Combat Weapons for All

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bushmasterThe .223 caliber Bushmaster is a semi-automatic rifle. It can fire a large number of rounds into bodies and is so well-made that the bullets penetrate and then stay in the tissue of the victim, virtually guaranteeing death. Gun experts describe this semi-automatic rifle as a combat weapon for civilians. The question arises for me: why do civilians need combat weapons? I understand that some people like to hunt deer and bears and the like. But do deer hunters blow away their prey with semi-automatic weapons? Do they shoot off so many rounds that the deer is pretty much obliterated? I don’t think so, as many deer hunters proudly eat what they kill and then hang the animals’ heads on the living room wall. If the deer were blown to smithereens, humans would not be able to eat the meat or display the heads. So why do civilians need combat weapons? To kill each other? Well, yes. If you are a mentally ill man, you will use a semi-automatic weapon to blow away your  unsuspecting friends, neighbors and fellow citizens in the schools and movie theaters and malls where they are just trying to carry on their lives. This is a free country, after all, and gun ownership is a right protected by the Constitution. The framers of the Constitution apparently did not distinguish between the rifle that kills the deer and the semi-automatic weapon that can make quick work of a class of first graders. But you know what? Tough luck. America is the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, so little Olivia Engel, the “wiggly, smiley” six-year-old who has been reduced to inert pieces of flesh, should have understood that her right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is superseded by the right of a mentally ill 20-year-old to own a combat weapon.

I have a few more questions for people who continue to support the right of Americans to own assault weapons, even in the face of multiple, regularly-occurring public massacres:

1) You say that if all citizens were armed, we could protect ourselves against crazy people with semi-automatic weapons. But what if I don’t want to carry a gun? What if I find weapons repugnant? What if I don’t want to walk around thinking all the time that someone might attack me? What if I am a peaceful person who wants to trust my fellow human beings, rather than existing in a constant state of readiness to kill or incapacitate them?

2) So, when semi-automatic weapons are easy to obtain, it looks as if lots more people kill other people with semi-automatic weapons (witness the dramatic decrease in semi-automatic gun deaths in Australia after a ban was implemented) than they do when assault weapons are banned. So what if, just as an experiment, we made semi-automatic weapons really difficult to obtain? Sure, there would still be a black market for illegal .223 caliber Bushmasters, but what if just for kicks, we implemented a ban for, say, five years? Then we could check back after the five years and see if fewer little kids and teenage moviegoers died at the hands of crazy dudes in public places. I mean, isn’t this kooky little experiment worth it, if only to save one Olivia Engel? If fewer people die, we keep the ban. If the number of people is the same or greater, you win and combat weapons for all!

 

The Death of a Child

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newtown-school-shootingMy cousin Sarah died after a three-year battle with leukemia when we were both thirteen. I saw my father weep for the first time at her funeral. As I remember it, in the years after her death, my parents and I and my younger sister often had conversations that circled back to the subject of the death of a child. My father always spoke of how terribly his brother Nick had suffered over the death of his eldest daughter. I was deeply affected by his claim that Nick would have given his own life if only he could have saved Sarah’s. As a teenager, I couldn’t imagine the idea of sacrificing my own life to save someone else.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the suffering of a parent over the death of a child would become a thread running through my adolescence and early adulthood. Three years later, when I was sixteen, a very close friend would die of leukemia, too, after a long stay at the formidable Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. Years went by while my friend Gianna slowly perished in a private room.  She lost her hair from the radiation and then her developing figure from the chemotherapy. We rinsed our hands with iodine solution and dressed in the required paper gowns to prevent bringing germs into her room. At the foot of her bed we stood awkwardly and reported about our first dates, the spring musical, the experience of getting tipsy on Champale (an awful combination of beer and pink champagne) at a beach party for the first time.  At Gianna’s funeral, even through my own suffering and grief, I registered the much greater suffering of the parents facing the unnatural event of outliving their child.

A decade passed and then another friend died, this time in a car accident. She was twenty-six and had just completed medical school at Johns Hopkins. The waste of this life was obscene. Her father had lost his wife several years earlier and now had to come to terms with the loss of his eldest daughter, Rosemarie, a friend from early childhood. At the wake her father seemed unable even to speak of her death. I remember only a conversation we had about Goldie Hawn movies. How could his daughter, a doctor now, simply be gone?

There are a number of reasons why I decided not to have children, but one of them has to be my early experience of seeing parents suffer so greatly over the deaths of Sarah and Gianna and Rosemarie. In those years I often heard the phrase, “almost too much to bear.” I could not imagine voluntarily bringing a child into the world unless I could keep that child in my life until I died. That seemed like the only fair way for parenthood to work: you bring the child into the world and raise her, and then the child helps you leave the world and die. For the child to die first seemed perverse, against nature. I would not, I decided by the time I was thirty, ever have children.

I know that I have foregone many of life’s pleasures and experiences by deciding not to have children. And yet, seeing the carnage in Connecticut yesterday, I realized that the parents whose children have died senselessly by the gun of a stranger are experiencing pain that would, in fact, be too much for me to bear. Not “almost” too much. That is the difference between the contractual arrangement people make with themselves when they decide to be parents and the arrangement I could not make. They will have to bear it.  But it is too much.

 

 

 

 

 

No Church Home

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In the town I grew up there were two churches, St. Gertrude’s and the Village Church of Bayville. Catholic or Protestant. Everyone I knew went to one or the other.
We didn’t go to either.
I have a memory of my father telling me, “So many of the wars in history have been fought over organized religion.” I must have been quite young at the time, because I didn’t understand what he meant by “organized religion.” Later I came to see that my father didn’t object to faith or worship in and of themselves. What he objected to was the way in which organized religion exerted power and influence over people, often to their own detriment.  I remember him telling me that his and my mother’s families weren’t happy when my parents announced they were getting married. The reason? He was from an Episcopalian family. My mother was Jewish. Of course, that was small potatoes compared to all the wars fought in the name of religion, all the people persecuted and ostracized and murdered.
So I grew up as “nothing.” When every other child in my class left early on Wednesday afternoon for religious instruction, I stayed in Mr. Smith’s’ classroom and studied ahead in the color-coded SRA reading program. My parents didn’t prevent me from going to mass at St. Gertrude’s with my friend Rosemarie, but I was frightened by the enormous crucifix with the flayed body of Jesus on it. I couldn’t understand why there was so much emphasis on God being everybody’s father when it was clear that mothers were the ones who did all the hard work. Even in college, when I finally took a Bible as Literature course with Professor Mauch, who brought fresh tomatoes from his garden to class for students, the stories of creation and Jesus’s birth and crucifixion and resurrection seemed bizarre. I had been a big fan of the Wizard of Oz books, but I couldn’t even read the Biblical narratives as science fiction — they were too upsetting. The values also ran counter to everything my parents had taught me. The guilt and sin, the promises of heaven and hell . . . for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23) — I couldn’t buy it! What was the matter with me? Why didn’t I believe in sin or heaven or hell? And I didn’t just not believe; I was, rather, appalled when I realized that people fully expected to be given a whole other life (the Afterlife) in addition to the one we were already given. Wasn’t one life enough? The belief in heaven or hell struck me as, well, greedy. Shouldn’t we be grateful for the one life we have and try to accept the fact that when we die,we’ll be eaten by maggots and that’ll be the end of it?
There have been times in my life when I wished I had the comfort religion provides. Before I turned thirty, I had lost my favorite cousin and a close friend to leukemia and then my dear friend Rosemarie (who crossed herself each and every time time she passed St. Gertrude’s) to a car accident. Rosemarie’s father had asked me to deliver a eulogy at her funeral, so I had to go stand at the altar of St. Gertrude’s and read a poem by Kipling. The day before the funeral, as I sat crying inconsolably near my friend’s casket, a woman I didn’t recognize came over and told me I should stop crying, saying,  “She’s in a better place now.”
Perhaps there is something missing in my soul, perhaps I wasn’t raised right, perhaps I should sign up for 24/7 evangelical indoctrination, but there was no way I could believe Rosemarie was in a better place than she was here in Earth, where she had just completed a medical degree at Johns Hopkins and begun her residency at Walter Reed Army Hospital. So if I believed in God, I’d feel better about my friend’s death. Seemed cheap and easy.
I suppose it’s heresy to say, but since I don’t believe in heresy, here goes: I believe we are given one life and one life only. I believe that the universe was created by circumstances beyond my understanding, but not by a single deity. I do not believe a deity judges me. I am grateful for my life, but I do believe the circumstances that brought me here and the ones that will see me out of this life are random and arbitrary and largely beyond my control.
When I moved to Alabama 12 years ago, Tuscaloosa locals often started conversations with me by asking about my church home. It felt weird to say I didn’t have one, so I’d try a diversionary tactic like saying I worked at the University of Alabama.
I do not think there is a God who cares about me or anyone else (and if he does exist, he certainly doesn’t consider your new Lexus SUV “Another Blessing”).
As for caring, I’m glad there are so many humans around who do.

For Now the Gingko Still Blooms

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Just before Christmas about five years ago, I was taking a nap when a police officer came to the door and told my husband and I that we’d have to evacuate our home. A house a few down from ours had gone up in flames, and the police were concerned that firefighters wouldn’t be able to contain the blaze.

Standing on a street corner some distance from the fire with our dogs and neighbors, we came to hear the full story. Our neighbor had booby-trapped his house, then committed suicide inside. Officials were concerned that explosions might endanger the whole neighborhood. We didn’t know this neighbor except by sight, and all I knew about him was that he was part owner of an Italian restaurant in town. We later learned that he was deeply in debt and that his girlfriend had filed for a restraining order against him. At the time, I couldn’t process all this information and instead fixated on the beautiful gingko tree that stood right in front of the house. This was just one of those trees that made you stand up and take notice. Its bright yellow, fan-shaped leaves made the tree a giant beacon in the neighborhood. In the Fall, families would come to have their photos taken under the tree. And when the leaves fell, the ground would be carpeted in yellow for weeks. At other times of the year, elderly Asian men and women would come with plastic bags to gather gingko nuts.

The next morning, we learned that our neighbor had parked his SUV a couple blocks away and put his dog in it. I was so happy to learn that the dog survived, and that act alone redeemed  the guy a little bit in my mind. His house didn’t survive the fire, but I was thrilled to see that the gingko tree still stood.  Many of its leaves had been burned off, but it would not have to be cut down.

Of course, I thought of my neighbor when I learned that James Holmes had booby trapped his apartment before he went on his shooting spree at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. And I thought of Nathan Wilkins, the white man who shot and wounded 18 people at a bar walking distance from my house this month. What is it about these white men in money trouble that makes them want to cause harm to so many people they don’t even know? Strangely, in light of the Holmes and Wilkins shootings, I feel almost grateful to my former neighbor that the only person he killed was himself. I can’t help seeing these shootings, though, as inextricably linked to gender and race. Black men generally don’t meticulously plan public massacres of people they don’t even know. And women, regardless of race, tend to internalize their self-hatred, wounding themselves with eating disorders or cutting or suicide, rather than lashing out at others.

The property where my former neighbor’s house used to be was bought by his next door neighbors, who have landscaped the space and made it into a side yard. As you walk down Queen City Avenue, there’s just one lot without a house on it, an odd gap like that left by a missing tooth. I’m reminded of the terrible violence every time I walk past it. But at least the gingko still blooms. I hope all of us can say the same for ourselves after the next shooter comes along.

Serena’s Thighs

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So many memorable moments, but this is the one that imprints on my brain: Serena falls back onto the court and covers her face with her hands. Under those hands she’s weeping with happiness. The camera lingers on her, but from this angle what’s visible isn’t her hands covering her face, but her big, powerful thighs. The camera lingers on those thighs for a long time, until Serena abruptly pushes herself upright and runs into the stands to hug her family.  I feel a little funny, being part of an international audience of millions, all of us looking at Serena’s thighs.

The next night, visiting a friend old enough to be my mother, I ask her husband if he watched the Wimbledon finals. As I chat with him, he’s watching golf, a sport I find about as interesting to watch as I do watching ice melt. He says he forgot to watch Wimbledon.

“You missed a good one,” I tell him. “Serena was amazing.”

“That’s a MAN,” he says.

At first I’m so taken aback that I can’t even process what he’s proposing here. Then I remember earlier accusations that Martina Navratilova was actually a man. You can still, in fact, do a Google search and see the debate played out, with people providing answers like, “No, Martina is a female, lady.”

It’s interesting to me, this knee-jerk reaction when women perform feats of athleticism. Accusing the female athlete of being a man is an attempt to discredit the athletic prowess and achievements of women. Such accusations manage simultaneously to insult female athletes and to make the claim that elite female athletes don’t actually exist. It’s as if, for these naysayers, the very definition of “female” excludes “athlete” and vice versa.

Though it’s puerile and ridiculous to call Martina a man, she does have a body one might describe as masculine: her finely muscled arms, small breasts, and narrow hips might lead the unenlightened to such an accusation. Well, screw the unenlightened. But one of the reasons I love watching Serena Williams play tennis, even more than I love watching her equally formidable sister Venus, is that Serena is such a great example of what female athleticism can look like. In order to be champions, we don’t have to look like men. Unlike her sister and many of her other willowy opponents, Serena has big breasts, hips, arms, and thighs.  She’s got the va-va-voom and the curves of a Marilyn Monroe, but don’t be fooled: she’s all muscle.  The contrast between her body and that of Agnieszka Rodwanska, the Pole who lost to her in the finals, speaks volumes about the possibilities for the woman athlete. We don’t have to be demure or willowy or thin to win, though if the genetics + training combination produce that, so be it (think Maria Sharapova). Holley Mangold, the 323-lb. weightlifter, is another example of a woman athlete who upends our expectations about what woman athletes can look like and how they can perform. Mangold has to fight constantly against perceptions that weightlifting is a sport for men, even as she heads to the London Olympics this summer. Maybe we need to expand our definitions of what a woman is and who a weightlifter can be, rather than saying a woman shouldn’t be a weightlifter.

I became an athlete late in life, in my 40′s. When I was a teenager I took Jackie Sorenson aerobics with my Mom twice a week, but I regard that experience as mostly an accessory to the unrealistic weight loss program I pursued during those years. And then, in college, the Jane Fonda videos I watched in my dorm lounge with my roommate Ginny, the two of us doing leg lifts and arm circles but rarely breaking a sweat. In those days, I saw exercise only as a way to whittle down, something I did to distract me between the banana I ate for breakfast and the demure salad I fixed for lunch. In my forties, though, I began to take fitness seriously and for its own sake. I ran my first half marathon when I was over 40 and was truly surprised when I saw the photos my husband had taken of me running those 13.1 miles. No longer did I fit into size 4 clothes; my fitness workouts had given me muscles.  I felt weirdly solid as I said goodbye to my bony, weaker self.  I’ve outrun her now, and she’ll never catch up.

Go, Serena — all 155 female pounds of you!

Health Care Catastrophes I Hope Will Soon Be Extinct

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I had no health care insurance for most of graduate school.  Because I got a Master’s degree and then went on to get a Ph.D., this time period amounted to nearly a decade. Colorado State University, where I went for my Master’s, had a limited insurance plan that allowed me to use the student health center for minor ailments. I could get antibiotics or have a sprained ankle checked there. One morning just after I finished teaching my freshman composition class, I began to feel very ill with period cramps. I went into the bathroom and began vomiting. The chair of my department found me lying on the floor and hyperventilating. She somehow dragged me into her office and called an ambulance. The EMT’s asked me repeatedly if I was pregnant. I assured them that at that time in my life, pregnancy would be impossible. It was just my period, I insisted; I frequently suffered from anaphylaxis at the onset of my period, especially if I was hungry or dehydrated.

At the hospital, they hooked me up to an IV and confirmed via tests I was later billed for that I was not, in fact, pregnant. An hour or so later I felt well enough to go home.

A couple months later, I received in the mail a bill for an outrageous amount of money. When I called my insurance company, the representative explained that they couldn’t pay for treatment provided off-campus. The entire cost of the ambulance and my brief stay at the hospital would be my responsibility. I should have walked over to the student health center, she said.    

Walked over to the student health center? Weak from vomiting, doubled over with cramps, and trying to breathe into someone’s tunafish-smelling lunch bag to stop myself from hyperventilating, I had been in no shape to refuse help from the EMTs who carried me on a stretcher out of the English department building. I was able to get the bill reduced somewhat, but it was still a colossal amount of money for a graduate student making $7300 a year.

Another memory from the 90′s: my boyfriend, an emigrant from Ireland, waking up one morning beside me with his upper lip swollen so large it resembled a duck’s beak. A gum infection was the culprit, but he had no dental insurance and couldn’t call in sick to the health food store where he worked.  He spent the day in excruciating pain, swishing clove oil around in his mouth while he hauled cases of soy milk with a hand cart. Finally he had to go to the dentist, where he got oral surgery that set him back considerably.

And another: I had no dental insurance at the University of Utah, where I studied for six years. One day I noticed a flyer for a $50 dental checkup. It had been seven years since I’d seen a dentist, and I figured I could afford a mere $50. I brushed and flossed regularly, so I figured the visit would be routine.

I needed two crowns, several fillings, and a procedure called a root planing, also known as non-surgical periodontal therapy, also known as an extremely effective torture method. The dentist divided my mouth into four quadrants and said I needed to have the procedure done four times, a separate visit for each quadrant. The procedure pretty much involves going in below the gum line with some sort of sharp implement and scraping the shit out of your mouth. Had I been able to afford regular dental care, I would never have gotten into this expensive mess.

All of the above was extremely painful and put me out approximately $3000.

At that point I was making approximately $8500 a year.

You see the problem.

Or maybe you don’t, if you’ve never experienced horrible pain without having the money to spend to allay that pain. I will bet anyone a year of cheeseburgers that Mitt Romney has never experienced horrible pain without having the money to allay it. And that Mitt Romney’s never had to sit and wait for seven hours in an emergency room with an asthmatic four-year-old because he doesn’t have health insurance and has no choice but to park it on one of those awful plastic chairs and watch his baby struggle for air, hour after hour.

One more catastrophe: several years ago, my father was laid off at work. Unemployed for nearly a year, he filled the hours when he wasn’t job hunting by working on restoring an old wooden boat he’d picked up for $500 when he was still employed. Working on the boat in dry dock, he slipped on the hull and fell about fifteen feet, breaking his pelvis. He was in his early 60′s at the time, and it became clear that he would never walk properly again unless he got an operation at Manhattan’s Hospital for Special Surgery. It was his great fortune that he had been paying for COBRA insurance. COBRA is an acronym for the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, which passed in 1986 and allowed people to keep their group health insurance for up to 18 months after losing their jobs. COBRA is prohibitively expensive for a lot of people, but for those who can afford it, this temporary insurance at least provides a bit of a safety net for someone who has been laid off. My father was able to have a specialist renowned for his work reconstructing pelvises do just that. Today he’s pushing 70 and robust as I remember him at 50. I shudder to think of the person my father would be were he confined to a wheelchair simply because he didn’t have the money for that surgery.

So many people in America suffer every hour of every day because they can’t afford simple treatment for ailments such as asthma, diabetes, and epilepsy. So many people in America die because they can’t afford preventative health care.

Let me know if you want to take me up on that cheeseburger wager. Cuz I sure do like cheeseburgers.

But What If It Really Was a Hand?

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      “Wild Swans” is one of my favorite Alice Munro stories, from her collection The Beggar Maid (in Canada, the collection’s title was Who Do You Think You Are? but the American publishers thought Americans wouldn’t appreciate being asked that question in a book title). In the story, a teenaged girl taking the train to Toronto for the first time finds herself seated next to a minister (or, at least, a man who claims to be a minister) who chats with her. Later, he opens the newspaper, and while he’s reading, Rose begins to notice something going on: “But what if it really was a hand? She shifted slightly, moved as much as she could toward the window. Her imagination seemed to have created this reality, a reality she was not prepared for at all. She found it alarming. She was concentrating on that leg, that bit of skin with the stocking over it. She could not bring herself to look. Was there a pressure, or was there not? She shifted again. Her legs had been, and remained, tightly closed. It was a hand. It was a hand’s pressure.
“Please don’t. That was what she tried to say. She shaped the words in her mind, tried them out, then couldn’t get them past her lips. Why was that? The embarrassment, was it, the fear that people might hear? People were all around them, the seats were full.”
In this passage, Munro gets at the complicated set of emotions and impulses the victim of sexual harassment negotiates, especially when that victim is a child. In Munro’s story, the victim is a girl on the edge of womanhood. She is frightened, but she’s also self conscious, confused, and curious about what’s going on.  People like to think that harassment is a clear-cut matter: you touch me, I scream bloody murder and elbow you in the groin. But as this passage so subtly demonstrates, the mind can play tricks on itself. What’s real and what’s imagined? What’s intentional and what’s accidental? To accuse someone of harassment is to put yourself on the line, for the victim immediately opens her/himself up to the possibility of having wanted or instigated or invented the behavior being perpetrated upon her or him. Look at the recent Jerry Sandusky pedophilia case. The children he abused and raped didn’t come forward at first for fear that they wouldn’t be believed. To accuse someone of harassment or rape is to risk being publicly tainted by the very act that violated you privately. You risk being called a pervert, crazy person, slut, tease, liar.

I remember people saying some very cruel things about my mother after she came out as a lesbian in her 50′s. That she was selfish, self-indulgent, destroying the lives of her daughters just to have a little mid-life crisis. We went for a walk one evening when I visited her and discussed this.
“Wendy,” she said, “Do you think I would have CHOSEN this life?”
I didn’t know what she meant at the time, but I now understand: to be gay means to give up all our culture’s heterosexual privilege, especially when you’ve lived the better part of your life as a married heterosexual woman. To be gay means that you have to think twice before kissing your partner in public, lest you get the crap kicked out of you. To be gay means you might have to hide key details about your personal life when you’re at work. To be gay means family and friends might reject you, that people might keep their children away from you, that churches or certain business establishments might not welcome you. I could go on and on.
I know that the issue of sexual harassment and abuse might seem tangential to the issue of coming out as gay, but in both cases, the culture puts immense pressure on people not to speak the truth. I’m not equating being gay with being sexually abused; rather, I’m seeing a connection between the refusal of the culture to see and listen to people who are gay and to see and listen to people who are sexually abused. So often we just want to sweep things that make us uncomfortable under the rug and not think about them. And that is wrong.
The Jerry Sandusky case got me thinking about these issues, but I had a bit of an eye opener yesterday that forced me to confront (just a little) how complex issues of power and harassment are. I went shopping at a Family Dollar here in Tuscaloosa. In just the first few minutes of looking for my Visine for Contacts and bug repellant, I kept glancing up to see a man standing at the end of whatever aisle I was standing in. He was a tall black guy with one striking milky blue eye. As I moved through the store, he seemed to be following me. Over by the pet treats, where I was loading up on Busy Bones and rawhide chips, he asked if I needed a buggy (buggy=cart, for you Northeasterners). Then he asked what kind of dogs I had. A few moments later he came over again to tell me that he was cleaning up a bleach spill in the next aisle, so if I smelled something bad, that’s what it was. I was cordial with him, but I did notice that his attention seemed a little beyond what I was used to in a retail establishment. And then he walked by me again, this time brushing close, and I felt his hand graze my rear end.
It took me a moment to put together what had just happened, but I sort of “knew” it emotionally before my brain had registered it. This guy was on my case in some way that I didn’t like. I hurried up to the register and paid, orienting myself so that the customer behind me was literally standing right behind me. Already my brain was beginning to do the work Munro represents in “Wild Swans.” Was that a hand? Was it merely an accident? You must be crazy. That didn’t really happen.
But it did really happen. I know the difference between an accidental brush up against someone’s arm and a hand running along my bottom. There’s a difference between deliberate and accidental touch. And much as I’d like to think I’d whip around and confront the guy, I didn’t. My brain was already too busy telling me I’d imagined it. Then my brain told me it was no big deal, though my cheeks were burning and I couldn’t meet the cashier’s eyes. And then, when I got to my car and sat in the Tuscaloosa heat waiting for the air conditioner to get going, my brain told me that no one would believe me anyway: all the employees in the store were black, and I am white, and there’s way too much fucked up racial history in Alabama involving black men accused of harassing white women for me to even think about complaining about some Family Dollar employee who’s being paid $7.25 an hour to clean up bleach spills giving my ass a little feel-up.
The thing is, if I had my druthers, I wouldn’t even want to get the guy in trouble. I’d just like to ask him what he was thinking to do something like that to me while I’m out at the goddamn store just trying to buy some rawhides for my freaking dogs. I mean, really? I’m not going to perish or anything, but it’s not the greatest feeling in the world to be followed around a store and groped for a second like a piece of fruit.
I’d like for him to look at me with his one good eye and tell me the truth.

A Name of My Own

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     It happened again.
“Mrs. Brouwer?”  A voice I don’t recognize.
“No, but how can I help you?”
“This is Tamiqua from Lowe’s. I’m calling to find out if her cabinet install is complete.”
‘Her’ is me, but I am not her. I didn’t take my husband’s name when we got married. Nor did he take mine. Nor would I have taken his if we had kids, or if I wasn’t already published under my own name, or for any other reason on earth. My name is my name and will always be my name. I know I’m prickly about this issue, and I try to be nice to salespeople who call me Mrs. Brouwer, though I tend to be rude to strangers who call to solicit money or political opinions from Mrs. Brouwer.
I got a Christmas card from my aunt addressed to “Prof. and Prof. Joel Brouwer.” Aunt Jane had managed the neat trick of sorta acknowledging my professional identity while at the same time eliding the me that is me: Wendy Rawlings. It doesn’t even make sense: if we are Prof. and Prof. Joel Brouwer, then there are two Prof. Joel Brouwers (actually, there are, but the other one is my husband’s father). This same aunt divorced her husband nearly half a century ago, yet she still goes by his last name. Women say they keep their ex-husband’s names “for the sake of the children.” Call me a crazy rabid feminist, but what kind of message are you sending your kids if you go through a (usually unpleasant) divorce and then don’t even reclaim your own name, but instead walk around being called by his name when you can barely stand the sight of him? Or even if you can stand to see the sight of him?
I’m always amused by women who tell me it’s too complicated to keep one’s own name when one has kids. Then I’ll see a few years later that these same women have gotten divorced and remarried, so they end up taking yet another man’s last name, which is a different last name from the one the kids from their first marriages have. Oh no, that’s not complicated at all . . .
Then there are others who say it doesn’t matter whether or not a woman takes her husband’s name because her maiden name was her father’s name anyway. I guess the logic here is that patriarchy is patriarchy, so who cares which man’s name you take. This argument doesn’t fly with me, either. For one thing, most of us don’t disown our fathers. My father is my father and he will always be my father. My name represents a connection with him. Furthermore, unless you’re adopted, your name connects you to one part of your family history. My last name is English and says something about my heritage. I always feel a little weird when I’m writing a letter to my sister, who has taken her husband’s Italian last name, as there isn’t one iota of Italian heritage in our family. I always feel as if her new last name is a kind of fraud she’s perpetuating.
Okay, who the hell am I to judge? I have heard plenty of women (often on Christian radio, which I sometimes listen to with a kind of perverse fascination) say they feel proud to take their husband’s names. Who am I to tell them they shouldn’t be proud, some kind of communist lesbian feminist family-hater? I suppose I’d have an easier time of it if the default position was for couples to decide which of their names was nicer, or to hyphenate if the hyphenated name sounded good. I don’t like the fact that men never have to consider giving up their names to make things easier for the machinery of capitalism to run more smoothly (I’m looking at you, mortgage company that hassled us about our different last names).
A few weeks ago, Joel and I went to brunch at Veranda, an upscale restaurant in Birmingham where the maitre d’ asked our name. I figured he was just putting us on a wait list for a table, but he then led us straight upstairs to dine. When the waiter came to our table, he asked, “What can I get you, Mr. and Mrs. Rawlings?” I was startled, Joel amused. Neither of us made a move to correct him.  But later, when the waiter used “our” name again, I was reminded of a remark Madonna made about filming the movie “A League of Their Own.” Female cast members were sexually harassed by some men on set, and the harassment so annoyed the women that they decided to sexually harass the men.
Oh how the men laughed. They weren’t annoyed or threatened at all; they got a kick out of it.
“Thank you for dining with us, Mr. and Mrs. Rawlings.”
What a hoot.

Revenge of the Childbearers

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Yesterday I made some remarks about the advantages of raising dogs instead of children (Jinx ain’t never going to Harvard, etc). Today I got payback. Well, sort of. When I adopted my first dog, Jinx, at the Humane Society in 2002, I undertook to learn more about the mostly hidden world of animal rescue. Not really having any idea what I was getting into, I became a volunteer at the Humane Society of West Alabama’s no-kill dog shelter. My visions of frolicking with dogs wearing neck bandannas in the sunshine meadows soon faded.  As my husband says, “It’s not all puppies and daisies.” It sure isn’t. Any volunteer soon finds out that you really need to love animals in order to take them out for a pee in the most extreme weather, clean piss and shit out of their runs,  and endure cuts and scrapes and bites without feeling an excess of self-pity. Animal rescue also puts you in touch with our own species’ capacity for cruelty and vanity and neglect. People will abandon animals for any or no reason at all.  We have a dog at the shelter right now, a beautiful white shepherd named Dixie, who is so terrified of everything and everyone that she will leap out of your arms (this is a big dog, mind you, but painfully skinny) and charge in the opposite direction of food, water, and comfort just to be at a safe distance from anyone. God only knows what was done to her before we found her.

Ordinarily I work an afternoon shift at the shelter, which just requires me to run the dogs in small play groups, refill their water bowls, clean up a couple of routine messes, and give everyone some affection. But our resident caretakers were out of town this week, so I signed up for a couple of morning shifts, which required me to show up by 6:00 a.m. and get each of our 15 or so dogs out of the crates where they stay overnight and into their runs. Each dog needs to pee, get fed, and get some play time in the yards. I felt some trepidation at the thought of orchestrating all this myself (it’s more complicated than it sounds, as timing is crucial to make sure that the dogs that hate each other don’t come into contact, that everyone gets the right amount of food and medication, etc). Oh, and also, it was raining when I woke up at 5 this morning. At the last minute, my husband very kindly volunteered to come help me.

Let me preface this next bit by saying that yes, I’m a fiction writer, but no, I’m not exaggerating. When we opened the door to the trailer where the dogs sleep in crates, the foulest smell imaginable nearly knocked me backwards, some combination of shit, piss, dog fear, and Alabama old trailer smell. An air conditioner showed the temperature to be 71, but the room must have been at least 10 degrees hotter from all the breathing and shitting. I hurried to the far side of the room to begin preparing the food bowls. Some liquid sprayed my clothes and face. Could a dog have peed on me from all the way over there in its crate? I glanced over and, amid the leaping and barking of each dog in its individual crate, saw that several of the younger dogs had soiled their crates and were, in their current excitement, sending sprays of the brown watery pee-poop-diarrhea combo platter, all over me in my “We’re Messin’ with Texas” Alabama football tee shirt. How had this preppy Long Island girl ended up here, in the middle of West Alabama, in a converted double-wide, covered (voluntarily, I suppose you could argue) in dog excrement? Well, I didn’t really have time to think about that. Joel and I worked as quickly as we could to get the dogs out into the yards, though it seemed that for most of them, the morning’s deposit had already been deposited. I got all the dogs out and fed, then waded through excrement to the trailer’s bathroom. Washing my hands, I was horrified to see my face speckled with whatever dreadful stew of muck  I’d just waded through.

For the next two hours, protected by nothing more than rubber gloves and and the promise that this too shall pass, Joel and I labored to clean the fifteen crates, the fouled floor of the trailer, and, intermittently, the dog’s runs, which pretty much all of the dogs soiled as soon as I closed the gates behind them.  There was so much shit and piss everywhere that I almost had to laugh at one point, watching a puppy named Angel shit loosely all over her run and then seem to DANCE AROUND in it, spreading it to every corner of her run. Hadn’t I seen a Monty Python movie about this?

So I know I delighted in saying that my dogs wouldn’t go to college, that they wouldn’t decide at thirteen that they hated me, that they wouldn’t snort bath salts or get the girl next door pregnant or crash my new car or keep me up all night. But I have to admit, even the nastiest diaper changing episode doesn’t hold a candle to the amount of filth 15 dogs in a trailer can produce overnight.

It takes a village. Wish me luck tomorrow, Moms and Dads.

No Children Here

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I’m just back from a trip to Mexico City and Oaxaca with my husband and three other couples. Over margaritas one night, we realized none of us had kids. Two of the couples are older than my husband and me,in their fifties and sixties, so the fact that none of us had kids was even stranger, demographically speaking.  All four of us women said we’d never wanted children. When that emerged in the conversation, I felt a happiness open in my chest. I don’t know how else to describe it. In the years since I decided I didn’t want children, I’ve so often felt a weird sense of having to defend myself against other people’s judgments and remarks. Something in my heart softened a little at not having to explain my choice. Many times, people have asked me why I don’t have kids or, worse, have given me the business about not having them. You’re gonna regret it. Why don’t you adopt? Don’t you think it’s kind of . . . selfish? Who will take care of you when you’re old? Once, while waiting for my car to get fixed at the Honda dealership here in Tuscaloosa, I managed to get entangled in a conversation with a guy waiting for his minivan (probably to hold his god-only-knows how many offspring), and at some point he said to me, “You must have had a terrible childhood not to have had kids.” I was floored. What kind of freaking assumption is that to make about a complete stranger? But I bit the hook and said that actually, I’d had a great childhood, which other than Junior High is true.  Having to rebut him made me sound like I had something to prove or hide.  I had to wonder how come I always found myself on the defensive when the issue of having kids came up. Had I ever asked a parent to defend his or her choice to have kids? Absolutely not, though I do in fact think that having kids is a COMPLETELY BATTY choice and would never do it unless I was one of those women who accidentally gave birth into the toilet or something. And then I would probably “accidentally” drown it or give it away.  I like kids; I think they’re funny and cute. But I don’t want them living in my house and spending all my freaking money on video games and college.

Once a colleague remarked to me that my three dogs cost more than her kid. I kept my mouth shut. But I thought, That’s a good one, sweetheart.  You must think I’m buying some real expensive freaking kibble.