D.R. I love talking to workers. I find myself often interviewing and talking to people casually or more formally about what it’s like to work in the resort, and what it’s like to tend to tourists and to rich people. Some of those conversations really aided in me writing this book.
When I travel to these resorts, I’m aware of the class distinction and who is serving versus who’s vacationing there.
DS:You have a number of characters all related to this resort somehow. But at the core it’s two sisters…and they’re really complicated. Why are you drawn towards writing complicated people?
CN: After writing my first book, Neruda on the Park, I realized I’m obsessed with relationships and the way that grief and loss affects people. One of the things that I’m most interested in is the way grief turns people into monsters, and sometimes lingers in such a way that it deteriorates the person’s personality, or even the potential of who they could have been. I also was thinking about the ways in which love can sometimes be the only thing that can save you, but it can also be the thing that can harm you, if you’re not very careful.
It took a while for me to realize that this [was about] two sisters. I wanted to test these two women who have very different ideals, and put them on this pressure cooker of this resort…and put them into a situationthat would force them to reckon with both their relationships and who they are in the world, and who they want to be in the future. I realized that in order to do service to what I’m trying to do in this book, which is really to talk about the complex of a resort as a microcosm of the whole world of capitalism. And the only way you can do it is to have this kind of multiphonic narrative. You couldn’t really do it with one or two characters. It has to keep shifting. One of the things that I was committed to was [not] compromising on their complexities. I think all of us are very complicated and contradictory, and there’s ways in which I think life also makes us complicated depending on our station.
I think we don’t talk about how, in some ways, wealth can enable you to have almost a more stable personality, or to be very different and live more up to your ideals or values. I think about that a lot, the ways in which wealth and my station in life has changed so drastically from the time that I was a child in the Dominican Republic, and the ways it has enabled me to do amazing things like write books and even talk to you.
DS:Obviously this book’s in conversation with TheWhite Lotus, but from a completely different perspective. Can you discuss?
CN: In 2020 I had finished writing Neruda on the Park. [My agent] PJ [Mark] was ready to send it to market, but we realized we couldn’t because there was a pandemic, and the publishing industry had screeched to a halt. So, I started writing these short stories from the perspective of employees in a resort. I knew that the central thread of the story was the fact that they were all in service to the resort in one way or another—and then in 2022, when the first season of The White Lotus came out, I was so upset! I was like, “They beat me to it. They stole my idea!” And I remember talking to my agent and he was like, “This is not a bad thing.”
I actually sold this book as a novel proposal. I hadn’t finished writing the whole book. In some ways, I think the fact that the book is so clearly in conversation with this social phenomenon that has become The White Lotus, but is very centrally concerned with privilege from a different perspective, aided in the speed with which the book was picked up by my editor.
DS:You teach writing.Did writing this book on proposal and selling it on proposal change the way you wrote the book?Do you think you’ll teach differently afterwards?
CN: Yes, to both. I had never outlined a book before and so it gave me a lot of comfort to have an outline because every time I came to my laptop I had a job to do—my first book was a 15 year journey, and if there was one thing I wasn’t going to do, it was take another decade or more on my next book. But I think I also learned that even when you want to force a story to do something, the narrative has its own heart and its own energy.
The best plot moves through the character
After writing this book with an outline, now I understand not just that plot is critical, but in some waysthe best plot moves through the character—it isn’t two separate things.Making the outline made me think about character motivation and character desire and instinct in a different way. With my first book it was almost an iterative process, where you lay down the foundation of the book and then you inject some propulsion and some tension. With this book, I think just by the nature of me having a strong sense of where I wanted the story to go, I became a lot more capable or maybe more competent in injecting some of those elements into the character. What’s activating the plot is the character and not the story.
DS:This book is inspired by current events in the Dominican Republic, particularly how the troubles in Haiti impact the Dominican Republic. There was a scene—and this is not a spoiler, but a moment—where you describe Black people, Haitians, being picked up and thrown into vans to be deported. It was so similar to things happening here.
CN: I feel like really good fiction that is concerned with telling the truth about whatever it is that we’re obsessed with is always going to resonate with a present moment in the future. For example, the first time that I learned about the Parsley Massacre of 1937, where tens of thousands of Haitians were massacred at the command of the Dominican government, was through Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones. I was in my twenties. And now, I think about the fact that I went to school until fifth grade in the Dominican Republic, and my grandparents, and my father, who was much older than my mother, had all lived through Trujillo, yet at no point did I learn about [the massacre] through my family or through my schooling. It was through literature that I came to understand this really important aspect of my country’s history. I also learned that as an immigrant in the United States.
When I started traveling back from the United States, I would often see my country through the eyes of that book. In some ways it made me more empathetic to what I was witnessing. I think sometimes when you live through injustice and the horrifying treatment of people, you are desensitized. You almost don’t see it. I think Danticat taught me to pay more attention as a human being, which has really aided me as a writer.
One of the things I thought about when I decided I was going to write this book was that I couldn’t write without talking about what’s happening to Haitian people in the Dominican Republic. It’s a horrifying situation there, especially when you think about the deportation of Dominicans of Haitian descent. Birthright was removed as a right for Haitian people in the Dominican Republic—and that just happened in the last decade. Every time I would go to the Dominican Republic, I would think about [The Farming of Bones] and about how far and also how close we were to the incidents that happened, and the way history has a way of remaining alive, taking over the present moment unless you’re really vigilant.
DS: Yes. We’re seeing it right now. However, the question I want to end on is: Can you discuss the role of hope in your writing?
CN: Oh my goodness. Thank you for that question. I feel like I’m such a hopeful person in real life. Sometimes it is very difficult to be hopeful in literature because literature requires us to be really truthful about logic in a way that’s not like real life. I think hopeful people, optimistic people like you and I, often diverge from reality to remain hopeful. Ending this book on a hopeful note was probably the hardest thing I could do.
I knew the way I wanted to end the book, especially as it comes to these two women who have suffered so much loss, yet who also make decisions that are just so disturbing. But then I also was thinking about how important hope is in this story, especially because I’m also cognizant of fiction coming out of the Caribbean, and especially the way in which I think many of us [writers] are being truthful to the realities of locals in our islands, when it comes to privilege and tourism, class, and money—it’s sometimes difficult for our stories to end on a hopeful note.
In a way, for me, it was like, challenge accepted: There has to be a way in which I can find redemption for these characters. There has to be a way in which I can bring that optimism and hopefulness that is part of my life, the way that my life is guided by this idea that the impossible can be possible, that beautiful things are ahead, even during the most ugly and difficult times.
The little Angus heifer was lying in the shade of a black oak in the south pasture, legs tucked beneath her and her head a half foot off the ground. JR cranked down the window and sat with the pickup idling, watching the cow. She was a three-year-old and he’d never known her to be sick, but the way she had her head canted was very strange. Her open mouth was strange.
“Do you think it’s heatstroke?” Mary Louise asked.
“Don’t know,” JR told his wife. “Worth taking a look.”
He pushed the column shifter into park, fetched his hat from the bench seat beside him, opened the door, and stepped out.
He waded through the switchgrass, squaring the hat on his head. Within ten yards of the heifer, he felt the hair stand on the back of his neck and he stopped as though he’d struck a wall.
The first thing he noticed was the cow’s left ear was missing and the next thing he noticed was her left eye was gone. She wasn’t breathing.
JR moved forward slowly and began to circle the heifer. When he rounded her far side, he stopped once more and then squatted, reaching for the ground to steady himself. A rectangular swatch of hide had been sheared from her back. By a scalpel, looked like. Or a box cutter. He got to his feet and studied the bare earth beneath the tree. He’d had coyotes pull down calves over the years—yearlings, mostly—but there were no coyote tracks in the dirt, no tracks of any kind, not even the cow’s.
He heard the truck door slam and turned to see Mary Louise walking around the vehicle’s front end.
“Don’t come up here!” he called.
She stopped and stood there with her eyebrows arched. He asked her to get back in the pickup and Mary Louise said, “Did she fall?”
“Momma,” he said, “get back in the truck for me.” But his wife only crossed her arms.
JR glanced back at the heifer. Flies crawled across her flank and stifle. Flies swarmed around her parted lips. A breeze stirred the leaves overhead and there was the tang of urine in the air. He looked at the tree line across the pasture, then at the road that wound up toward the house. Cicadas buzzed from the buffalo grass. Birds called from the oaks. He started for the pickup, staggering slightly, frightened in a way he didn’t understand.
JR stood at the kitchen counter, flipping through the phone book. He could hear Mary Louise’s sewing machine upstairs, the click and chug of the treadle. His shirt was soaked in sweat.
When Sheriff Bledsoe pulled up the driveway in his cruiser, he walked out and shook the man’s hand.
Bledsoe said, “Cindy says you got a calf down?”
“Be better just to show you,” JR told him, and the two of them climbed in the old Ford and started down the dirt road that ran through the woods.
Bledsoe was a short man with thinning hair and a face that always seemed to be sunburned. He looked over at JR and said, “And how is Mary Louise?”
“Well,” said JR, “right now she’s kind of rattled.”
The sheriff didn’t seem to hear him. He said, “We saw her over at the bake sale last weekend. Wanted to see if she had any of those little tarts she makes, but Patty was in a hurry.”
JR nodded. He could feel the sheriff looking at him, waiting for a response, but he wasn’t about to talk bake sales with everything he’d seen that morning. After a few moments, Bledsoe turned to regard the pines blurring past the passenger window.
Then he said, “It’s a cow we’re going down here to look at?”
“Cow,” JR said.
He stopped the truck in the road a couple dozen yards from the oak tree in the pasture. The heifer was just as he’d left her, and when they came walking up, Bledsoe cupped his mouth in one hand and whispered something JR couldn’t hear. They stood there for half a quiet minute, staring at the striated ribbon of muscle and fat where the patch of hide had been cut away.
The sheriff said, “I never seen a dead animal with its head raised like that.”
JR told him he hadn’t either.
“This is how you found her?” Bledsoe asked.
“Exactly how I found her, bout ten o’clock this morning.”
“Remember when you saw her before that?”
“Feeding time yesterday evening,” said JR, “down at the barn.”
Bledsoe had stooped and begun to study the ground. He said, “Wasn’t coyotes.”
“No,” said JR, “I’m confident of that.”
The sheriff stepped closer and took a knee beside the carcass. He pulled a pen from his shirt pocket and prodded the heifer’s mouth with its tip, pressing her lower jaw down a few inches. His face flushed and he glanced up at JR.
“Come look at this,” he said.
JR walked over and knelt beside Bledsoe and saw what he’d missed before: the cow’s tongue had been sliced away below the root.
The creep of something climbed his backbone, joint by joint. He thought it was like coming home after a long trip to find your house ransacked, your drawers pilfered, muddy boot prints in your bed.
He said, “I hope you’re able to locate whoever did this ‘fore I do, Jack.”
“Well,” said the sheriff, “I don’t blame you feeling that way. You ain’t had a run-in with anybody, have you?”
“I don’t have run-ins,” JR said.
“I know it,” Bledsoe told him. “Those your tracks?” He was pointing the pen at a pair of prints in the soft earth under the tree.
“Them are mine,” JR said. “I’d known what I was walking up on, I’d’ve called you first.”
The sheriff nodded. He palmed his thighs, rose with a grunt, and stood there gripping the pen in one hand like a wand.
Then he said, “I reckon you already did a head count.”
“Did one first thing,” JR told him. “My Brahmans are up in the corral and the Angus and Black Baldies are in the west pasture. All accounted for.”
“Nothing else out of place?”
“Nothing,” JR said.
Bledsoe shook his head. “I never seen anything like it,” he said.
“No,” said JR.
“If we could figure out how to get her loaded, you might haul her in to Dr. Thrasher.”
JR looked at the man. “What would that do?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” said the sheriff. “I’d think a vet could tell you more than I could. This is the damnedest thing I ever seen.”
On the way back up to the house, Bledsoe sat silent as a sundial, staring at the dashboard. He still had the pen in his right hand and JR realized the sheriff wasn’t going to put it back in his pocket. Something about that troubled him worse than everything he’d seen that morning. Bledsoe hadn’t wanted to touch the heifer, and he didn’t want to touch anything that had. As though it might wear off on him.
“Wasn’t any blood,” the sheriff mumbled.
“What’s that?” JR asked.
“Blood,” said the sheriff. “I didn’t see a single drop.”
JR lifted his boot off the gas pedal and let the pickup roll to a stop, then just sat with his hands on the steering wheel. Crows cawed from the black oaks. A squirrel darted from the tree line, paused in the road with its ears twitching, then leapt back into the brush.
JR said, “I want you to listen at me, Jack. I’m going to find out who done this. I aim to treat it like a full-time job.”
“I can appreciate that,” Bledsoe said.
“Tell you something else. I catch somebody stepping foot on my property, it ain’t going to be no conversation. I’ll wear the ground out with him.”
Bledsoe nodded and cleared his throat. “I’m going to act like I didn’t hear that,” he said, “but if you shoot some ole boy for trespassing, you drag him in your house before you call us.”
“Is that right?” said JR.
“That’s right,” the sheriff said. “And you didn’t get that from me.”
They were sitting out on the deck after supper, watching the sunset reflect off the pond.
“And you don’t think it could’ve been a bobcat?” Mary Louise said.
JR shook his head and set his coffee mug on the little table between them. “It was a perfect patch cut off that heifer,” he told her. “Bobcats don’t carry pocketknives, last time I checked.”
Mary Louise brought the blue porcelain cup to her lips, blew into it, then tilted the cup, and sipped. She wore a nest of tight brown curls and in her plump, pretty face were a pair of hazel eyes.
“What did Jack have to say?”
“Not much,” said JR. “Seemed pretty baffled by the whole deal.”
“Well,” Mary Louise said, smoothing a hand over the left leg of her slacks, “I am too.”
Then into the quiet she said, “Where did you bury her?”
“Out on the pasture under that tree.”
“You don’t think the coyotes will dig her up?”
“Don’t know,” he said. “I cut down about five foot with the front-end loader. They’d have to work at it.”
Mary Louise said, “We ought to start shutting the gate down at the road. Of an evening, anyway.”
“Already done it.”
“Did you padlock it?”
“Padlocked it.”
They sat for several moments and then Mary Louise said, “Maybe it was teenagers.”
“Maybe.”
“Drunk teenagers pulling a prank.”
JR said, “Me and George Northcutt pulled a prank or two when we was kids. Never would’ve occurred to us to mess with a man’s cattle.”
“These kids now are different.”
“I mean that.”
“I saw this thing on TV,” she said. “There were people in Tulsa stringing cats to fences and a policeman said it was a Satanic deal.”
“Satanic?”
Mary Louise nodded. Then she said, “I don’t see how somebody could come in and do all that without Gretchen and Moses barking their heads off.”
“I thought about that,” he said. “Maybe they didn’t come up the drive.”
“You think they came through the woods?”
“Might’ve.”
Mary Louise seemed to consider that. She said, “If there was ever a reason to move into town, I don’t—”
“Momma,” he said, “don’t start.”
“Why not?”
“We’ve had that conversation,” he said.
“Yes,” she told him, “and we’re fixing to have it again.”
It’d become a sore spot between them and JR knew she couldn’t keep herself from prodding it.
“You know how I feel about this,” he said.
“And you know how I feel about throwing money out the window on your cows.” Her face had gone flushed. She brushed a piece of lint off her blouse.
He sipped his coffee. “They’re our cows,” he said.
“And is this our ranch?”
“You know it is.”
“I don’t know any such thing,” she said, her words coming a little faster, a little higher in pitch. “I’d like to be able to get something from the store without driving into Seminole. I’d like to meet Margaret and Lucille for lunch.”
“You meet them pretty regular,” JR said, trying to think of something that might put this to bed.
“Sitting out here on this farm,” she told him, “while you go around playing cowboy.”
She’d said that to him before and it always stung. He stood and tossed the last of his coffee over the porch rail, then turned and started for the door. He’d just opened it when she said, “JR?”
He glanced back at her and thought her face looked more troubled than mad: brow furrowed, eyes slightly wet.
“This has scared me something awful,” she said. “I don’t like knowing someone’s been on the place.”
“I don’t either,” he told her. “There’s nothing about it to like.”
He’d been looking for the Brahman going on three days, a little yearling named Belinda. It’d been two weeks since he’d found the mutilated heifer in the south pasture, and he was walking the fence line on the west side of his property, long about the shank of the afternoon. He glanced up and saw two turkey buzzards wheeling in the cobalt sky and knew he was about to come on something dead. He threaded his way through the brambles on the edge of the blackjack forest and went downhill through the oaks toward the creek.
He glanced up and saw two turkey buzzards wheeling in the cobalt sky and knew he was about to come on something dead.
The yearling was on her side in a brown bed of leaves, bloated, all four legs stretched out straight as a string. The air reeked of rotting flesh, sickly sweet. He approached from the animal’s rear, scanning the ground for tracks, and when he looked up, he saw there was an oval-shaped cavity where the cow’s vulva had been. He stood there, eyes watering from the smell. There was no doubt in his mind the cuts had been made by some sort of razor. He didn’t see a speck of blood. He turned and went back the way he’d come, stepping in his own boot prints, and when he returned a few hours later, Sheriff Bledsoe was with him.
It was Sunday and the man was out of uniform, but he’d brought a camera. He circled the heifer, taking pictures. He photographed the body, and he photographed the forest floor, then he asked JR to lift one of his feet off the ground, and he photographed the boot sole. When he was done, he capped the lens, and stood with the camera hanging from its leather strap, biting at his lower lip. He looked at JR.
“Left ear and eye,” said Bledsoe. “Just like the other.”
“Tongue too.”
“Tongue too,” the sheriff said.
JR pointed at the cow’s hind end. “They even cut out her business.”
“I seen that,” Bledsoe said, tapping his index finger against the camera’s lens cover.
“Jack,” said JR, “whoever’s doing this has done it before.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning it’s a smart chance it’s happening to someone else around here.”
The sheriff stood with the thumb of his left hand hooked in the rear pocket of his jeans. He said, “I think you might have something there. If I was to hold a meeting, would you mind telling folks what’s been going on?”
JR reached and scratched the whiskers on his cheek. “I reckon I could.” The sun beat down on them. “I don’t like a crowd,” he added.
“Don’t have to be nothing formal,” Bledsoe told him. “Just tell everybody what you seen. If there’s other ranchers have this happening, we might get an idea or two.”
“All right,” said JR.
“All right,” Bledsoe said. “I’ll go ahead and ask Buzz Gillespie to run it in the paper, and I believe I might get Brother Keith to mention it at service tonight.”
“I appreciate that,” JR said, but he was already worried what Mary Louise would say when he told her about the cow. She was liable to start in on him, demanding he sell the ranch. It’d be a real dust up and he didn’t know he had the wherewithal for that.
In fact, he knew he didn’t.
Friday evening, they gathered at the library down the street from the courthouse: Robert Gist and his wife, Lucille; George Northcutt and his. Ruth Martin was there with her grandson. Gene McQueen, Lois and Johnny Shoemaker, all three of the Buford brothers and their father, Gerald. Herb Gunter, Dr. Thrasher, Sandy Prince who owned the dog kennel north of town. Dennis Wisnatt came in swaying slightly; the man was often drunk. Turning to look back at the crowd who’d assembled, JR saw OU ballcaps, John Deere ballcaps, a cowboy hat or two, and then he saw Betsy and Phillip Harjo walk in and take seats at the far side of the room. They were Seminole, the only Native people in attendance. JR had known Philip for thirty years. The man was combat veteran, World War II and Korea; he’d been in the Marine division that’d taken Guadalcanal.
Just after seven, Sheriff Bledsoe approached the lectern and informed the audience about the mutilated heifers, then asked JR to speak.
JR and Mary Louise were sitting in the front row of folding chairs and he stood to face the crowd. He didn’t know what to do with his hands, ended up crossing them behind his back, holding his left wrist in his right palm. A panicked thought blossomed in his brain, the notion that the person responsible for carving up his cattle might be seated in this room.
When he was done telling them, the sheriff said, “Thing that struck me, there wasn’t any blood. And I mean not a single drop.”
“Coyotes,” said Johnny Shoemaker from the back of the room, pronouncing the word like a two-syllable slur: ki-oats.
“There weren’t any tracks,” Bledsoe told him. “And I’ve never known coyotes to drink blood.”
Robert Gist raised a hand and the sheriff nodded to him. Gist said, “Did the heifer looked like it’d been scrounged?”
“Well, that’s another thing,” said Bledsoe, “wasn’t none of that. Didn’t even look like the buzzards had been at her.”
“What about the tongue?” Dennis Wisnatt asked.
“Yes,” said Bledsoe, “Mr. Stewart mentioned it’d been cut—but we don’t mean chewed on. Looked like someone had done it with shears.”
Couples began mumbling to each other. JR glanced at Phillip Harjo and thought he saw something come into the man’s eyes, a faraway expression, slight crinkling of his brow. He looked as though he might say something, but he didn’t.
“Now,” said the sheriff, “that was enough to cause me concern, but then this past weekend Mr. Stewart found another one.” He turned to JR. “You mind talking about that?”
“So,” said JR, “this was a little yearling that had been missing a few days. Ended up finding her down by the creek and it was the same sort of deal: left eye, left ear, swatch of hide.”
“And her privates,” added the sheriff. “Whoever done this cut them out like a surgeon and there wasn’t tracks or blood, either one.”
JR saw several women in the audience cross their arms and then Ed Thrasher raised his hand.
“Yessir,” Bledsoe said.
The veterinarian said, “If I could, I’d like to take a look at the body.”
“Well,” said Bledsoe, “here’s the deal: that heifer was in the woods about a mile from the road and it wasn’t no way we could get a pickup in to tump her out. I believe Mr. Stewart buried her.”
“I did,” said JR. “Took me three hours to dig the grave and I had to use a pry bar to lever her into it.”
“It happens again,” said Dr. Thrasher, “I want you to call me.”
JR nodded.
“Now,” said the sheriff, “I didn’t call y’all down here to cause a panic, but me and Mr. Stewart thought if this was happening to him, it might be happening to some of you. If you know anything, I’d sure like to hear it. You don’t want to talk in front of everybody, you can call me at home.”
JR stood beside Bledsoe, watching the crowd. Most of the faces staring at him looked puzzled or uneasy. A few looked disgusted. Only Phillip Harjo looked unsurprised by what he’d heard. He sat there in his OSU ballcap, both hands cradling his left knee. He turned to his wife and whispered something.
The sheriff said, “Anyone had stock go missing?”
Men began to shake their heads and Gerald Buford said, “We do a head count ever morning. We hadn’t had nothing like what you’re talking about.”
Johnny Shoemaker said, “Any sumbitch comes traipsing around my place without a by-your-leave is going to end up with a bad case of lead poisoning. I’ll give him a load of double-ought buck.”
Several men smiled and Lois Shoemaker’s face went red.
Gene McQueen said, “JR, I hate hearing this. That sort of thing would eat me plumb up. Whoever’s behind this ought to be doing a stretch in McAlester, you ask me. There’s a reason ranchers used to make cattle rustlers the guest of honor at a string party.”
Robert Gist said, “Hear, hear.”
“Just awful,” said George Northcutt.
“Terrible,” Ruth Martin said.
“Now,” said the sheriff, “I want y’all to listen at me. I got a herd myownself and I’d be lying if I told you this hasn’t put me off my feed. But that’s no call for anyone to get crossways with the law over it. You see anything out of the ordinary, you call our dispatch. Me or one of my deputies will be there quick as a minnow can swim a dipper. Bad as you might want to, you can’t go shooting somebody over a cow.”
Every man but Phillip Harjo—the only person present who’d ever shot anyone—looked rankled.
“What if they was to come in our house?” Herb Gunter said.
“That’s a different story,” Bledsoe said. “If you’re in your home defending yourself, the law’s behind you and I am too. That’s always been the case. I just don’t want this turning into a corpse and cartridge occasion.”
JR watched the sheriff. Bledsoe seemed to be addressing everyone, but he was staring at Johnny Shoemaker.
“All right then,” Bledsoe said, “that’s all I got for you. Appreciate everybody coming down. Y’all see anything out of fix, you call. Otherwise, have a good evening.”
JR drove down the gravel road at dusk with the season’s last fireflies tracing luminous arcs in the pastures. He’d called Phillip Harjo 30 minutes before, asked if he could stop by, and Harjo had said, “Come see me, yeah.”
The land went rolling out east of JR’s ranch. He topped one hill and descended into the valley beneath, his mind following similar contours, cresting and plunging, the sun setting behind him, blue twilight ahead. He’d half begun to wonder if an oil company wasn’t behind his carved-up cattle, some yack trying to spook him into selling, and the thought made him feel crazy—it was a crazy thought to have. One man alone couldn’t have accomplished all he’d seen, and two or more would’ve left some trace, tire tracks, all manner of sign. He’d considered the possible motivations of his neighbors, weighing each man’s interests until he’d begun to suspect them, every one—which was foolish—and he’d started keeping a pistol on him at all hours, a Dan Wesson .357 revolver; it lay on the bench seat beside him now. He woke at odd hours and peered out the windows of his house.
He’d considered the possible motivations of his neighbors, weighing each man’s interests until he’d begun to suspect them, every one—which was foolish.
He turned south onto a red dirt road that cut through the black oak forest, sagging barbed wire fences on sun-bleached posts, the bar ditches overgrown, limbs hanging above the narrow lane thick enough to make night early.
When he pulled in at a well-kept drive that wound through the cedars, he crossed a cattle-guard, then crossed another, and stopped in front of a two-story cabin. He’d been there before, but never inside. Lifting thecolumn shifter, he pushed it all the way to the left, and then just sat, trying to gather himself. He glanced at the pistol, then hit the glove compartment button, leaned down, and stowed the revolver atop the papers and tire gauges and pairs of needle-nosed pliers. An old pocketknife he’d forgotten. A roll of nickels. When he sat up, he saw that Harjo had stepped out on the porch. The man raised a hand in greeting, and JR opened his door to get out.
They sat at a twin-slab table beside a large window that looked out into the woods. JR thought the cabin was a jim-dandy—more lodge than ranch house—with walls of lacquered pine and cedar crossbeams above. Mounted deer heads. Calfskin rugs. An upright piano in the living room and the entire house lit by electric lamps in walls sconces that resembled the old kerosene ones in the shotgun shanty he’d grown up in. Seminole was a boomtown then, the streets a mud quagmire, wooden derricks like a ghastly forest, far as the eye could see.
Betsy Harjo served them coffee and fried pies. Her blue-black hair was parted in the center and worn in long braids down her back. She had dark, dazzling eyes that stared out from a face that must have been older than it looked. JR thought she could’ve been any age between thirty and fifty-five—it was hard to say. She asked after Mary Louise and then about their son in Oklahoma City and then she nodded at her husband and went upstairs.
The two of them talked for a while about the assassination attempt on President Ford the previous week and then they talked about Patty Hearst who’d been arrested in San Francisco. When JR finished his coffee, he looked at Harjo and asked what he’d made of the meeting on Friday.
“Oh,” Harjo said, “that was something. John Shoemaker’s kind of funny, enit?”
“He’s worse than that,” JR said, and a few silent moments passed. A crow cawed from out in the night. He could just hear the muffled sound of a pumpjack engine, a faint, muted chug.
He said, “Phillip, it sort of seemed to me like you might’ve had some thoughts on what all’s been happening over at my place. Understand you not wanting to air your lungs in public, but I’d appreciate listening to anything you’d have to say.”
Harjo sipped his coffee, turned his head and glanced out the window where their reflections hung in the glass. Then he looked at JR and said, “Everyone talking about coyotes and outlaws. Gerald, I think it was? He wouldn’t know a bandit from a bull’s foot.”
“Have to agree with you there,” JR said. He picked a piece of crust off his plate and put it in his mouth, chewing slowly before speaking again. “I ain’t discussed this outside the family, but I’ve had a dozen oil companies try to buy me out so they could come in and drill. Mary’s wanted me to sell for a few years now and move us into town. Appreciate you not telling that around.”
“I don’t talk other people’s business,” Harjo said.
“I know you don’t. I’m just saying.”
“You able to turn a profit?” Harjo asked. “It wasn’t for these wells of mine, I wouldn’t have any cows at all.”
JR shook his head and exhaled a long breath. “I’ve lost a thousand dollars a year on my herd, but the ranch has been in the family since 1911. I hoped to pass it on to my boy, but he don’t care nothing about cattle. Can’t say I blame him. Sure ain’t no money in it. But I’d hate to see it go to some petroleum company. It’s Stewart land.”
Harjo was watching him with his calm, steady eyes. He said, “Reckon whose it was before?”
“Beg pardon?” JR said.
“Before the Rush, it was our land. Seminole land.”
“Well,” said JR, “I don’t mean to get into all that.”
“Why’s that?”
“I just don’t see it pertains.”
“No?” said Harjo.
“No,” said JR.
Harjo leaned back in his chair. “Since I was young,” he said, “I’ve heard our elders speak about these matters. There is a good deal of bitterness, you understand. They call your people chiselers. I would not say so. You had the property from your father and your father had it from his. But now a terrible thing has happened and you feel some great affliction.” He looked at JR. “This is how the Seminole have felt for generations.”
JR stared at the crumbs on his plate. “I don’t see how that helps.”
Harjo leaned forward and braced his forearms against the table’s edge. He said, “You own your mineral rights?”
“Surface and mineral,” JR said.
“What’s your acreage?”
“Six hundred and forty.”
“Whole section.”
“Whole section,” JR said.
Harjo glanced up at the ceiling, as if calculating figures in his head. Then he looked at JR. “I would buy it,” he said.
JR had heard him just fine, but he was so stunned he asked Harjo to come again.
“Your place,” said Harjo. “I would buy it from you.”
JR felt like he’d been splashed with hot water, anger scalding his face. Yes, I see, he thought. I can see it now.
He pushed his chair back and stood.
“Mr. Harjo,” he said, “I thank you for your time. You tell Miss Betsy I appreciate the refreshments.”
He crossed the room without waiting for a response, a kind of electricity coursing through him, the air all but crackling with it, and he’d just placed his hand on the doorknob when he heard Harjo say, “You think about it, yeah?”
JR opened the door and stepped out.
But JR didn’t see how Harjo could’ve carved up his cattle. He’d suspected so many culprits it drove him distracted. Probably, the smart thing would be to contact the OSBI, but when he called Bledsoe to float the idea, the sheriff said, “We could do that. We certainly could. But you really want the State Bureau poking around your property?”
“What about the Feds?” JR asked.
Bledsoe snorted. He said, “Them ole boys couldn’t drive nails in a snow bank. I wouldn’t let them step foot on my place.”
By the time he hung up the phone, he was wondering if the sheriff was involved, though that went against everything he’d ever known about Jack Bledsoe.
He’d heard folks talk about paranoia, but he’d never felt it until now: a chill behind your breastbone, wouldn’t seem to thaw. His people had come out of Howell County, Missouri; before that, Tennessee—Appalachian hill-folk, a long line of Scots-Irish bootleggers, long riders, barroom brawlers. They were fractious, short-tempered, at times. Certainly clannish. But not exactly paranoid. It was just good sense to assume anyone who wasn’t family was trying to fix your flint.
He wasn’t thinking clearly, wasn’t really sleeping. When he managed to drift off, he’d dream of a forest glade festooned with cattle teeth, a floor of white incisors. He dreamt of a boneyard pasture and a black sun in a scarlet sky or an owl on a low branch with a needle in its human hands.
Every morning, he did a head count of his beef and show cattle, and he did another in the afternoon. His Angus cows had always been a bit skeersome, but his Brahmans were little more than pets. He’d thread his way among the silver bodies, touching each blue-gray hump. He felt like he was going a little mad. One night at the supper table, Mary Louise looked over at him and said, “Why, JR.”
She was pointing at his plate with the tines of the fork she held, and he glanced down to see that he’d picked the bones out of the chicken wings he’d been eating and arranged them atop his mashed potatoes like a cairn.
Then he woke one morning from a dream he couldn’t recall and heard rain lashing the side of the house. Mary Louise was still asleep in the bed beside him, her face slack and her lips parted, her bosom rising and falling, rising and falling.
He stood at the window watching the gray sheets of rain. It was a real toad-strangler; he could hardly see twenty yards. He dressed and went in the kitchen to make coffee and by the time he’d sat down, the rain had stopped. He pulled on his rubber boots, tucked his jeans into the leg covers and went to do his morning count.
The Brahmans were under the eaves of the cowshed he’d built just outside the yard. His chow dogs were whining and pawing the fence, and he let down the tailgate of the truck for them to hop into the bed, then drove up to the hay barn in the west pasture where his Angus and Black Baldies would gather during a storm. He parked in the bay and did his count, came up one short, did the count again, and then a third time. One of the Angus steers was missing.
He couldn’t drive to the south pasture without the pickup bogging down, and by the time he got back to the house, a soft drizzle had begun to fall. He went inside to get his slicker.
Mary Louise wasn’t in the kitchen and she wasn’t in the living room and when he walked down the hall to their bedroom, the bed was made and all the pillows arranged against the headboard. He opened the closet and got his slicker from its hanger, then went back up the hallway and poked his head out into the garage: her car was sitting right there.
He stood in the living room numbly. Drops of rain beaded the windows.
“Momma,” he called, “you in here?” He listened to his voice Doppler along the wood-paneled walls. He walked down the hall and went upstairs.
The guest bathroom was empty, as was Jonathan’s old room. He knocked on the door of Mary Louise’s sewing room, then opened it and stepped inside. Without knowing why, he closed the door behind him and stood in the center of the room.
She enjoyed working in here because of the light from the south-facing windows. Her dress mannequin was in the corner—a headless torso on a walnut stand—and her antique sewing machine sat on its mahogany table against the wall. She’d been after him for a new electric model, but he liked that she did things the old way. The noise of the foot treadle was a comfort to him.
He heard a door slam downstairs, and he was about to walk out when, outside, Gretchen and Moses began to howl. He stepped over to the window. Water dripped from the eaves and through the light screen of rain he saw the dogs standing at the fence that enclosed the yard, ears back and hackles raised, rucking up a chorus. Out in the pasture, not fifty yards away, the Angus steer lay on its belly in a rumpled patch of bluestem, its legs bent at crazy angles, as if it had been dropped from a great height. From the bridge of its nose all the way around its lower jaw, a circle of the black hide had been sheared away.
He stood there, watching, trying to ignore the howling. Nothing he’d done, no one he’d spoken to, had brought him any closer to an answer, and suddenly he knew this would keep happening until his entire herd was gone. Turning, his eye fell on the sewing dummy again. The charcoal-colored dress Mary Louise was making hung over the torso like loose flaps of flesh and he saw how perfect the joinery, how precise the cuts. He stepped over and fingered the cloth. On a small table, beside bolts of fabric, lay a set of stainless steel X-ACTO knives. He glanced out the window at the mutilated steer, then back at the dummy, and the hair rose along his forearms. His heart began hammering against the thin wall of his chest and he could hear blood rushing in his ears.
Ain’t no way, he thought. Little woman, wife and mother, no more hurt in her than a sparrow. Georgie on her bosom in the hospital not three hours old and her face lit up like a sunbeam. She’d held him just the same after he went through that windshield down in Bowlegs, summer of ’62, had changed out his bedpan for two weeks while he was laid up, never once crinkled her nose. Thirty years and hadn’t asked for anything but some cash for the sewing store or not to have to sit around on a failing farm while he—
He looked out the window and he could see Mary Louise’s face that day in the south pasture, calm as a millpond. Wouldn’t listen to him. Wanted to see for herself.
Go around playing cowboy.
He stared at the bolt of fabric on her worktable, the cuts so clean.
“Ain’t no way,” he whispered, as if speaking the words would make them true.
A man makes decisions about what to believe and he makes decisions about what he won’t. He would auction off the herd, sell his ranch to Harjo or one of the oilmen, whoever made the best offer. His grandfather was a cattleman, his father too, but his days of raising cattle were over. He could stand knowing someone was dismembering his stock. He could stand suspecting his friends, his neighbors, even the sheriff. But his wife of thirty years? That was the last feather.
He heard Mary Louise on the stairs. “Daddy,” she called, “are you up here?”
That was a good question, he thought. All he’d wanted was to figure out what was happening to his cows, but now he decided he didn’t need to know. Wasn’t going to think about that anymore, wasn’t going to do it.
JR turned from the window and started across the room.
“Yes,” he said, and his voice sounded strange to him. He reached for the knob and opened the door.
Fiction often involves movement—in both the literal and figurative sense. The reader, accumulating pages, follows a character’s emotional and physical journey. The writer, accumulating drafts, goes in search of an elusive answer to a difficult question. For us—Rickey Fayne and Carrie R. Moore—fiction pays homage to places left and longed for, especially when it comes to the South.
In the winter of 2021, I met Rickey at the Michener Center for Writers. Like so many of our peers, I felt shaken by the pandemic, taking classes on Zoom and trying to write without the in-person communities MFAs often promise. Then– Rickey’s manuscript appeared in workshop. It reimagined the story of the Devil, who in Rickey’s telling, received a deal from Jesus: free Black folk from legacies of slavery and earn the chance to reenter heaven. Rickey’s pages were soulful, relentlessly honest, full of profound grace. I read as the Devil pursued generations of the Laurent family, offering each descendant a shaky salvation in the hopes of earning freedom for them both. Rickey’s work reminded me of home, of the South as I knew it. He was writing the way I hoped to, which is to say, he was complicating the people and places I loved. For years after that class, we traded work before we ever met in person. Now, his manuscript has become the novel The Devil Three Times, which was released May 13 by Little, Brown.
– Carrie R. Moore
I first encountered Carrie’s writing in a novel writing workshop. She shared a draft of her novel about two teens’ troubled relationship to their home, an all-black town known the world over for their stained glass. I tore through it in half a day in awe of Carrie’s prose. Her descriptions were rich, evocative, and kinetic. But what I was most taken with was the deep sense of place, the way this town felt alive. She’d written a book that catered to my readerly tastes. I feel the same about her debut short story collection Make Your Way Home, out from Tin House July 15th. Here, Carrie turns her attention to real places all throughout the South, delving into their histories, and peopling them with characters as tangible as anyone you might meet out on the street. I am beyond thrilled that her writing is finally out in the world.
– Rickey Fayne
Now, in the summer of our debuts, we decided to interview each other about how we arrived at our characters, the complexities of desires, and getting back home.
Carrie R. Moore: The Devil Three Times is so daring with its religious references (to this practicing Christian, in particular!). I’m floored by the amount of complexity it affords the Devil. He’s unsettling, and at the same time, I have a deep empathy for your version of him. Was there anything that pursued you as you wrote the novel? Something you just couldn’t shake until you’d gotten it right on the page?
Rickey Fayne: I was terrified of the Devil when I was kid. One of the things that separates the Black church from mainstream Christianity is the emphasis on immanence over transcendence. It’s as if the figures in the Bible are still living and you might one day encounter them in the world. I thought that one day I was going to turn the corner and he was going to be there waiting with a bargain for my soul too good to refuse. I could feel the shame that would be visited upon me when that happened. Part of my motivation for writing the Devil in this way was to pay homage to this attribute of Black religion and to find a way to forgive myself for not being perfect. I think a lot of people who grew up in the church were made to feel guilt for actions both real and imagined. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, what hope do any of us have? None. But, if there’s hope for the Devil, there’s hope for everyone.
CRM: I definitely feel that sensation in your novel, especially the sense of shame that affects so many of the characters, whether they struggle with addiction, passing, or desire for the wrong person. And of course, there’s the Devil’s shame in his separation from God. It’s hard not to feel shame when being imperfect has such a cost, when you’ve been shunned or kicked out of someplace meaningful, like heaven in the Devil’s case.
RF: Where do yourown characters come from? Do you see or hear them first, or do you start with a situation and allow that to give rise to them?
CRM: They come from emotional extremes. Much of Make Your Way Home arose from my own inner turmoil, from moments when I felt like I was struggling with multiple ways of being. In my twenties, I wouldn’t just feel anger or disappointment or acute self-awareness. I would almost watch myself having those emotions and try to suppress them, as if that would afford me safety or control. I remember a specific instance where a former friend of mine said something deeply disappointing and hurtful about Black women’s desirability. Half of me felt a profound, unshakable anger. But the other half was aware of how easily people perceive Black women as angry, and this was the half that wanted to project some more positive emotion, even if my rage was justified and pretending otherwise wore me out.
I gave those internal conflicts to my characters. Cherie in “Naturale” has my anger. Claire in “How Does Your Garden Grow?” has my fear of trusting others. Damonia in “Gather Here Again” has my simultaneous hope and apathy for a better future in this country. Every character is born from one emotion or another that I’ve wrestled with late into the night. It’s not that I see or hear my characters, but I feel them, if that makes sense. Hopefully, that doesn’t sound crazy.
If there’s hope for the Devil, there’s hope for everyone.
Rickey Fayne
RF: It most certainly doesn’t. I know exactly what you mean. I think this is what Du Bois was trying to get at with his talk of double-consciousness, the “seeing one’s self through the eyes of another” of it all. But, more often than not, we spend so much time worrying about the “double” that we forget consciousness. Which is why I love your stories so much. You’re mapping out the inner life of Black feeling over the Southern landscape and working toward a deeper understanding of what unites us as Black Southerners outside the experience of race and it’s a joy to behold.
CRM: I deeply appreciate that. How do your characters come to you?
RF: It’s similar for me. I think of many of the characters in The Devil Three Times as versions of myself that might have existed if time and circumstance had had something else to say. All of them have something of my own feeling and experience. Reverend Walter’s eulogy for Lucille, his mother, is something akin to what I might have said if I’d had it in me to stand up at my own father’s funeral. Lucy’s having to choose between her art and her familial obligations mirrors how I felt when I looked up and realized that I’d spent the last few years of my grandparents lives on a dissertation only a handful of people would ever read. I don’t know that I was aware of these connections as I was writing but, once they were down, and I was able to look back over them they were disconcertingly obvious.
CRM: I can feel that realness in your characters. My favorite writers put their distress and unanswerable questions in their work.
RF: Speaking of unanswerable questions, I’m curious about what first compelled you to write about the South. In each of your stories, even before I’m told where I am, I can feel the South in the logic of thought, the rendering of image, the rhythm of speech. Then, once I’m pulled into the story, I see it in the presentness of the past and the problems your characters face. Why do you turn to the South over and over again?
CRM: I’m deeply interested in uncomfortable intimacies, in moments where you get so close that you can’t ignore a truth that makes you flinch. I was born and raised in the Atlanta area, which means the South has many warm memories for me. It’s where I ate tomatoes from my aunt’s garden and grew up alongside my cousins and first realized how easy it was to drive and suddenly end up in the mountains or at the beach. I have a deep love for the places and people that made me. And at the same time, I can’t ignore the way the South has been romanticized: moonlight and magnolias, the plantation wedding, the glamorization of the Confederacy. While conducting research for this collection, there were many times when I would encounter some law or historical event that absolutely horrified me, that was worse than anything I could’ve imagined. At their core, the stories in the collection are love stories—but they have to be honest. I write about the Black South again and again because I want to get that balance right. I’m always trying to make sense of the relationship between past and present.
Did you feel something similar while writing The Devil Three Times? My approach was to include as many stories as I could within the collection, but I can’t help but notice what the scope of your novel allows you to do in terms of time and its impact on the Laurent family.
RF: I did. What the past means for the present is always at the forefront of my mind when I write. At the same time, one of the most important revelations for me as a reader was that people throughout human history have largely worried about and wanted the same sorts of things. I wanted to show how historical forces inflect the worries and wants of one family over the course of hundreds of years. So although the external pressures bearing down on the characters toward the end of the book look very different from what their ancestors faced during slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights era, internally they are all going through the same sorts of things. We used to sit around eating whole tomatoes fresh from the garden too, sprinkling salt onto them as we went, and I like to imagine our ancestors, no matter how bad things were, found time to do the same.
CRM: So true. With the first of my stories in the collection, “When We Go, We Go Downstream,” that feeling was the only way I could even begin to write characters who were enslaved, since there’s so much potential for a failure of research and imagination. What I wanted most was to capture my characters’ central human experiences. Even if liberation was the goal, I kept wondering about the small ways they’d try to take care of themselves, their inclinations toward family, the loves they would have craved. I kept seeking their interior lives. For many of the characters in the collection, actually, that became different forms of love and connecting with another person.
RF: It’s so interesting that you cite love as the unifying factor of your collection. I hadn’t thought about it in that way before but I definitely see it. I’m curious about this idea of uncomfortable intimacy, when I hear the term, I can’t help but think of the interpersonal dynamics in your stories, particularly “All Skin is Clothing,” where the younger brother sees his older sister as an extension of himself, or “Cottonmouths,” where the mother and daughter share pregnancies—that last scene where the daughter pours her mother tea gave me chills. Can you say more about what drew you to explore that kind of relationship? Is it still love when it goes that far? Or does it become something else?
CRM: My characters are looking for love in its best sense—what they want is for someone to know them for the entirety of who they are, to make space for their joys and hurts and vulnerabilities. Complete safety, in other words. And still that’s one-sided. They haven’t yet learned love as an act of service or, more specifically, how to give and receive care at the same time. The younger brother character in “All Skin is Clothing” is so emotionally wounded by experiencing gunfire that he sees his sister as a refuge. He’s right to. He’s a child who’s been through a harrowing experience. The same is true of Twyla in “Cottonmouths.” She only wants to be close to her mother as her pregnancy thrusts her into early womanhood. I’m always interested in how our needs—even when justified—can unsettle other people or become burdensome. I’m writing about how you get so close to another person through a continuous process of sharing and asking—until they get weary and have to take a step back. I’m interested in love as work.
RF: That’s interesting, I was more interested in what desire does to a person. At some point in my education, I was introduced to Lacan’s idea that desire is lack. But this idea is kind of reductive. In grad school, I encountered the work of Deleuze and Guattari and found more to grasp in their idea that desire is a productive force, the only means by which one entity may strive to become other than what it is. Lack presupposes a state of perfection to which one might return, whereas “becoming” is an open-ended process that could, potentially, lead to heretofore unimagined possibilities.
CRM: I love that. Whenever I write something that verges on the romantic, I’m always thinking about what that love—or perhaps desire—will mean to those characters, even outside the particular relationship.
RF: Exactly,we all have a story we tell ourselves about who we are, what we value, and what our limits are. After you develop intense feelings for someone else, your grip on the narrative slackens. Desire allows you to imagine alternative ways of being, to see life with fresh eyes and know that they’re capable of more. This sort of change can be positive or negative. For James—one of the few characters in the book who comes to understand that love is work—these intense feelings help him realize that he can do difficult things. For Porter, James’s brother, the after-effect of desire is the realization that he can leave all his problems behind.
CRM: Your characters’ personal relationships to desire—and its dark side—is one of the most intriguing elements to track throughout the Laurent family’s generations. Without giving too much away, some of the characters—such as Asa and Louis—initially lust after people who aren’t “technically” blood relatives, though this soon changes over the generations. Eventually, the limit stretches, until what counts as “sin” becomes particular to each character. Even then, what matters more is how they think of themselves in the wake of their actions. It’s astonishing.
RF: I’m thinking now about the title of your collection, Make Your Way Home, the epigraph from Jesmyn Ward, and something you said once about leaving the South, seeing it for what it was and is, and then returning. Did you know before you started writing what you wanted to write about all this or did you have to get it all down first to understand it?
I can’t ignore the way the South has been romanticized: moonlight and magnolias, the plantation wedding, the glamorization of the Confederacy.
Carrie R. Moore
CRM: I didn’t know, at first. I only knew I wanted to write about how multi-faceted the South really is, in terms of Black cultures and geographies. Much later, I realized I was writing about creating a home in a hostile environment, whether that hostility involved political and historical forces or interpersonal relationships. If I were to guess, based on how well I got to know you and your work during our time in our MFA, I’d imagine that’s true for you too.
The last word in my story collection was always “back.” Tell me, how did you arrive at the last word of your novel: “home”?
RF: When I was living at home, all I thought about was how much I wanted to get away. It wasn’t until I left that I realized what that place meant for me. I grew up at the intersection of Fayne Rd and Fayne Ln on land my family has lived on for almost two hundred years. By the time I came along it was filled with people who loved and wanted nothing but the best for me but, by the time I finally realized this, most of what made home home—my grandparents, my aunts, uncles, and cousins,—was gone. That is part of how I identify with the Devil. He didn’t realize Heaven was paradise until he left and by then it was too late to go back. Of course, I didn’t see any of this until I was several drafts in, which is when I wrote that last section. It came to me fully formed, all at once and it wasn’t until after I typed that last word that everything clicked.
CRM: My story is the same as yours. I grew up in Georgia, then began college in California, where I thought my life would begin. I wanted to make movies, then write novels. From there, the South called out to me. It kept showing up in my work.
But I think writing allows for that. If it can’t return you home, it can get you close.
In the early aughts—when I was in high school—my friends and I often chose Claire’s as our meetup location at the mall. We perused the accessories and sometimes could even afford to buy a trendy charm bracelet or puka shell necklace. One humid summer night in Cleveland, a copper arm band caught my eye. It was the kind of thing I imagined Cleopatra might have worn, curled several times around the upper arm, each end adorned with the ruby-eyed head of a snake. The ornament looked out of place hanging from a shelf in Claire’s, as out of place as I felt standing there in a polo shirt and loose cargo shorts, gawking at it. I tried it on, walking around the store, glancing in every mirror. My friends were running late. After a few minutes I stood in front of where I’d found it, considering if I’d really wear it if I purchased it.
“It’s fine for you to try that on as long as you don’t buy it.” A saleswoman had crept up behind me. She was Black, with graying hair pulled back into a tight bun, and she wore stockings, and the sensible, kitten-heeled shoes of a woman who never missed her Sunday church service. I didn’t know her, and yet I knew her very well.
“I’m sorry?”
“You wouldn’t actually buy that. You’re not a girl; it’s not for you.”
She had clocked me.
“No, ma’am, I guess not.”
I typically felt invisible, but with one glance, one comment, this woman let me know that she could see me for what I was—and what I wasn’t.
I placed the arm band into her outstretched hand and rushed from the store, my eyes lowered to the ground as I frantically texted my friends to meet me elsewhere. I was angry and embarrassed, but mostly I felt exposed. I’d been standing by myself in a store meant for teenage girls in a suburban mall in middle America. I typically felt invisible, but with one glance, one comment, this woman let me know that she could see me for what I was—and what I wasn’t.
A year later, a friend and I visited a different mall, a fancier mall, one that didn’t even have a Claire’s. We walked around, he and I, deep in conversation about sexual identity and stereotypes, when he asked me quite calmly, if I had ever considered the idea that I might actually be a girl—one who’d simply been born into the wrong body.
I considered his question. His tone was gentle, but his query was sharp, pointed, and it lodged itself inside of me. I was aware of their existence—because of the T in the acronym LGBT, and because I’d seen episodes of The Nanny and Will and Grace—but trans people had always been, to me, more theoretical than real.
Being “trans” seemed an unthinkable way to move through the world. I was already Black, and gay, and the son of a well-known Baptist minister. I was a high-school senior who had somehow managed to survive at a deeply conservative all boys prep school. Soon I would be a freshman at a progressive liberal arts college outside Philadelphia. I had worked hard in school, convinced that leaving Cleveland and never looking back was the only answer if I wanted to live my best Black queer life. This college—a campus where The Princeton Review said it was easier to come out as queer than as a Republican—was my reward. I wanted to step into the freedom of the real world, and distance myself from the context in which I was raised. I was not looking for further marginalization.
I told my friend that I was not transgender, but his question punctured me like a bullet that wouldn’t, or couldn’t, be removed.
I first had the idea for an essay series centering trans and gender non-conforming writers of color in the fall of 2021. I had recently been named the Editor-in-chief of Electric Literature, a groundbreaking digital literary magazine with an annual readership of more than 3 million. A few months earlier, I’d publicly disclosed my identity as a trans woman, something I’d been preparing to do for two years in response to a question I’d been asking myself for sixteen. When I was named to this new role, I was widely celebrated as the first Black, openly transgender woman to helm a major literary publication.
Around this time, the comedian Dave Chappelle released a new Netflix special, The Closer, in which he pitted the Black community and the LGBTQ community against each other, arguing that queer white people are better off in contemporary American society than Black people and often participate in the racist marginalization of Black people. The role played by different marginalized groups in each other’s oppression deserves a richly considered and nuanced conversation, but instead, Chappelle completely erased the existence of those who live at the intersection of Black and queer identities.
Around this same time, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie published an essay which doubled down on an evasive response she gave when asked whether or not a trans woman is a woman: “…My feeling is that trans women are trans women.” This puzzled me. As a woman who claims to be in alliance with the LGBTQ+ community, her choice to write the essay felt like an intentional anti-trans dog whistle to her global army of supporters, many of whom are self-identified terfs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists).
For all the dialogue surrounding trans identity, the loudest voices in this conversation were never trans people, and in particular, never trans people of color.
But Chappelle infuriated me. The popularity of his special, and the conversation it ignited, remained a major talking point in news media for weeks. Netflix defended the special, resulting in a walkout by their trans employees. Over weeks of social media and news media discourse, what I noticed was this: for all the dialogue surrounding trans identity, the loudest voices in this conversation were never trans people, and in particular, never trans people of color. We were the existential center of a cultural boiling point—and our voices were almost nowhere to be found.
From my fury was born Both/And, a series of fifteen essays published online by Electric Literature, with the goal of elevating emerging trans and gender nonconforming writers of color to a national literary platform. But there was one key distinction—these writers would have the unique opportunity to be edited by a trans writer of color. Electric Literature quickly fundraised to support the series, meeting and then exceeding our goal in just one week, proving that writers and readers alike were hungry for these essays. The popularity of the series, which was published on electricliterature.com in 2023, as well as the ever-growing far-right political targeting of the LGBTQ+ community, further proves how necessary these essays are.
A few nights ago, Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, during which Republicans spent hundreds of millions of dollars on anti-trans ads. As I watched the results, my heart fell from my chest. I knew what was coming, and predictably, less than twelve hours later, I tuned into morning shows where I saw political pundits—from both parties—blaming the trans community for the election results. Early analysis saw folks saying that the Democratic party was out of touch with the majority of American voters, that it was too woke, that American families didn’t want grown men playing sports against little girls. The absurdity of that statement aside, I kept thinking to myself, But I’m an American voter, too.
What followed was a profound sense of displacement, politically speaking. While my values are progressive, I have always been a voter motivated by pragmatism and harm reduction. I was raised in a Black, middle class family of churchgoers by parents born between the silent and the baby boomer generations. I was raised to vote in every election. And I was raised to vote without attaching a grave sense of preciousness to that vote. It wasn’t necessary to agree with everything my chosen political candidate said, in part because voting wasn’t supposed to be the sum of my political engagement. It was a chess move, a means to an end, and it was the bare minimum. More simply put, I have always been a registered voter, and I have always voted for the Democratic ticket. Given my values, this means I have also, always, held a deep sense of frustration at the party’s continued pursuit of moderate white voters.
I have always worried that when it comes to policy, measures that affirmed and protected my existence would end up on the chopping block.
Being Black, and being queer, I have always worried that when it comes to policy, measures that affirmed and protected my existence would end up on the chopping block. And very often, that’s exactly what happened. But in recent years, public opinion has shifted. Marriage equality, for instance, has been legal for nearly a decade, and folks have largely realized that their heterosexual marriages were never in danger. Perhaps it was the optimism of youth, or the stability of democracy, but I never looked into the future fearing what it held for me, or my community. When faced with the possibility of a rebooted Trump administration, I felt strongly that Kamala Harris needed to win if I was to maintain any sense of safety.
Whenever progress is made, there’s corresponding backlash. Right now we live in a time of unprecedented targeting against the LGBTQ+ community, and yet we stand on the precipice of an even darker era. Being a writer, I turn to literature in times of darkness—the writing of it, and more importantly, the reading of it. In the face of a political class that, at best, hesitates to stand beside us, and at worst works to bring about our ruin, I introduce you to the brilliant writers in this anthology, all of whom live at the fraught intersection of race and gender identity.
Each of these essays is a wonder, something taken from the heart of its writer and flung, with delicious abandon, into this world. Each essay leaves an imprint, promising to reverberate inside the reader. There is Akwaeke Emezi, who meditates on what it means to be beautiful across gender, and Tanaïs, who writes about the fantasy of making feverish love to another femme, to mark the occasion of a landmark birthday. Meredith Talusan remembers a casual hookup that awakened the woman within, and Gabrielle Bellot travels to Hawaii with her wife, where the eruption of a volcano inspires her inner goddess. These are just a handful of the essays that turn their gaze inward, and backward, straddling—and sometimes weaving—what it means to be man or woman, masc or femme.
There are also essays that turn their gaze fearlessly forward, conjuring the sort of tender, loving future we so rarely get to live. Zeyn Joukhadar considers what it means to be part of a future their ancestors never lived to see. Kaia Ball dreams about their estranged father coming out as trans, and finding a way to accept them. Jonah Wu brings the reader along as he jumps from the proverbial cliff into the world of hormone replacement therapy, embracing a more masculine future. And A.L. Major considers the cost of creating the life, and family, of their choosing.
Historically, trans people have been forced to imagine, or conjure, representation of ourselves into existing narratives that never sought to include us, often using the stories and fictional lives of canonically cishet characters as foundations for possible trans stories. Both/And is unabashed in its portrayal of the fullness of our lives. These essays consider imagination and fantasy as real-world liberation, the heightened visibility and invisibility of trans bodies, trans joy, laughter and love, and trans rage, revenge, and loss.
My community is under vicious attack on every level, but we refuse to disappear, and I refuse to allow our stories, and our lives, to be erased.
At Electric Literature, we believe that literature has the power to shape public consciousness. Storytelling breaks down barriers in numerous ways; perhaps the most powerful being the building of empathy. My community is under vicious attack on every level, but we refuse to disappear, and I refuse to allow our stories, and our lives, to be erased. The time is now for trans and gender nonconforming writers of color to amplify our own voices on our own terms. While the culture is obsessed with us, that obsession has been weaponized in an effort to legislate us out of existence. But it simply won’t work because we’re already here. We’ve been here, telling our stories in our own words, our voices rising to the rafters, ringing so loud that we’re impossible to ignore.
We’ve all heard the groaning, whether in reviews, in books and articles, or on social media: The writer-protagonist is out of touch, navel gazing, insular, unimaginative…The critiques go on and on. These days, any book that features a writer as the main character seems to face this blanket assessment before the spine in question has even been cracked.
Sometimes the critique is valid, but I’d argue that we also need protagonists who are writers, that some stories can only be told through a writer. The writer-protagonist in a novel might be the engine of the book, its central obsession. Or they might be used as a frame that expands the world of the central story. Or they could be a single brushstroke at the end that changes what you’ve just read. To me, the possibilities seem almost endless, and each writer-protagonist offers nuance to the elements of fiction.
My debut novel, Atomic Hearts, is about a writer. The book follows Gertie at two points in her life. In the first, she’s sixteen and spending a secret-filled summer in Sioux Falls with her father, who is struggling with an opioid addiction. She finds escape in the pages of a fantasy novel she’s trying to write, about a girl transported to another world. In the second, when Gertie is thirty-one, we find her trying to find a way, through her novel-in-progress, to reconcile herself with that fateful summer. Teenage Gertie struggles with the ever-darker worlds of her life and her fantasy novel, while adult Gertie’s rejection of fantasy becomes a barrier to inspiration. But it’s through Gertie’s writing that she learns, in different ways, to define what’s real, what’s imagined, and to know when the boundary between the two should be blurred. The books on this list—and many others that fit this theme—were an inspiration to me as I wrote Atomic Hearts. They loom large in my imagination, showing why, and how, writer-protagonists can dispel common knee-jerk reactions to become a tool of versatility in a novel.
On Christmas morning in Mind of Winter,Holly Judge wakes up with the scrap of a line of a poem in her head. She feels, for the first time in years, a physical urge to write. From there, a single snowy day unfolds in a nightmarish spiral as Holly moves from room to room preparing for the arrival of company, searching for the time to write, and wondering at her daughter’s increasingly odd behavior. The book’s ending changes everything, but it’s Holly’s internal musings about poetry and the sense that there is an invisible, physical forcefield keeping Holly from sitting down to work on a poem that make the story vibrate with an odd electricity. That Holly is a poet becomes a tool of mystery in the novel. We feel her muscles twitching toward a pen, but she never quite gets there. It’s discomfort (in a good way) from beginning to end.
As Yoli’s sister Elf tries again and again to die, Yoli is trying to write “the real book.” Yoli, best known for her Rodeo Rhonda series, is in financial straits after her latest divorce, and meanwhile Elf begs to be taken to Switzerland—a place where she’d have the right to die. As Yoli’s resistance to Elf’s idea deteriorates, she starts to wonder how she might pay for such a trip. The answer is to furiously, in a span of days, write another installment of Rodeo Rhonda. All My Puny Sorrows is of course about so much more than the economics of writing, but Yoli’s financial maneuvering—in a way, to save her sister by helping her kill herself—is a devastating, unglamorous, desperate look at the writing life as a means to make money for ourselves and our families.
The year in which Parable of the Sower begins (2024) has come and gone, but its message and predictions are increasingly true. Lauren Oya Olamina, the novel’s first-person protagonist, lives in a walled neighborhood outside of Los Angeles and imagines a philosophy that defines God as Change, which she eventually calls Earthseed: The Books of the Living. Passages from Earthseed frame each chapter, but the novel is also told through Lauren’s journal entries. Lauren also suffers from hyperempathy, a disorder where she feels the physical pain of those near her—which is fitting, for a writer of philosophy, to experience so closely the feelings of others. Following the devastation of Lauren’s neighborhood, she heads north with a group of survivors—and she brings her belief system, which reshapes not just the post-apocalyptic world she lives in but also the idea of God and faith. The blend of formal philosophy and personal writing connects us intimately to Lauren while expanding our view of what survival really means. Parable of the Sower shows how hope begins with words, and how one can transform words into change.
The narrator of Red Pill leaves his family in New York for a three-month residency at the Deuter Center in Germany, ostensibly to work on a project called “The Lyric I”—but he realizes soon that he has no interest in working on this project; in his words, he just “wanted a break.” So, instead of writing, he binges a cop show called Blue Lives alone in his room—which is antithetical to the Deuter Center’s philosophy of communal work spaces. As he binges, he comes to feel his writing is meaningless, and he grows increasingly paranoid that someone is watching him. When by chance he meets the creator of Blue Lives, Anton, he’s certain that Anton is “red-pilling” his viewers. The narrator also feels he’s meant to expose Anton and save the world from Anton’s alt-right worldview. Is the narrator insane, or is what he fears true? Is it possible to know the difference in a world driven by madness? (Adding to the nightmare is the fact the Deuter Center is located across a lake from the villa where the Final Solution was planned.) But threading through Red Pill’s grim, triumphless plot is an autofictional layer: It’s not just the story of a writer; it’s a story the narrator is writing down for us, the readers. Though relentless in its study of our political danger, Red Pill still holds on to the idea that through writing we can try to tell our stories, even if the madness of the world feels both like it’s been with us forever and like it’s just getting started.
Fangirl starts on Cath’s first day of college at the University of Nebraska, but we learn that for years she’s been writing fanfiction online for a wizard series under the name Magicath. Many readers are likely drawn to this YA book for the romance between Cath and her roommate’s ex-boyfriend, Levi, but what I loved was the way storytelling, for Cath, plays crucially into her formation of self as she takes her first steps into adulthood. Cath clings to the idea she can keep writing her fanfiction, even as her college fiction class—and, more and more, her own identity as a writer—encourage her to expand into her own imagination. Fangirl is by no means a perfect novel—fears (and jokes about) sexual assault by random strangers on a dark sidewalk are so exaggerated they end up making the real everyday threats faced by women and girls, and perpetrated most often by the men they know, seem unserious. But in its approach to the development of a young writer, Fangirl is a touching journey. We see writing as a means of coming of age, and by the end we glimpse the beginning of one writer’s quest to find her own voice.
One night in 1935, when Briony is an imaginative 13-year-old, she accuses the son of her family’s servant, Robbie, of committing a crime he’s innocent of. In general, Briony has a natural inclination toward storytelling; and in particular her mind on that night is influenced by a moment she witnessed between her sister, Cecilia, and Robbie earlier that day. In 1940, Cecilia is a nurse and estranged from her family. Robbie’s enlistment is a condition of his release from prison. And Briony, a nurse-in-training, is still a writer. (In a rejection letter from a periodical, with an appearance by Elizabeth Bowen, we read a critique of a scene recognizable as one we’ve read earlier in the book.) While writing is central to Briony throughout the novel, it’s Atonement’s extraordinary metafictional twist of an ending (which I dare not give away to readers out there who don’t know) that to me emphasizes the lengths we’ll go, the detours we’ll take, in life as in writing, to try to find the right ending. It’s a book whose metafictional elements make it so famous it feels almost unnecessary to include it on a reading list 25 years after its publication, but it was probably the first book I read, back in college, that made me realize just how important metafiction can be to a novel.
It’s made clear at several moments in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale that the first-person narrator known to us only as Offred is offering the reader a story. (“Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.”) We know from Offred’s telling that before her capture and conscription as a handmaid to one of Gilead’s “commanders” she worked in a library. She loved books when she was still allowed to have them. While perhaps not professionally a “writer,” Offred is certainly a storyteller with a literary sensibility, one whose voice the architects of Gilead are trying their hardest to silence. In the book’s epilogue, set in 2195 at an academic conference, a Professor Pieixoto of Cambridge University delivers a keynote address on the subject of his discovery and transcription of a collection of thirty cassette tapes found in a footlocker in what used to be Maine, which his partner academic has coined “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which is an intentionally vulgar pun on tail: “That being, to some extent, the bone, as it were, of contention, in that phase of Gileadean society of which our saga treats.”
Near the end of his keynote, Professor Pieixoto scolds Offred for not describing more of the “workings” of the Gileadean empire, or better yet, printing off pages from Commander Waterford’s computer. From this epilogue we learn, for certain, that Gilead has fallen; that Offred was able to record her story, and possibly make it as far as Maine in her escape; and that the world after the fall of Gilead is just as misogynistic, that the academics have little regard for their “anonymous author,” and that Gilead’s worldview was not eradicated, just made, once again, latent.
This postscript changes one’s reading of the pages before it, but to me Pieixoto’s callous critiques enhance the feeling that Offred’s voice is her own. She tells her story as she wishes, and as she is able in her circumstances to tell it. And in Offred’s time, as in our own, telling one’s story is an act of resistance.
My husband and I first met our reproductive endocrinologist (RE) on a cool, weakly lit March afternoon. He sat behind a large desk with a tropical fish tank that spanned the length and height of the wall behind him. I’d come straight from a class and was wearing a jean skirt and leather boots because I needed him to know how sexy and alive I felt. Only in pregnancy is thirty-five considered “geriatric.” At thirty-three, I was still fertile and open to possibilities. Unlike those other women in the waiting room, I wasn’t desperate. I didn’t really need him. I would portray an image of strength. My voice wouldn’t crack, I wouldn’t cry.
Sitting there, I realized I found the doctor attractive. Short, compact and muscular, he pulsed with a sexual energy, as if he could compact the world’s energy in his hands and BOOM, produce a baby. He could definitely help us.
He started with a long series of questions about my health history and our fertility struggles. I did most of the talking with Scott adding details here and there. Each time I spoke, the RE seemed a little impatient, as if he’d heard it all before. He wanted to know how long we’d been trying to have a baby (three and a half years), how old I was when we started trying (twenty-nine), how long it had taken to achieve the first pregnancy (about a year) and then, the second (another year). I tried to focus on what he was saying instead of the brightly colored fish that swam behind his head.
“And the first pregnancy ended—?” He paused. “I’m sorry. I have to ask,” he said.
I was glad for his sensitivity, but that didn’t make it easier.
“About seven weeks,” I said. No matter how often I went over these losses, I was surprised by the depth of emotion that still pooled beneath the surface. Strange details, a secret history. The bathroom I stopped at after teaching my class on the morning the bleeding had started, the old, ugly yellow tiles on the floor at my feet, the shuttle I’d taken up the hill to the parking lot and how sure I was that the student who got on after me could see the pain and fear on my face.
No matter how often I went over these losses, I was surprised by the depth of emotion that still pooled beneath the surface.
“And what happened then?” he said, gently.
I told him how I’d called the doctor’s office and a nurse had suggested rest. How the bleeding had continued and I’d ended up in the ER because I didn’t know how painful a miscarriage would be. I said I’d had a fever and threw up. I didn’t say how the doctor in the ER had put his hand on my leg and said he understood how hard it was, or how I’d appreciated that tenderness.
I looked around the room and tried to focus on the facts. Paper, fluorescent lights, folders, desk, black dress shoes poking out from underneath the desk.
I told him we’d started trying again a few months later and that I’d gotten pregnant for the second time about eight months after that. I said that for two years I’d gone to acupuncture, watched my diet, tried to relax, gone to yoga, tried not to worry, tried to forget how important this all was. I wanted him to see I’d been so, so good.
“And the second pregnancy—what happened then?”
He looked up and pushed a box of tissues toward me.
“I’m sorry, but this is important.”
“We were so happy when we heard a heartbeat at the first ultrasound around eight weeks,” I began.
Scott squeezed my hand.
“I’d been really nauseated the entire time. Then, right around the twelve-week mark, the nausea disappeared. I thought it was normal.”
I pulled a tissue from the box and wiped at my nose.
“We had the second ultrasound in the thirteenth week,” I continued. “We went in thinking everything was fine. That we made it through. But then there was no heartbeat.”
That one sentence conveyed so little about the actual moment. It seemed my clear-eyed strength could not save me from the sudden flood of memories: the OB’s cold instruments and her magenta dress, the way the air had suddenly flattened when she said she couldn’t find a heartbeat. How I’d thought she was wrong at first, that she was mistaken or talking to someone else, how her eyes had filled with tears.
It wasn’t this doctor’s job to care about all that. I held my breath, afraid that if I breathed, it would all come rushing out.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, softly.
We went through the rest quickly. The D & C after the second miscarriage to see if we could determine what had gone wrong and how the tests were inconclusive, and then, later, more remedies, tests and procedures.
“We’ve never had any answers,” I said.
At the end, he took me in for an ultrasound. As he moved the transducer wand around inside of me, he announced that my uterus looked good—really good.
“Nice, smooth lining here,” he said. And I felt proud and happy, as if I were responsible for my fine-looking uterus, as if it were a sign.
Back in his office, he scratched a few more things into my chart and when he finally spoke, it seemed he wanted me to understand the seriousness of my situation.
“At 33, with your history of two miscarriages and no pregnancies in the two years, things don’t look great,” he said.
I stiffened, skeptical. Wasn’t it his job to scare us, to make us believe the only way forward was with his help?
“But what are our chances of conceiving on our own?” I said. “I mean, considering I’ve gotten pregnant twice already?”
“I’d say between 1-2% each month,” he said.
That math didn’t compute. I realized I’d been half expecting him to say that we didn’t need his help. That we should just keep trying on our own and eventually it would happen. Fertility treatments were for couples with a diagnosed problem. We didn’t have a diagnosis, which I wanted to believe meant it would eventually just happen. But now I realized this doctor with all his tests and data had the upper hand. He had the precedence of the hundreds of women he’d worked with before me. Numbers don’t lie. Perhaps, he knew my body better than I did.
He said that IUI, or intrauterine insemination, would be a good place to start. Since we’d managed to get pregnant twice already, maybe we just needed a little help, and IUI was cheaper than IVF. He knew neither procedure would be covered by our HMO insurance. I’d start on Clomid to encourage the production of more egg follicles, and we could try a few rounds.
I studied the family portraits that lined the walls above his head. His beloved wife’s hand on his shoulder, their four beautiful children arrayed around them. I saw now that they had procreated in the bloom of youth. His triathlon calves and lush head of hair, her satisfied smile, said all this. I imagined their mansion and pool, the elite private schools for their children and a Porsche parked along their rose-lined driveway.
I saw now that they had procreated in the bloom of youth.
I thought of our dirty old house and felt a flush of shame. There was the kitchen faucet that sprayed water from the handle and our overgrown lawn. The dusty, unpaved alley, our cheap flooring and windows that leaked whenever it rained. Comparatively, our life decisions suddenly seemed misguided. The way we’d sought meaning over money, our teaching jobs and dreams of art, our sensible shared car with its 150,000 miles. The picnics, camping trips and thrift stores. I saw it all so clearly now. We needed more money, and we needed our youth back. We needed better plans, better hair, better teeth, clean countertops. But it was too late now.
That spring, Scott and I had completed a series of foster-to-adopt classes and an adoption home study, which meant we were almost certified to become foster and adoptive parents with LA County. After three and a half years of trying to get pregnant, it seemed it was time to move on. We’d always agreed that we would adopt if we were unable to conceive. But instead of feeling excitement as we neared the end of our certification process, I’d begun to wonder what if. What if we adopted a child and that journey was full of uncertainty and loss, and what if we encountered special difficulties with our adopted child, would I wonder what might have happened if we’d tried fertility medicine? I didn’t want to live with regrets.
I also couldn’t seem to shake a longing to experience pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding, to see what our biological child would look like, whether this imaginary child would have Scott’s sense of humor or endless curiosity, my pessimism or shyness. I have trouble explaining this desire even now, how overpowering it was, and why, instead of waning, it had only intensified over the many years we’d tried and failed to conceive a baby. Maybe it was simply about not getting what I wanted. Maybe it was a compulsion to keep striving for something that always seemed just out of reach, a stubborn belief that my hard work and persistence would be rewarded. Maybe it was simply that I had always pictured myself as a mother someday, or at least having the power to make that choice, and I couldn’t yet accept that my body couldn’t do it.
Before that meeting at the fertility clinic, we’d been planning to spend the summer in Mexico where we would attend language school and travel. After the meeting, we decided to keep our Mexico plan but instead of becoming foster-to-adopt parents upon our return, we’d begin fertility treatments.
We’d thought one last fling before adopting a child would be fun, but we were also hoping, I think, that I might get pregnant while we were away. Maybe in Mexico it would be possible to forget about getting pregnant, which many of my friends and family still believed was the answer. Just relax, they said, which was more than a little annoying –it felt impossible. I couldn’t forget how badly I wanted a baby after three years of trying for one. I felt as though they were reducing a real medical problem to an issue of positive thinking, essentially blaming me for my failure. The problem was, I so easily fell into the same magical thinking too.
For four weeks, Scott and I studied Spanish and lived with a host family in the city of Oaxaca. After class each day in the afternoon heat, we wandered the cobblestone streets. In the town zócalo, a teacher’s strike was playing out. Soldiers rode around in the backs of pickup trucks, their guns pointed out toward the sidewalks where we walked. We stopped at bookstores and museums. We sat under trees. We ate tlayudas and tacos on the street. We went to the annual Guelaguetza arts festival and were delighted when Lila Downs took a seat in front of us.
After the month was over, we travelled to the Yucatan. In Tulum, we stayed at a small hotel and caught taxis to the beach. We waded into the turquoise water and slept under the shade of a palapa. The heat was all-consuming. In the afternoons, moody clouds gathered overhead while parrots, parakeets, Yucatan jays and blue-crowned Motmots called out from the jungle. Sometimes, lightning and thunder broke across the sky and then rain fell in great torrents like waterfalls.
A small soaking pool sat in the middle of the courtyard at our hotel. The pool had smooth concrete walls, white tile and an arbor with a vine of flowers for shade. We’d sit there in the afternoons, usually just the two of us, ordering drinks from the bar and watching the other guests. The hotel was half-empty in the middle of hurricane season, and I felt empty too—empty and aimless, but also, free. I sat close to Scott in the cool water, book in one hand, my other resting on his muscular thigh or grazing his swim trunks. When we returned to our room, we were hungry, sick with lust and love. Afterward, I’d feel salty and ironed-out lying next to him under the fan, still heavy with need. I realized I didn’t care about babies anymore. The rest of my life, I decided, I just wanted to feel this way. I wanted pleasure, not pain. I wanted to be in my body and fully in the world.
I wanted pleasure, not pain. I wanted to be in my body and fully in the world.
At dusk, we trekked to town, mud splattered across our calves from the wet streets. I wore dresses that came off easily. We played cards and drank beer, cracking jokes and people-watching in hot, humid bars. We gossiped and practiced our Spanish, and forbade each other from speaking of children. We’d spent years trying to conceive a baby, years that now felt wasted. Away from home, I saw the possibility of forward momentum. Yes, there was a melancholy in my life that wasn’t there before, but here, my sadness took on an exquisitely breakable quality like pain that becomes pleasure, like exoskeletons crushed to sand. Outside of me somehow.
But when the summer ended, we came home to our regular lives. I still was not pregnant. My best friend was about to give birth to her second child, and I helped throw a baby shower for her. I’d started thinking about getting pregnant when she gave birth to her first child, and now four years later, she was having her second. The familiar longing returned. I wanted to know what my friends and coworkers knew, what my sister, mother and cousins knew. It was inexplicable, this biological pining, an unshakeable baby fever.
I was also newly hopeful. I now had a secret weapon that my friends knew nothing about. Baby showers were difficult. I always felt like an outsider as I listened to the incessant talk of breastfeeding and childbirth, sleepless nights and teething toddlers. But now I had science and technology on my side. Surely, my turn was coming.
A package of medical supplies arrived sometime that fall after three failed IUI’s and we’d made the decision to move on to IVF. When I unpacked it all, my medications consumed half of our kitchen table. There were bandages, alcohol swabs, sharps, a sharps container, syringes, folic acid and baby aspirin. There were vials of Menopur for injections that would hopefully stimulate extra egg follicles, boxes of Endometrin and Estrace to strengthen the lining of the uterus. The side effects, I noticed, were all the same: breast tenderness, headache, nausea, irritability and drowsiness. They were also signs of pregnancy, which meant, I realized, that I’d be obsessing over whether treatments were working or if it was simply the hormones.
I texted a photo to Scott. I thought this might be the beginning of a series of photos documenting the life of our child. Look! I’d say to our future child. Isn’t it funny this is how you were conceived?
I made the hormone injections Scott’s job because it was something he could physically engage in after all this time. He hated causing me pain, but his discomfort gave me some small pleasure—maybe now he would understand how hard this had been for me.
One night I had to do the injection myself because I was teaching late and the timing of the shot had to be exact. Ten minutes before class, I unlocked the faculty restroom and entered, glad to find it empty. Inside a stall, I sat with my back against the wall facing the toilet. I removed my supplies from a paper bag and arranged them on a paper towel that I laid on the tile floor: swab, syringe, needle, vial of follicle stimulating hormones. The nurse had shown me how to attach the needle to the syringe, puncture the bladder, turn it upside down and pull the solution into the syringe. I flicked it with my fingertip to remove the air bubbles. I unzipped my pants and pinched an unbruised section of skin on my belly. The bruises didn’t have time to heal between injections, but still, belly was better than thigh—more than once, a jolt of pain had exploded through my leg when Scott had hit a nerve. It wasn’t the idea of pain that bothered me now though. It was my uterus and ovaries somewhere behind the skin, a fear that the needle would reach all the way inside of me. I took another breath and poked my skin with the needle. It bounced off, and a bright dot of blood appeared. I can’t do this, I thought. But not doing it was not an option.
I took another breath. This time I jabbed with more force and like that, the needle slid right in. I laughed out loud as I watched as the fluid disappear under my skin. I’d done it! This one impossible thing that would make other things possible.
A couple of weeks later, I found myself back in my RE’s office to see how many follicles I’d grown. The more follicles you produce, the better the chances of IVF success. Scott couldn’t get away from work that morning, so my best friend had come with me. When the doctor walked in, I felt suddenly foolish. Grown women shouldn’t need hand-holding, his face seemed to say. I should be able to take things in stride. I should be witty, warm, sensitive, self-aware and mature, possessing the wisdom that comes with age, but also a youthful optimism and energy, all while maintaining my sense of humor. In other words, good. Deserving of motherhood. And yet here I was, weepy and weak, a big baby, with my hand-holding friend.
I tried to decipher the images on the computer screen as he measured each follicle and wrote down numbers in my chart.
“Well, I don’t see too many,” he said, finally. “I’m surprised. I’d expect to see more for a woman your age.”
He looked up, saw that I was crying and handed me a tissue.
“It’s not bad though,” he said. “Fine, really. We have enough to continue.” He paused. “Hey, you have a plan, remember? If this doesn’t work, you’ll adopt.”
I nodded. But I hated his tone of pity. And I hated how it sounded as if he’d already given up.
IVF makes you feel like you are finally getting close. After months or years of going about it the old-fashioned way, you feel powerful enlisting the help of science. When I was ingesting all those pills, making appointments and preparing syringes, showing up at the clinic several times a week for blood draws or ultrasounds, I felt like I was working toward something. And after the veins in my arms became sore and bruised, and even after the time a nurse who was filling in for the phlebotomist one Sunday morning couldn’t find my vein and stabbed the needle over and over into the crease of my arm, I didn’t give up. I felt grateful to be doing something measurable and exact.
And yet here I was, weepy and weak, a big baby, with my hand-holding friend.
I wondered if my real problem was one of class and race. Were I not a white, middle-class, American woman with a sense that I was entitled to certain things in life, would I have been so surprised by my bad luck? I might have been forced to move on because other options were out of reach. Perhaps it was selfish or emblematic of my privilege that I spent so many years obsessed with having a baby, so much time and money spent chasing something that just wasn’t meant to be. But in the clinic waiting room, I saw a demographic that matched that of my neighborhood in Southern California. It was a racially-diverse group of working- and middle-class women, all of us accompanied by sisters, mothers, aunts and friends, boxes of tissues nearby, our anxious partners staring at the screens on their phones. They were women like me. I realized that the desperation of wanting a baby and being unable to have one is universal, even if solutions are not.
When the holidays came, we waited for the results of a blood test to see if our first round of IVF had worked. We were in Texas visiting my family, a trip I’d hoped would be a distraction during the two-week wait, which is the period of time between embryo transfer and pregnancy test. Every microsecond of those two weeks had been consumed by doubt and uncertainty, excitement and despair, every twinge a cause for extended analysis. I compared each bodily sensation to what I could remember from my two pregnancies. Were those implantation cramps or period cramps? Was I extra hungry? Were my boobs extra sore?
We were staying with my sister and her husband and though they knew that we were waiting for our IVF results, my parents didn’t know. My parents had driven back to Dallas after Christmas, and I was glad. My mother hadn’t inquired about my fertility treatments since the first time I’d mentioned it, and I didn’t bring it up. I think she viewed it as a private matter, and I felt relieved to not have to talk about it.
After my first miscarriage, she’d cried softly into the phone.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I just don’t understand. None of the women in our family have had trouble getting pregnant.”
I felt a familiar clenching in my chest, like something twisting or breaking. It was a comment that recalled all the ways she thought I’d failed at womanhood, something I’d heard from her before. I was different from my older sister and different from her. As I was going through puberty, she’d mused out loud, more than once, about why I was so tall and flat-chested, or why I was so sensitive and shy. And now, why I couldn’t have a baby.
After my second miscarriage, she’d asked about the tests we’d had.
“Did they find out what’s wrong with you?” she’d said over the phone.
Even though I’d learned in adulthood to love all my imperfect body was capable of, to love the pleasure it gave me and others, the experience of going through infertility had revived all my old insecurities, and my mother’s questions hit this raw, tender place. Perhaps my infertility was a sign that my womanhood was flawed, that my mother had been right all along. There was a natural flaw that I couldn’t fix, some innate stubbornness or immaturity, and it was also, somehow, my fault.
My mother was trying to deal with her own shock, I think. She was trying to understand. She wanted me to know she was concerned, that I was loved. But I wanted her to tell me it was going to be okay, that I’d done everything right, that there was nothing wrong with me. That I’d make a great mom someday. I wanted to be mothered.
On the day of the pregnancy test, I woke up early. Scott and I dressed quickly and drove thirty minutes to a medical clinic that would do blood work on New Year’s Eve. A few hours later, my cell phone rang. I sat down on the bed in my sister’s guestroom and answered it, Scott sitting next to me.
“I’m sorry, Kathleen,” the nurse said. Suddenly, every piece of bad news I’d ever had blew in all at once, like a crack of thunder.
That afternoon, we walked for a long time. The suburban streets of my sister’s neighborhood were empty and quiet, and the winter trees looked arthritic in the cold dusk. I shoved my gloved hands into my pockets and wiggled my fingers in the holes of the lining in my coat.
My dictionary tells me that the word pitiful means deserving of or arousing pity, something lamentable or mournful. Despicable, contemptible or miserable. But none of these seem exactly right. I felt pathetic. After five years, my situation had become redundant. I wondered if listening to me had become burdensome. Surely, I was exhausting to my friends and family. A pitiful version of a woman, a faulty link in the ancestral line. But maybe what I hated most was needing everyone so badly.
That spring brought another failed round of IVF with frozen embryos leftover from the first round, and then a third and final round with fresh embryos. Since money was an issue (i.e., credit card almost maxed out), my cousin, who happened to be in the middle of her own IVF struggle, generously offered me all of her leftover medication. Her excellent health insurance had paid for fertility treatments so she could get more medication. My doctor found a way to work her medication into my protocol and also enrolled me in a study that would help cover the cost of the remaining drugs. He said we’d be more aggressive with the medication on this last round, which would hopefully stimulate more follicles.
But I did not grow more follicles and after laboratory fertilization, we ended up with four embryos, exactly the same number as the first round. The doctor scheduled my last transfer at 5:00 a.m. on a Sunday to fit it in around a triathlon he had later that morning. My acupuncturist, who’d seen me every week for two years and had listened to me on some of my hardest days, agreed to meet us at the clinic at that early hour. The acupuncture treatment would cost another $400 hundred dollars, but since it had been proven to increase IVF odds, it seemed worth it.
I felt pathetic. After five years, my situation had become redundant.
The office suite was quiet and dark when we arrived, and a nurse led us to the transfer room. The acupuncturist put on some drumming music I liked and gently began tapping needles into my skin. One between my eyes and another on the top of my skull, which were my favorite points because of the intense and immediate release of pressure in my head, like steam from a vent. She placed a few needles on each leg near my shins and knees. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe.
Afterward, Scott came back in the room. The three of us cracked jokes about the doctor showing up in running shorts with sweatbands on his wrists and forehead. Scott made increasingly ludicrous suggestions about the doctor’s potential attire and what else he might demand of his staff at 5 a.m. It felt good to laugh. I was optimistic: we had four good embryos, and I felt healthy and hopeful.
The doctor came in looking spry and healthy and shook each of our hands in turn. At our first embryo transfer, his question about whether we wanted to transfer one or two embryos had surprised us. It was not a question Scott and I had discussed and for a moment, we’d felt triumphant. Not only would I get pregnant, I’d have twins! This time, sobered by experience, we said we wanted to use all four embryos.
I lay back on the table, and the doctor threaded the catheter through my cervix. I felt a slight fluttering sensation when he released the embryos into my uterus and then, it was over. Compared to other treatments and tests I’d undergone to become pregnant, this was the gentlest. I felt almost nothing. No passion, no pain. I tried to enjoy it. I was a receptacle, an empty room, a vessel. Afterward, we followed protocol and waited for twenty minutes. I remained lying down on the table and Scott held my hand. We were quiet.
When I can no longer write about this, I spend the morning going over my old charts, and I begin to see myself the way I suspect my RE saw me. I become a patient, a body, a problem, columns of numbers in a chart. White blood cell count, red blood cell count, hemoglobin, hematocrit, MCV, MCH, MCHC, RDW, platelet count, absolute neutrophils, lymphocytes, basophils. I read his terse, practical notes from our first meeting: infertility, SAB x 2 SAB, discussed treatment option, Plan 01 +/- IUI, Heparin in pregnancy.
It’s my experience he recorded there but devoid of all emotion. If only it could have been so straightforward, if only I could have been an efficient machine, scientific, neutral and predictable. But I see the intangibles in between the lines of my chart. His desire to make my dreams come true, my own emotions and embodied experience, and the grand, existential mystery of conception.
In the old files, I also find a computer printout of our embryos in pyrotechnic color.Colored in aqua, hot pink, red and yellow, they looked like bulbous, tropical fruits. My first round of IVF had produced just four viable embryos. Some women get as many as eight or nine. Embryos are graded on a scale of one to four, four being the highest. The grade is based on how many cells have developed by day three and how distinct the cells look, i.e. whether the edges show fragmentation. A “perfect” day three embryo has eight cells, no fragmentation, and evenly sized cells. I’m not sure what grade mine received, but I knew they weren’t perfect.
When I examine them now, I notice two that look pretty good with six cells each, blooming on top of each other like little chrysanthemums. But even these good ones have smaller blobs breaking free from the main mass. The other two have just four cells and show a lot more fragmentation, little breaks and uneven edges, crevices and dark creases.
In the old files, I also find a computer printout of our embryos in pyrotechnic color.
On another printout I see the two frozen embryos we used in the second round that were in even worse shape. They look sad and featureless. One is collapsed on one side, like a deflated balloon. Another is wrinkled and lopsided with dark spots like tiny moons circling the main clump. Despite all this, I’m struck by a sense of possibility. For all those years of trying to get pregnant, I’m reminded that we could make embryos. And suddenly, I feel an inexplicable sliver of hope.
It was June when we found out our last round failed. Almost a year had passed since we’d started fertility treatments. In that time, we’d endured six failed treatments between IUI and IVF, and we both knew we’d come to the end. The hormones had made me unbearable to myself and to Scott. We were out of money, patience and emotional reserves. After taking four containers of sharps to the hazardous waste facility and then vacuuming under all the beds, after clearing out the hand-me-down maternity clothes I’d been stuffing in closets for the last five years and throwing out all the extra syringes and empty pill bottles, the house felt empty. School was out, and both of us were off for the summer. With no more IVF appointments or acupuncture, I suddenly had so much free time.
I’d never wanted to call myself infertile. Infertile meant you’d never have kids. Infertile meant you had a diagnosis. Infertile meant you were incapable of getting pregnant. I’d struggled to accept I was any of those things. But that was what I’d become: broken and imperfect, infertile. Barren.
I felt sad and moved slowly, as if I were swimming underwater. I wandered the rooms of our house, angry and irritable. In the evenings, Scott and I lay wrapped together on the couch watching violent, fantastical TV shows. Vampire shows and detective shows and serial killer shows. I liked feeling a manufactured fear in my chest. I spent hours at the library enjoying the air-conditioning and checking out novels. At night, I stayed up late, stretched out on the couch with my books and a gin and tonic, crying over the plotlines.
And yet. After all the injections, blood draws and anesthesia, after all the hormones, charting of temperatures, giant pills and bitter Chinese herbs, after all the appointments and scheduling and the years of monitoring of my caffeine, sugar and alcohol intake, there was an immense relief running alongside this sadness. And the depth of this relief surprised me. This period of waiting had been burning me up. Now, the burning would stop.
I decided to paint a wall in our living room and spent days putting up sample patches of paint: dandelion, tangerine, sky blue, sage. Scott knew to steer clear of this project. Nothing seemed right. I sat on the couch staring at the bright colors, as if there were an answer there. I liked standing at the sink to wash the paintbrushes, and I liked feeling the cool water that ran over the bristles and how the paint flowed out, lighter and lighter, until it was clear.
After I finally settled on a mushroom color and painted it on, I sat and stared at the new wall. I felt fragile and hollowed out, but there was also a small flutter in my belly. I recognized it as lightness, maybe even joy. I wondered that something as small and pointless as painting a wall could fill me with such a sense of possibility. For years, I’d been at the mercy of a powerful, unknown force. It’d been a long waiting period full of ambiguity. It’d been so long since I felt any sense of agency over my own life. But now I realized I still had choices.
I would not get pregnant, or experience my body being everything for my child.
Even on the question of children. If I even still wanted children, which I wasn’t sure that I did, it wasn’t going to be the way my friends had done it. Instead of panic, I felt a small sense of acceptance at this thought. So my children would not look like me. So I would not give birth. I would not get pregnant, or experience my body being everything for my child. I would live with that grief the rest of my life. Well, so what—so fucking what? The end game had always been parenthood, not getting pregnant. I could still become a parent. I’d always known that, but now I felt it in my body.
Somehow too, Scott and I had remained partners. We still loved each other. We basically still had everything: our health, our dreams, our home, our jobs, our friends and family, our community. Yes, I’d struggled. Yes, I’d wanted to move toward what I saw as more love and more life. There’d been harrowing detours and blockades, but I could keep moving.
I had to accept that my body was fragile, infertile and tragic. But I saw it so clearly now: it was also profoundly, and gloriously, alive.
Even at the loudest parties—say one of Gatsby’s, with the grotesque and glittering abundance, the “salads of harlequin designs” and “floating rounds of cocktails”—it’s often the private conversations and murmured asides that move a story along. Equally thrilling are dinner parties of an entirely different scale: a tense group of couples at a modest table, or the family holiday during which the lacquer of politeness cracks and the truth seeps out. Among my favorite things about reading fiction is how many parties I can attend without having to leave my house.
In my debut novel, The Other Wife, one of the ways I came to understand the characters was to place them in social situations in which they were supposed to have fun. The desire to be seen as a “really fun person” drives many of the narrator’s decisions. As I wrote about her time in college, I noticed how often the appearance of joy, especially at parties, demanded her effort and calculation. I started to wonder more about the way party scenes work on the page. Parties, I realized, demand two distinct registers—a broad sense of the event and a narrow focus on the interpersonal—and offer writers a great opportunity to create a mess.
As a reader, I’m not especially interested in the parties that go as planned. In the books listed below, each writer uses a party’s celebratory chaos as a backdrop for something important, whether dramatic conflict or quiet realization, to brilliant effect. The party is a tool that puts characters under pressure—to impress as hosts, to perform as happy celebrants. In the hands of these skilled authors, parties build to become spectacular displays of literary talent and social insight.
Haroutunian’s collection of linked stories focuses on friends Taline and Valerie (“Tal and Val”) as they navigate college and the years that follow. In “Twenty-One,” the opening story, an egg strikes Val in the temple as she and Val make their way to a Halloween party, presaging more extreme events to come. Once they finally arrive, the festivities themselves take a surprising and violent turn that will haunt Val for years. Haroutunian’s precise, understated prose sets up the questions that expand in the fourteen stories that follow: what does it feel like to grow older, to mature? How do people grapple with ambition, both artistic and personal? How do the relationships of early adulthood evolve? How does one salvage the pleasure and wash away the rest? That last question is top of mind for Val in “Twenty-One” as she cleans her face: “I want to remove egg, retain glitter.”
Taylor’s second novel, set in Iowa City, follows a range of people at various stages of financial, professional, and artistic success. Fear of debt and the fact of debt cast a shadow over this landscape; the financial preoccupation feels especially vivid when Fyodor, who works in meat processing, attends a party at a gallery. Gazing at his fellow party attendees, Fyodor thinks: “They were anonymous, elegant people who seemed part of a different species […] Nothing in his life had anything to do with this place.” Fyodor’s anguish leads to a public outburst. In a gallery at a party, Fyodor becomes—unwittingly, and unbidden—his own temporary installation, a thing to be observed. Later, in the car, he asks his (sometimes) boyfriend, Timo, “‘Did you have a good time?’” The question reads as both perfunctory and absurd, and Timo’s response: “‘No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t,’” is unsurprising. This brief exchange holds several of the novel’s overarching questions, as does the landscape of the party itself: questions of money and pleasure, public behavior and private sorrow.
This story collection, winner of the 1979 Pulitzer Prize, is chock-full of parties; one wonders how many times the word “gin” appears. There are fundraisers and dinners, vacations and holidays, often set in the suburbs of New York City, and there is always a sizzling undercurrent of desire—sometimes for another person, sometimes for escape from the party, sometimes, somehow, for what is already there. Under the sparkly décor and chiming glass, these stories are piercing, haunting, and deeply melancholy. Cheever’s masterful ability to build tension allows seemingly cheery exchanges (“‘Why, thank you for coming!’”) to introduce a worrisome chill to the sprawling gatherings. Insincerity blazes as brightly as the jewelry at these endless social events. This quote from “The Children” says it all: “It was not the Mackenzies’ idea of a good party. Helen Jackson tried unsuccessfully to draw them into the circle of hearty, if meaningless, smiles, salutations, and handshakes upon which that party, like every other, was rigged.”
Shipstead’s debut, set in an East Coast island town, follows the Van Meter family—Winn, Biddy, and their daughters Daphne and Livia—over the course of Daphne’s wedding weekend. The novel is playful in its treatment of the Van Meters’ extensive wealth and avoids deriding it. Shipstead takes care to truly develop these characters, both acknowledging their material comfort and exploring the limitless hunger for more that persists despite all they have. For Winn, this desire includes a reckless, if often comic, desire for Agatha, one of Daphne’s bridesmaids. The beauty of the Van Meters’ world is rendered without excluding its fissures and flaws; a glossy aspirational tale this is not. As he prepares to join his family on the island, Winn is wary of what lies ahead: “[N]ot a straightforward exercise in familial peacekeeping and obligatory cheer but a treacherous puzzle, full of opportunities for the wrong thing to be said or done.”
One of Strout’s most complex and unforgettable characters, Olive Kitteridge anchors the majority of these linked stories set in the fictional town of Crosby, Maine. Olive is jarringly blunt, but she is also consumed by compassion for her neighbors, and is often the voice, or offers the literal hand, that hauls people out of despair. At her son’s wedding reception, Olive finds even the slightest sensory detail to be antagonistic: other people’s clothing, the sound of a door closing, the odor of a guest’s perfume. Against the backdrop of the wedding—a “smallish, pleasant affair”—and the reception that follows, Strout reveals that beneath Olive’s gruff refusal to play along is deep-seated fear. Of the newlyweds, Olive has an astonishing flicker of silent insight: “They think they’re finished with loneliness.” Overwhelmed with conflicted feelings for her son—her desire for his happiness, and her doubt that he may have found it—she hides away from the party in his bedroom. Even lying on a bed in the middle of a party, she cannot achieve the solitude or peace she’s seeking—people keep coming to the door. Strout uses the chatter and fragrance of the party, the niceties and rituals, to put Olive’s thoughts about love and fear in sharp relief.
Friends of the Museum is a gorgeous and very funny whirlwind of a novel, packed with characters aplenty—there are enough of them to justify a “Cast of Characters” list before the novel begins. This is just right for the occasion at hand: The hours preceding a fundraising gala at a New York City museum. Pivoting rapidly from one character to the next, McGowan drums up the frenetic energy required to pull off such a magnificent event. The novel’s commitment to such a range of voices—from the Curator of Film to the Chief Security Officer—reflects the enormous volume of labor and planning behind these major events and institutions. As McGowan intuitively knows, they are also the perfect, insular setting for scandals, of which there are many, all exacerbated by the fact of the gala itself. The demands of the party push each character to their limit; the occasion drains them of pretense and forces their secrets into the carefully curated light.
Barrett’s novel follows two superb story collections (Young Skins and Homesickness) and features a cast of unnerving, violent, clever characters. Dev Hendrick—quiet son of an ill, absent father and dead mother—agrees to let his home serve as a satellite for criminal enterprise. Barrett presents the story out of chronological order, and deepens the painful suspense—what will happen to Doll English?—by describing the party at which Doll is kidnapped in exacting, granular detail. Excruciatingly, Doll spends several minutes at this ill-fated gathering describing an earlier party, in which his brother “‘did tear the lobe a bit’” on another man’s ear. In the world Barrett creates in these pages, social activity is always laced with potential danger.
Set in an ever-changing, beautifully rendered San Francisco, Edgarian’s novel is the story of Charlie Pepper and Lena Rusch and their family, friends, and colleagues. Within minutes of meeting Lena and Charlie, the reader is ushered into the first of several parties, a New Year’s Eve celebration hosted at the Pepper/Rusch home. Edgarian uses the event to introduce a rich and varied group of characters and circumstances, including the crucial conflict: Charlie, a surgeon who needs funding for a medical invention, secures that funding from Lena’s wealthy, paternal uncle, Cal. Lena happens to detest Cal for his long-ago affair with her mother; worse, Cal employs Lena’s ex. A second party, in honor of Cal’s daughter’s engagement, brings Lena and her ex together, raising the stakes and complicating Lena’s life and marriage.
On the news a man holds an alligator like an infant. In his home there is a jacuzzi tub in the living room for the alligator to water-rest while the man watches Gilligan’s Island or MacGyver. At one point he puts the gator’s face to his own and smooches it all over like unexpected rain. The gator blinks his thin lily lids in reception. In considering affection, I think first of touch then of obsession — I do not know softness without longing, and although the alligator is far from soft, his entire constitution communicates love. My lover collects . . . perhaps the sentence stops there. I too extend myself through objects though mine is most of a gathering, some of a worshiping — talismans that remind me of my mother or the saint I believe my mother to be, martyred and mine. I take a midterm this week in the form of an office conversation — just the two of us talking ego, waxing God. The balance is off, the power in his favor, and every gland of my body sweats in shame of my self-centered approach to artmaking — how I see myself inside and in-middle, very little Lord. He says there is no inside/outside, no self- separate, that if I am in right relation, if I am in gift-giving, (and this he encourages, but softly) then I too love beyond physicality. The alligator could be my child — Frankenstein’s monster my chance at grace. I believe my precious things are material tethers to acts of creative and saving gestures. I did not say this first, the professor did during the midterm, and because I hoard quips, sentiments, heart-moments, perspectives, and the rest — a compulsion to know so much from so many somatic spaces — I become the light-echo of a star that died billions of salty years ago. It makes no sense really no sense no sense since too much light resurrects the dead, and if the dead come back, what do I do with my blasphemous treasures? Where does the grace go? And who will tuck the gator in at night?
Midrash While Woman
Genesis 1-3
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