The Best American Essays 2011 Part 8

We like it here, mainly for the grounds outside. There's a gra.s.sy field for tag and ballgames, and a full play set of swings and slides and monkey bars and three concrete barrels laid on their sides, which are big enough to sit in and walk upside down around on your hands (and they offer some privacy too, if you desperately need to pee). There's a basketball court and two badly cracked asphalt tennis courts that my parents sometimes use, but have to weed a bit first. So what if teenagers smoke and drink beer on the benches at night, or if there's broken gla.s.s sprinkled about the playground. We're careful not to lose our footing, and make sure to come in well before dark.

And you can see the water from here. I like to sit by the windows when I can't go outside. With the right breeze, at low tide the mucky, clammy smell of Echo Bay flutters through the metal blinds. Sometimes, for no reason I can give, I lick the sharp edges of the blinds, the combination of tin and soot and sludgy pier a funky pepper on the tongue. I already know that I have a bad habit. I'll sample the window screens too, the paint-cracked radiators, try the parquet wood flooring after my mother dusts, its slick surface faintly lemony and then bitter, like the skins of peanuts. I like the way my tongue buzzes from the copper electroplating on the bottom of her Revere Ware skillet, how it tickles my teeth the way a penny can't. My mother scolds me whenever she catches me, tells me I'm going to get sick, or worse. Why do you have to taste everything? What's the matter with you? I don't yet know to say, It's your fault.

One of my favorite things is to chew on the corner of our red-and-white-checked plastic tablecloth backed with cotton flocking and watch the slowly fading impression of my bites. It has the flavor of plastic, yes, but with a nutty oiliness, and then bears a sharper tang of the ammonia cleaner my mother obsessively sprays around our two-bedroom apartment. She'll pull out the jug of bleach too if she's seen a c.o.c.kroach. There are grand armies of c.o.c.kroaches here, and they're huge. She keeps the place dish clean, but it's still plagued by the pests stealing over, she is certain, from the neighboring units. Twice a year, the super bombs the building and they'll be scarce for a few weeks, until they show up again in the cupboard, the leaner, faster ones that have survived. You'll hear a sharp yelp from my mother, and a slammed cabinet door, and then nothing but harrowing silence before the metallic stink of bug spray wafts through the apartment like an old-time song. I know I shouldn't, but sometimes I'll breathe it in deeply, nearly making myself choke. For I'm a young splendid bug. I live on toxins and fumes. My mother, on the other hand, is getting more and more frustrated, hotly complaining to my father when he gets home: we've lived here for more than a year, and no matter what she does she can't bar them or kill them, and she's begun to think the only solution is to move, or else completely clear the kitchen of foodstuffs, not prepare meals here at all.

Of course, that's ridiculous. First, it's what she does. She does everything else too, but her first imperative is to cook for us. It's how she shapes our days and masters us and shows us her displeasure, her weariness, her love. She'll hail my sister and me from the narrow kitchen window, calling out our names and adding that dinner's on-Bap muh-guh!-the particular register of her voice instantly sailing to us through the hot murk and chaos of the playground. It's as if we had special receptors, vestigial ears in our bellies. There's a quickening, a sudden hop in the wrong direction: I gotta go! My mother is becoming notorious among the kids; they'll whine, with scorn and a note of envy, Hey, your mom's always calling you! And one big-framed, older girl named Kathy, who has sparkling jade-colored eyes and a prominent, bulging forehead that makes her look like a dolphin, viciously bullies me about it, taunting me, saying that I eat all the time, that I'm going to be a tub o' lard, that I love my mother too much. I say it's not true, though I fear it is. Plus, I'm terrified of Kathy, who on other days will tenderly pat my head and even hug me, telling me I'm cute, before suddenly clamping my ear, pinching harder and harder until my knees buckle; once she even makes me lob curses up at our kitchen window, words so heinous that they might as well be rocks. I remember my mother poking her head out and peering down, her expression tight, confused, most of all fearful of what I might be saying, and immediately I sob. Kathy sweetly tells her that I'm hungry. My mother, who understands little English and is maybe scared of this girl too, softly orders me to come in, then pulls in the cas.e.m.e.nt window.

Once I'm upstairs, she offers me a snack-cookies, kimbap, a bowl of hot watery rice, which I eat with tiny squares of ham or leftover bulgogi, one spoon at a time. I eat while watching her cook. If she's not cleaning or laundering, she's cooking. Every so often, she'll make a point of telling me she hates it, that she no longer wants to bother but she has to because we must save money. We can't waste money eating out. My father is a newly minted psychiatrist, but his salary at the Bronx VA hospital is barely respectable, and we have no savings, no family in this country, no safety net. We dine out maybe four times a year, three of those for Chinese (there are no Korean restaurants yet), and the rest of the time my mother is at the stove-breakfast, lunch, dinner, as well as making snacks for us midmorning and afternoon, and then late at night for my father when he gets home. The other reality is that my parents don't want to eat non-Korean food; they want to hold on to what they know. What else do they have but the taste of those familiar dishes, which my mother can, for the most part, recreate from ingredients at the nearby A&P. She's grateful for the wide, shiny aisles of the chilled supermarket and its brightly lit inventory of canned goods and breakfast cereals and ice cream, but the cabbage is the wrong kind and the meat is oddly butchered and the fish has been set out on the shaved ice prefilleted, so she can't tell how fresh it is, and she can't make a good broth without the head and bones and skin. But she makes do; there's always garlic, often ginger and scallions, and pa.s.sable hot peppers. We still have a few cups of the ground red-pepper powder that friends brought over from Seoul, and every once in a while we can get the proper oils and fresh tofu and dried anchovies and sheets of roasted seaweed on a Sunday drive down to Chinatown.

We adore those Chinatown days. I love them especially because it means we skip church and the skeptical regard of the pastor and his wife and the bellowing Hananims and Amens from the congregation that for me are calls to slumber-a break that I see now my parents welcome too. Somewhere on Bayard or Mott Street, we'll have a lunch of soup noodles or dim sum and do the shopping with an eye on the time, because the parking lot is expensive and by the hour, and, despite the parade-level litter and the grimy bins of dying eels and carp and the lacquer of black crud on the sidewalks, which she would never otherwise tolerate, my mother seems calmed by the Asian faces and the hawker carts of fried pot stickers and gooey rice cakes and the cans of stewed mackerel and chiles filling the shelves. She'll go unexpectedly slowly through the crammed aisles of the dry-goods store, lingering over selections that aren't exactly what she's looking for but that nonetheless speak to her in a voice I imagine sounds very much like her own: Take your time, silly girl. Enjoy yourself. You're not going anywhere. Soon enough, the bags of groceries are teetering like drowsy siblings between my sister and me in the back seat of our navy-blue Beetle as we swerve up the FDR Drive. The seats are covered in a light-gray leatherette stippled like the back of a lizard, which I'm constantly picking at with my fingernail, inevitably running over with my tongue. It tastes of erasers and throw-up. My father is one of those people who drive by toggling on and off the gas pedal, lurching us forward for brief stretches and then coasting, the rattling of the fifty-three-horsepower engine establishing the dread prophetic beat, my sister and I know, of our roadside retching-one of us, and sometimes both, barely stumbling out of the car in time to splash the parkway asphalt, stucco the nettles. Now, with the odor of dried squid and spring onions and raw pork enveloping us, we'd be doomed, but luckily we don't have too far to go to get back to New Roch.e.l.le; my father will let us out before searching for a parking spot, my sister and I sprinting for the playground while my mother goes upstairs to empty the bags.

On those post-Chinatown evenings, she'll set out a plate of fluke or snapper sashimi to start (if she finds any fresh enough), which she serves with gochu-jang sauce, then broiled spareribs and scallion fritters and a spicy cod-head stew along with the banchan of vegetables and kimchi, and it's all so perfect-looking, so gorgeous, that we let out that whimpering, joyous, half-grieving sigh of people long marooned. Yet often enough, apparently, the dishes don't taste exactly the way they should. My father, the least imperious of men, might murmur the smallest something about the spicing of a dish, its somewhat unusual flavorings, and my mother will bitterly concur, lamenting the type of fermented bean paste she has to use, the stringy quality of the meat, how these Chinatown radishes have no flavor, no crunch, instantly grinding down her lovely efforts to a wan, forgettable dust. We protest in earnest, but it's no use; she's not seeking compliments or succor. She can get frantic; she's a natural perfectionist and worrier made over, by this life in a strange country, into someone too easily distraught. In Korea, she's a forthright, talented, beautiful woman, but here, at least outside this apartment, she is a woman who appears even slighter than she already is, a woman who smiles quickly but never widely, a foreigner whose English comes out self-throttled, barely voiced, who is listening to herself to the point of a whisper.

Never quite up to her own exalted standards, she is often frustrated, dark-thinking, on edge. Periodically I'll catch her gripped in fury at herself for not quite comprehending, say, the instructions on a box of Rice-A-Roni or Hamburger Helper (seemingly magical dinners that my sister and I whine for, despite not actually liking the stuff), revealed in her wringing the packet like a towel until it's about to burst, then remorsefully opening it and smoothing it out and trying to decipher the back of the box again. I do something similar with toys that I can't get to work properly, or am tiring of, or sometimes-and with an unequaled, almost electric pleasure-the ones I value most. I'll take the claw end of a hammer and pry open the roof of a Hot Wheels car, the enamel paint flaking off from the twisting force and gilding my fingertips. I'll squeeze the clear plastic canopy of the model P-51 Mustang I've carefully a.s.sembled until it collapses, the head of the tiny half-pilot inside shearing off. We are mother and son in this way-we share a compulsion we don't admire in the other but never call out either, and right up to the unsparingly frigid night she dies, nineteen years later, and even now, another nineteen on, I'll p.r.i.c.kle with that heat in my foolish, foolish hands.

A few years earlier, when we briefly lived in Manhattan-this before I can articulate my feelings for her, before I understand how completely and perfectly I can hurt her-I make her cry because of a fried egg. She cooks an egg for me each morning without fail. I might also have with it fried Spam or cereal or a slice of American cheese, which I'll unwrap myself and fold over into sixteen roughedged pieces, but always there is a fried egg, sunny-side up, cooked in dark sesame oil that pools on the surface of the bubbled-up white in the pattern of an archipelago; try one sometime, laced with soy and sweet chili sauce along with steamed rice, the whole plate flecked with toasted nori. It'll corrupt you for all time. But one morning I'm finally sick of it, I've had enough. She never makes an exception, because it's for my health-everything is for my health, for the good of my bones, my brain, for my daunting, uncertain future-but rather than eat yet another, I steal into her bedroom with my plate while she's talking on the telephone with Mrs. Suh (at that time her only friend in the country) and drop it onto her best shoes, black patent-leather pumps. And here's the rub: there is no sound a fried egg makes. It lands with exquisite silence. This is the dish I've been longing to prepare.

Do I confess what I've done? Does my face betray the crime? All I remember is how my mother, still holding the phone, and my baby sister, usually squirming in her high chair, both pause and stare at me as I return to the kitchen table. My mother bids Mrs. Suh good-bye and stands over me, eyeing my plate swiped clean save for the glistening oil. Without a word from either of us, I'm dragged forth, her hand gripping my elbow, and we're inexplicably moving. It's as if a homing beacon only she can hear were madly pinging from her bedroom, where I've left the sliding closet door open for all to see my work: the yolk broken and oozing inside the well of one shoe, the rubbery white flopped over the shiny ebony toe. It's a jarring, bizarrely artful mess; boxed in Lucite, it could be t.i.tled "Stepping Out, 4," or "Mother's Day Fugue," but of course she can't see it that way because she's hollering, her morning robe falling open because she's shaking so violently, stamping her foot. The end of the robe's belt is bunched in her tensed fist, and I think, She may kill me, actually kill me. Or my father will do the job when he gets home. But I'm hugging her leg now, my face pressed against her hip, and as much as I'm afraid for myself, I'm confused too, and frightened for her, for tears are distorting her eyes, and she's saying, in a voice that I will hear always for its quaver of defiance and forfeit, how difficult everything is, how wrong and difficult.

She's too indulgent of us, especially of me. I love to eat, so it's easy for her, though also at times a burden for us both. Each morning at breakfast, after the egg, she asks me what I want for dinner, and except when my father requests j.a.panese-style curry rice, which I despise (though I enjoy it now) and show my disgust for by dragging my chair into the kitchen and closing the louvered doors to "get away" from the smell, my choice is what we'll have. As with an emperor, my whims become real. Dinners-from-a-box aside, I have wide-ranging tastes, but increasingly it's American food I want, dishes I encounter while eating at friends' apartments, at summer camp, even in the cafeteria at school: meat loaf (with a boiled egg in the middle), southern fried chicken and mashed potatoes, beef Stroganoff over egg noodles, lasagna. These dishes are much heavier and plainer than ours, but more thrilling to me and my sister and perhaps even to my parents, for it is food without a.s.sociation, unlinked to any past; it's food that fixes us to this moment only, to this place we hardly know.

My mother, having no idea how the dishes should taste, at first struggles to prepare them, going solely by recipes that she copies into a small notebook from a new friend in the building, Mrs. Churchill, an always smiling, blond-haired, broad-shouldered woman who hails from Vermont and has a shelf of cla.s.sic cookbooks. It's excruciatingly slow going at the A&P as my mother runs down her shopping list-it's as if she were at the library searching for a book in the stacks, trying to find the particular spices and herbs, the right kind of macaroni, the right kind of cheese or cream (heavy or sour or cream or cottage cheese and a perhaps related cheese called ricotta and the deeply puzzling cheese that is Parmesan, which comes in a shaker, and is unrefrigerated), the right canned tomatoes (chopped or crushed or pureed-what, exactly, is "pureed"?), each decision another chance to mar the dish beyond my ignorant recognition. I can be tyrannical, if I wish. I can squash her whole day's work with a grimace, or some blithe utterance: It's fatty. It's too peppery. It doesn't taste the same. You can watch her face ice over. Shatter. Naturally, she can't counter me, and this makes her furious, but soon enough she's simply miserable, her pretty eyes gone lightless and faraway, which is when I relent and tell her it's still good, because of course it is, which I demonstrate by shoving the food in as fast as I can, stuffing my awful mouth.

Her lasagna is our favorite of that suite, though to taste it now I fear it might disappoint me, for the factory sauce (which I demand she use, this after noticing jars of Ragu at both the Goldfusses' and the Stanleys') and the rubbery, part-skim mozzarella, the cut-rate store-brand pasta, the dried herbs. But back then, it's a revelation. Our usual dinners feature salty fish and ginger, garlic and hot pepper; they are delicious in part because you can surgically pick at the table, choose the exact flavor you want. But this is a detonation of a meal: creamy, cheesy, the red sauce contrastingly tangy and a little sweet, the oozing, volcanic layer cake of the pasta a thrilling, messy bed. Maybe I first have it at Ronnie Prunesti's house, or Mrs. Churchill delivers a show model, but all of us are crazy for it once my mother begins to make it. We choose our recipe (was it on the box of macaroni?), our tools. I remember how she carefully picked out a large Pyrex ca.s.serole dish at Korvette's for the job, a new plastic spatula, two checkerboard wooden trivets, so we can place it in the center of the table, and for a few years it becomes a Friday evening tradition for us. She makes it in the afternoon after dropping me off in town for my junior bowling league, and when she and my sister pick me up I hardly care to recount my form or my scores (I'm quite good for a second-grader, good enough that my father decides that I should have my own ball, which is, whether intentionally or erroneously, inscribed "Ray") owing to the wonderful smell on their clothes, clinging to my mother's thick hair-that baked, garlicky aroma, like a pizzeria's but denser because of the ground beef and the hot Italian sausages she has fried, the herbal lilt of fennel seeds.

My father gets home early on Fridays, and while he takes off his tie and washes up for dinner my sister and I set the table with forks and knives (but without chopsticks, since I insist that there be no side of rice and kimchi at this meal, as there is at every other), folding the paper napkins into triangles. My mother brings out a bowl of iceberg-and-tomato-and-carrot salad, a dish of garlic bread, my sister waiting for the Good Seasons Italian dressing to separate so she can start shaking it again. I wonder aloud if my father ought to retrieve from the top of the kitchen cabinet the clay-colored ceramic bottle of Lancers they got as a present (they rarely drink), if only because it makes the table look right. They do, although the wine is old, for they forget that they opened it a month before, when a cla.s.smate came through New York. But no matter. They don't know that the wine has soured. My mother will lift out fat squares of the ca.s.serole, the fine strings of cheese banding across the table; I scissor them with my fingers and flinch at the tiny-striped burn. We feast. Only my sister can eat just one. Who cares that it's too rich for us to handle, who cares that our family affliction of mild lactose intolerance will surely lead to guffaws and antic hand-fanning during the Friday night repeat of the Million Dollar Movie. Here is the meal we've been working toward, yearning for. Here is the unlikely shape of our life together-this ruddy pie, what we have today and forever.

This is what a boy thinks, a boy with a tongue for a brain, a heart.

Now my mother is nearly done baking the turkey. Bake she must, because there's no Roast setting on the oven. It reads "Roast" in Mrs. Churchill's beautifully handwritten instructions, and the Churchills have gone away for the holiday. There's no one else we can call-at least, no one who would know. It certainly smells good, as if we were going to have a soup of pure fat. Yet my mother desperately peers in at the bird, the tendrils of her hair stuck against her temples, biting her lower lip, as she does whenever she's frustrated or unsure of herself. She has been basting it with margarine and the pan juices, but I can see she's deeply worried, for the bird was still slightly frozen when my father shoved it in, and we've been baking instead of roasting and we have no meat thermometer ("Why didn't I buy one!"), and at some point amid the continuous conversation with my uncle and aunt we've lost exact track of the time.

My mother has readied other food, of course, if none of the traditional accompaniments. We'll have the bird and its giblet stuffing a la Churchill (a recipe I still make), but the rest of the table is laid with Korean food, and skewed fancy besides, featuring the sort of dishes reserved for New Year celebrations: gu jeol pan, a nine-compartment tray of savory fillings from which delicate little crepes are made; a jellyfish-and-seaweed salad; long-simmered sweet short ribs; fried hot peppers stuffed with beef; and one of my favorites, thin slices of raw giant clam, whose bottom-of-the-sea essence almost makes me gag, but doesn't quite, and is thus bracing, galvanic, a rushing of the waters. Yet because of what's happening in the kitchen, we're not paying much attention; we're distracted by our celebrity guest, so buxom and tanned. My mother decides it's time; a piece of plastic has popped up from the breast, though exactly when she's not sure. My father helps her pull the turkey out and they lift it from the pan, cradling it with butcher string, onto the platter. We quickly take our places. Do we remove the stuffing now or serve it directly from the bird? The instructions don't say. After some discussion, it's decided that it should be left in-the bird might look too empty, sad. My father wields the new carving knife he's bought, a long, scary blade with a saw-toothed edge on one side and smaller serrations on the other. My mother winces. The knife strobes: the first cut is deep, surprisingly easy.

What Really Happened.

Madge McKeithen.

FROM TriQuarterly.

FIND THE NORTH CAROLINA Department of Correction Public Access Information System website. Enter the name of the offender. Write down the seven-digit offender ID number. Click on the box to see the photograph. Or you can do this later.

Write down the name of the correctional inst.i.tution in which he is incarcerated. Write down the name of the corrections officer who will coordinate your visit. If you are invited.

Ask a friend who is a lawyer to search the record to make sure the offender is not insane. Write down the name and telephone number of the lawyer who handled the offender's appeal and who is now a judge. Call him. If you must leave a message, say I am considering visiting... and use the offender's name ... Say I am a friend of... and use the victim's name. Say you would appreciate his thoughts on what to expect, given his knowledge of the offender's mental state. Be direct (others have called before you with similar questions).

Answer the phone courteously at 8:30 on a summer Sat.u.r.day evening. Thank him for calling back. Listen to the judge say You should go. Listen to him say that once you've been incarcerated twelve years, most visitors, even mothers, stop visiting. Listen to him say Murderers are not like the shark in Jaws, they are not monsters, usually and They are more like you and me than we may want to know.

Thank the judge and walk quickly outside because you know walking in the city helps everything. Walk to the river. Walk along the river for a while. Watch normal people doing normal things. Find balance.

Return home. Take a note card from the desk by the front door and write the request for an invitation to visit. Be direct. Make it three sentences.

Remember that you knew the offender. Remember what he has done. Remember he can invite you or he can refuse. Remember her.

Use sincerely to close. Put the note in an envelope and address it. Put a stamp on the envelope and look again at the address. Check the seven numbers after his name. Make sure you have them right. Leave the envelope by the door to be mailed Monday morning.

Tell one person you trust that you are requesting an invitation to visit a murderer you know in prison. Say Yes, life sentence. Say No, no chance of parole. Listen when your friend asks Why are you going? Listen to yourself when you say Because I loved her.

Early on Monday walk to the post office two blocks away and drop the card in the inside mail slot.

Wait for a response.

Call the other two who knew her well when you did. Talk together. Mention her freckles, her strawberry blond hair, how good she was in math, how well she danced, how much you laughed together, what a ringleader she was, an instigator, how she was the first among you to have s.e.x but not by much, how you went over every detail she would give up that night at the Pizza Inn all-you-can-eat buffet. Say you have been thinking about her because you are all turning fifty. Do not bother them with your thoughts of visiting prison.

Wait for an invitation.

Find the Christmas cards with family photos she sent each year. Look at the two of them and their three children on the beach, costumed, poised, staged, fun-one year in ski clothes, another in Mickey Mouse ears. Look at her children. Count back-estimate five, eight, twelve that morning. Count forward-estimate nineteen, twenty-one, twenty-five now. Probably older.

Look at the newspaper clipping your mother sent of the first-born's wedding. Look at the old photos of her wedding. Call the other two friends again. Call her mother. Do not leave a message. Remember more high school silliness, a little college silliness, the long blank of the years after. (Note: remembering a blank may leave you quiet.) Ask yourself why you get to be alive.

Take the long envelope fat with pages out of your mailbox. Read the tiny handwriting pressed hard into the notebook paper on two sides. Twenty pages. Notice the putdowns. Notice the excess verbiage. Imagine that he has little else to do. Notice no kindness.

See the invitation to visit the offender in prison. Notice his words. Put the pages back in the envelope and look at the calendar. Find three dates. Write back. Receive a response. Choose a date. Rent a car. Drive 528 miles to Bayford Correctional Inst.i.tute. Think of her first car-that red Triumph Spitfire. Remember her energy, the curves of her body, her hands.

Drive all day. Do not call anyone. Be quiet. Listen to music. Be quiet. Drive down the Delmarva Peninsula, the out-of-the-way place that it is, especially at the southern tip. Drive over the Bay Bridge Tunnel. Keep driving. Do not stop.

Arrive in Oriental at the B&B you booked. Let yourself in. Follow the instructions left on the table by the door. Find your attic room. Brush your teeth. Wash your face. Go to bed. Stare at the ceiling.

Hear You are there for her... to see, ask, hear ... because she isn't.

Sleep. Awake and find the m.u.f.fin and coffee at the base of the stairs to the attic room. Dress in clothes that cover. Notice the rain on the rental car. Notice that the town is still quiet. Notice that there are more sailboats than cars in this town called Oriental. Follow the MapQuest directions to the prison. Notice it is all gray and wet-the building, parking lot, fence, razor wire.

Look at the official visitor instructions that came in the mail. Take only your car keys, four dollar bills, your lip balm, and your driver's license. Lock the car. Wait with the others outside the kiosk that looks like a Cineplex ticket booth. Look neither worried nor curious. Do not look directly at the other visitors.

Wait for the loud buzzer to sound. Line up. Show ID. State the name and number of the offender. Sign your name. Go through metal detectors. Pa.s.s through automatic doors that open and shut with a Star Trek-like whoosh. Continue inward. Wait for more automatic doors to open and close-two of them. Enter what looks like a cafeteria.

Hear the guard say The offender must sit facing the clock. Sit in the chair with its back to the clock.

Look at him when he enters. Show nothing. See how much older he looks. See that he has no teeth. Listen for two hours.

Notice he always says The tragedy that happened. Notice he never says I killed. Ask Why could you not just let her go? Why leave the children with neither parent ? Hear I had come to believe they would be better off with her mom. Hear It takes courage to do difficult things. Hear Like the men who flew into the World Trade Center towers. Hear no remorse. Hear no regret.

Buy a soda from the vending machine as the visitor instructions permit. Hand it to him. Sit back down.

Wait for the time to be up. When the time is up, walk to the door. (Note: You may feel oily, dark, in need of a Brillo pad to scour off everything that has come toward you in these hours, and the feeling may be physical and metaphorical.) Drive north through the Great Dismal Swamp. Keep driving. Drive home.

Receive the hundreds of pages of letters he sends over the next six months. Save them for a while. Keep thinking of her. (That part is not hard.) Write from her son's perspective. Write it as fiction. Write from her perspective. Listen.

Ask. Where are her words ?

Shred his.

Wait several years. Attend a wedding. Be sociable. Hear the charming man next to you talk about his four children, his wife, that his father killed his mother when he was small, his career, his hopes for his children, his love for the grandmother who raised him. Talk to him about family and fun and food and New Orleans. Laugh. Dance with your man.

Hear her now. Hear Love life. Hear Love especially those who have no need for the word "lugubrious." Hear That's it.

Say back What really happened is your life.

Rude Am I in My Speech.

Caryl Phillips.

FROM Salmagundi.

PERHAPS THE MOST ARRESTING MOMENT in the first act of Shakespeare's Oth.e.l.lo occurs when the soldier is asked by the Duke of Venice to respond to the accusation that he has "beguiled" Brabantio's daughter, Desdemona, away from the protection and safety of her father's house. The soldier is an outwardly confident man, full of pride and bombast, and hugely aware of his celebrity in Venice. He addresses the Duke. "Rude am I in my speech," he says, then spins a masterfully persuasive narrative full of lyrical eloquence which the Duke acknowledges would have ensnared his own daughter too. The poised, silver-tongued soldier is vindicated and the play can proceed. What is firmly established in this first act is that Oth.e.l.lo is an outsider both racially and socially. In this thoroughly demarcated Venetian world where Michael Ca.s.sio is simply "a Florentine," the "old black ram," although he claims to be descended from "men of royal siege," is regarded as little more than an "extravagant and wheeling stranger." For the full length of the first act, what Shakespeare does not allow us to see is that for all Oth.e.l.lo's public success there is at the center of his personality a kernel of self-doubt, a tight knot of anxiety, which is eventually exploited by his ancient Iago. During this first act the soldier appears to be in control. He plays games, protesting that he has a clumsy tongue even though his language betrays no hint of rudeness or foreign taint. If Oth.e.l.lo possesses any self-doubt, or inner discomfort, its origins are not rooted in language. What if he had begun his mellifluous speech with, "Rude am I in my visage"? Would this self-a.s.sured black migrant to Europe have had the confidence to stand before the Duke of Venice and play fearlessly with notions of ident.i.ty and belonging that are rooted in race as opposed to language, or would this be to trespa.s.s too close to the source of his well-hidden self-doubt?

Almost ten years ago, I arranged to meet my father at lunchtime in a hotel in Manchester. The night before I had given a reading at a local bookshop, and that afternoon I was planning to move on to Liverpool and give another reading at the university. My father lives maybe an hour away from Manchester, and so this seemed an opportune moment to get together. What made the meeting unusual was the fact that we had not seen or spoken with each other for some years. I came down into the hotel lobby a little early, but there he was, already sprawled out on a sofa and watching the news on the television. He saw me and stood up. I was glad to see him. He had not changed much, and we hugged and I suggested that we go to another hotel around the corner, which had a nicer restaurant. There were very few people in the place and the hostess seated us and gave us our menus. She asked if we would like a drink to start with. My father ordered a Scotch and I asked for a gla.s.s of Sauvignon Blanc, and, having informed us of the specials, the hostess left us alone. Five minutes later a waitress arrived with our drinks. As she withdrew we raised our gla.s.ses and clinked, and then I sipped and grimaced. My father asked me if there was a problem and I said that the wine was not Sauvignon Blanc. It tasted like Chardonnay. I signaled to the waitress and then I saw a flicker of panic pa.s.s across my father's face. He asked me if I couldn't drink it. I said, "Why, it's not what I ordered." The waitress came over and I explained the situation. She shrugged her shoulders and took up my gla.s.s. There was no apology, but there was no surliness either as she disappeared from view. My father remained quiet and I could see that he was uncomfortable. For a few moments I made inane conversation; at last the waitress returned with the new gla.s.s of wine and I tasted it. Better, I thought, so I nodded and thanked her and she left us alone. However, this incident caused the atmosphere between father and son to become strained.

First-generation migrants to Europe, from wherever they may originate, have to learn quickly how to read the new society in order to successfully navigate their way forward. Sometimes this involves learning when to remain quiet, and somewhat compliant, and not risk causing offense. When West Indians first arrived in England in the 1950s, countless pamphlets were thrust into their hands which explained to them the ways of the English. They were instructed that they must line up at bus stops in an orderly fashion, and not keep working when their fellow laborers were on a tea break, and it was suggested that they should try to join a trade union, and perhaps they should not bring food that smelled "foreign" to work. In common with many immigrants, they were being taught how to tread carefully, the unspoken contract being that in time they would learn the rules and become familiar with how the society worked; so much so that one day they might be considered domesticated. Whether they would ever become fully fledged insiders was not discussed, but for many first-generation migrants this was not something that was necessarily desired. The hope on both sides was for some vestige of tolerance and respect.

There are, of course, two places where new immigrants can find some relief from these anxieties of belonging. First, at home with their families, where the rules are of their own making and no local person can prevent them from being kings and queens in their own castles. Behind closed doors they can cook their own food, listen to whatever music takes their fancy, and curse the locals in whatever tongue or dialect they choose. And then of course there is the world of the pub, or the club, or the cafe, where immigrants gather together socially and over a drink compare notes with others of their own tribe. The home and the social gathering place const.i.tute zones of psychological relief for immigrants. In such s.p.a.ces one doesn't have to be called Sam or Son, or take aggressive orders from ignorant people half one's age. In the kingdom of the home, or in the citadel of the club, first-generation migrants are free to be whoever they imagine, or remember, themselves to be, and there is no expectation that they should perform the shapeshifting dance that immigrants often have to execute in order to safely negotiate a pa.s.sage from sunup to sundown. Of course, the more successful the immigrant, the more difficult it can be to keep in touch with the "club." Upon a.s.suming a white-collar job as a foreman, or an executive role in a company, the rules become more complex, for there are now men and women above you and men and women below you, and with the job comes a salary increase and perhaps a move to a new neighborhood where there are less of you and more of them. To keep contact with fellow migrants one has to now travel further, both physically and psychologically.

During the first, Venetian act of Shakespeare's play, before the action moves off to Cyprus, it is clear to us that Oth.e.l.lo, this "extravagant and wheeling stranger," is a man who is a long way from home. In Venice he is an exotic celebrity, and as such the Duke is inclined to overlook the social and cultural transgression of not only an interracial marriage but a secret one, therefore allowing Oth.e.l.lo to indulge in behavior that would almost certainly be frowned upon if attempted by a noncelebrity. This being the case, this extravagant stranger appears to be untroubled by the fact that he has recourse to neither home nor club as places to which he might retreat and recuperate from the daily fatigue of living a performative life, and he appears content to veer dramatically between rhetorical swagger and self-deprecating bl.u.s.ter like a kite snapping in the wind. Apparently he feels that his success is such that there is no need for him to be aware of the unwritten Venetian rule book which tells him that he must line up in an orderly fashion for a gondola, and don't even think about cooking chickpeas or couscous, and whatever you do don't mess with the local ladies, especially the t.i.tled ones. Our celebrity migrant considers himself above and beyond such restrictive nonsense. By the end of Act One the newly married man truly believes that he has crossed over into full acceptance, but the truth is, without family or peer group, and without societal knowledge born of vigilance and judicious interaction, he is incapable of making sound decisions about something as basic as knowing who to trust. It soon becomes lamentably evident that, far from being in control of the situation and partic.i.p.ating as an insider, our black first-generation migrant to Europe is about as unmoored as any man can be.

My father is no Oth.e.l.lo. He may have polished up a few words and phrases here and there, and done a little studying of the dictionary, but to this day he remains admirably rude in speech. But then again he has never been a vital or essential cog in British life and occupied the role of supermigrant. What West Indian immigrant has? In fact, what immigrant has? As a first-generation migrant he has always been aware of the home and the club as zones of sanity in which he can be himself. Like most second-generation children, I have at times been puzzled and frustrated by his dependence upon one form or another of the "club," and irritated by the taciturn manner in which he often exercised his authority in the home; not that he was always wrong. When I was fifteen or sixteen, I remember one Sat.u.r.day night standing upstairs in front of the mirror and preparing myself to go out to the church discotheque. Eventually I ventured downstairs wearing tight blue nylon bellbot-toms, black platform shoes, a pink shirt with a huge collar that was trimmed in brown piping, and a black-and-white-checked jacket. My father was sitting at the kitchen table and he looked up at me over the top of his newspaper. He shook his head and said, "Somebody tell you that s.h.i.t matches?" The second generation was stepping out into England with a confidence and brashness that, in retrospect, could have used a little more of his cold water being poured upon it. It was his house and he was trying to tell me something about how to look and comport myself out there on the streets, like the time a year or two later when I pa.s.sed my driving test and he told me that I must be very careful if I was out driving at night with a white girl in the pa.s.senger seat. He warned me that I should be prepared to have the police stop and hara.s.s me for no other reason than the fact that I was with a white girl. Again he was pa.s.sing on knowledge which was meant both to help prepare me for life in England and to reaffirm who he was when in his own private sphere. I listened, and I a.s.sumed that my father knew what he was talking about, for at the time he had a white wife.

As a reader and a writer, I am interested in loneliness and isolation, and I have found myself returning time and time again to consider those who have suddenly realized themselves to be marooned. Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas in that huge Chicago mansion, scared out of his mind and not knowing whether to stay put or flee; Ibsen's Oswald, recently returned to Norway with his body eaten away by disease and his mind racked with pain at the bleakness of his own country; James Baldwin's David, alone in a house in the South of France at precisely the time his lover, Giovanni, is about to be guillotined in Paris; Shusaku Endo's medical intern, Suguro, whose conscience begins to torment him as he remembers the past and finds himself increasingly detached from daily reality. However, I know of no character in literature more profoundly alone and isolated than Shakespeare's pioneer migrant Oth.e.l.lo, who, once he pa.s.ses beyond the imaginary security of his life in the great city of water, suddenly finds himself adrift with no son or daughter to measure his situation against, no peer group to bond with at the end of the day, no Venetian home to return to, and loving a local woman whom he eventually decides he cannot trust. No wonder he loses his mind.

Immigrants will continue to enter Europe, and initially they will be unsure of how to be an Italian, or how to be a Dane, or Irish or Greek. It takes many years for a first-generation migrant, of any race, to become socially confident, and perhaps, in the end, it is only those closest to them, the second generation, who can fully understand the price they pay as they grapple with self-doubt and attempt to hitch their fortune (and talent) to a new country. I am beginning to feel that witnessing and recording the predicament of the first generation is a responsibility, because by the time we reach the commendably brash third generation, a parental comment about one's dress, or how to be circ.u.mspect in the street, is likely to be met with a bemused and slightly disdainful "What are you on about?" As the grandchildren enter fully and boldly into the country with not only the temerity of an Oth.e.l.lo but, crucially, armed with the social knowledge and understanding that the Venetian resident didn't have, or seem to desire, the kernel of self-doubt which speaks to either social standing or race is, in their lives, beginning to disappear. Nervous hesitation will once again be visited upon the next wave of first-generation migrants, wherever they might hail from, and to the list of potential sources of anxiety to be negotiated we might add religious belief. Rude am I in my speech. Rude am I in my visage. Rude am I in my faith. When I left my father in Manchester that lunchtime, and took the train to Liverpool, I began to think about first-generation diffidence, and again I reflected upon the supreme loneliness of the migrant to Venice, who also had a white wife, but it never occurred to him that the police were going to pull him over, until, of course, it was too late.

Lucky Girl.

Bridget Potter.

FROM Guernica.

IN 1962, I WAS NINETEEN, working in my first job, living in my first apartment, having s.e.x with my first real boyfriend. Michael was a tall, thick-haired Italian from the Bronx. For birth control, I was using fluffy pink foam from an aerosol can. I had heard about it from dark-banged, bespectacled Emily Perl in the television production office where I had my first job. I was the floater, filling in when a secretary went to lunch or the switchboard operator needed to go to the bathroom. Emily was a researcher and married. She used the foam as backup to her diaphragm. At the time it was illegal for a gynecologist to prescribe a diaphragm for a single woman, and I didn't have the nerve to lie. As for condoms, what little I knew of them was that they were disgusting, unreliable, and boys didn't like to use them anyway.

Emily Perl knew a single girl who had been buying the pink foam illicitly from a pharmacy on Madison Avenue and using it-no diaphragm-without a problem. It was a spermicide. When the white-coated pharmacist handed me the plain white box of contraband from beneath the counter I tried to ignore his knowing leer. Sperm killer sounded safe and safe is what I wanted to be.

I used the pink foam.

My period was late.

Historian Rickie Solinger in her book Wake Up Little Susie describes what it was like to have an unwanted pregnancy in 1962. The woman might be "futilely appealing to a hospital abortion committee; being diagnosed as neurotic, even psychotic by a mental health professional; expelled from school (by law until 1972); unemployed; in a Salvation Army or some other maternity home; poor, alone, ashamed, threatened by the law." There was also an acute social stigma attached to an unwed mother with an illegitimate child; maternity homes were frequently frightening and far away. All counseled adoption. The only alternatives were a shotgun wedding or an illegal abortion.

According to a 1958 Kinsey study, illegal abortion was the option chosen by 80 percent of single women with unwanted pregnancies. Statistics on illegal abortion are notoriously unreliable, but the Guttmacher Inst.i.tute, a respected international organization dedicated to s.e.xual and reproductive health, estimates that during the pre-Roe v. Wade years there were up to one million illegal abortions performed in the United States each year. Illegal and often unsafe. In 1965, they count almost two hundred known deaths from illegal abortions, but the actual number was, they estimate, much higher, since the majority went unreported.

Michael and I checked around for remedies. First we had a lot of energetic s.e.x, even though we were hardly in the mood. That didn't work. One night I sat in an extremely hot bath in my walk-up on Waverly Place while Michael fed me a whole quart of gin, jelly jar gla.s.s by jelly jar gla.s.s. In between my gulps, he refreshed the bath with boiling water from a saucepan on the crusty old gas stove. I got beet-red and nauseous. We waited. I threw up. Nothing more. Another night I ran up and down the apartment building's six flights of stairs, Michael waiting at the top to urge me to go back down and do it again.

On a Friday evening, I drank an overdose of castor oil. By midnight I had horrible cramps of the wrong kind in the wrong place.

When my period was a month late I gave up hoping for a false alarm and went to visit Emily Perl's gynecologist. His ground-floor office in a brownstone on a side street on the Upper East Side was genteel but faded. So was he, a short, stern old man with gla.s.ses perched on the top of his head and dandruff flakes on his gray suit jacket. As I explained my problem, he shook his head from side to side in obvious disapproval of the loose behavior that was the cause of my visit. He instructed me to pee in a jar. The test results, he said, would take two weeks.

At that time pregnancy testing involved injecting a lab rabbit with human urine and watching for its effects. I waited to hear if the rabbit died. I learned much later that all lab rabbits used for pregnancy tests died, autopsied to see the results. It was code.

My rabbit died.

Michael was Roman Catholic and at twenty-two was willing to get married but unenthusiastic. We could, he supposed, live with his parents in the Bronx. I didn't know what I wanted to do. My upper-cla.s.s English parents would have been appalled and, I was sure, unsupportive. Confused, ashamed, scared, and sad, I decided to try to get an abortion.

Try was the operative word. I asked the gynecologist for advice. He told me that the law prohibited him from helping me in any way, but he offered to check me later for infection. The idea of infection alarmed me but I thought his gesture was nice.

I'd heard that after twelve weeks the procedure became extremely dangerous. So I had four weeks left to borrow money, find a way to do it, and get it done.

Emily Perl knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who had been taken care of by a woman in an apartment on West Eighty-sixth Street. When Michael and I arrived, she put the chain on the inside of the door and peeped through the crack. She let me in but demanded that Michael wait in the lobby. The room was dark, overheated, and smelled of boiled cabbage. I glimpsed a big Victorian wood-framed red velvet couch and a round oak pedestal table through the dinge. In her fifties, the woman had an Eastern European accent, suspiciously black hair, and smeary scarlet lipstick. She was curt.

She would "pack" my uterus and send me home, where I must rest. For a day or two. When I started to bleed I must return, and she would take care of it. What would she put inside me? I asked clumsily. "Stoff," she replied. Where would she "take care" of it? I asked. She pointed to a door. "In ze udder room." I must "svear" not go to a doctor or a hospital. I understood the chilling threat. "It's nowting," she said. "If you wanna now is fine. Five hunnerd dollars. Cash."

My rent was $60 a month. I earned $60 a week, $47 after taxes. I could barely make it Friday to Friday. I thanked her and fled. There had to be a cheaper, safer way.

There was. Within a couple of days Emily Perl, born researcher, came up with the Angel of Ashland, Pennsylvania. Dr. Robert Spencer was a legend, a general pract.i.tioner inspired by compa.s.sion to perform, it is said, somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 illegal abortions over his sporadic career. His price was $50. He worked in a sterile environment with an anesthetist and used an orthodox medical procedure called dilation and curettage. What did that mean? I asked Emily. Opening and sc.r.a.ping, she told me. I was sorry I had asked. His clinic had been closed down by the law, but she gave me a contact number at a motel somewhere in Pennsylvania. I should say I wanted an appointment, saying simply that I needed a D & C. It was affordable, sane, and safe.

I called. The woman who answered told me Dr. Spencer was unreachable, he would be unreachable for about five months. I pressed. I might even have cried. The woman in the motel somewhere in Pennsylvania finally told me that he was in jail.

Emily's last suggestion was based on a rumor. There might be a place in the Santurce district of San Juan, Puerto Rico, called the Women's Hospital that would give an abortion. It might cost $250. She knew nothing more. I was becoming frantic. Michael was unable to do much more than hold my hand. I had two weeks left. I was on my own.

Sneaking into an empty office at work and locking the door, I picked up the phone. The overseas operator found the number and placed the call. The connection was crackly, and the man who answered neither confirmed nor denied that they would help. I asked if I would need more than $250. That might be okay, he said vaguely. I should come down if I wanted to know more. Not on a weekend, he warned.

I would go. I would need money for the airfare, money for a place to stay for a couple of nights, and money for the abortion. It would add up, I speculated, to about $500.

Michael offered to ask his father, a shoemaker with a repair store on Ca.n.a.l Street, but he couldn't tell him what he needed the money for, and he wasn't sure if his father would have it to lend. I had never asked my parents for money, and they had never offered it. If I did now, they would a.s.sume, rightly, that their prediction that I would get into some kind of dreadful trouble had come true. I couldn't face them. Emily Perl's husband was a book editor. They lived in an apartment with real draperies. They gave dinner parties at which they served wine in long-stemmed gla.s.ses. Maybe she had an extra $500. Borrow it from the office, she suggested. Bosses like their employees to feel obligated. They'll get it back by deducting it from your paycheck.