From the Archives: Rumpus Original Fiction: The Anniversary

This was originally published at The Rumpus on April 24, 2017.

By mid-morning, it was so hot her breath felt as if it were being drawn back into her. She took the tin washbasin out to the front yard, filled it with cold water, and shampooed her hair. If she turned her head, she could watch her reflection in the kitchen window as she leaned over the tub. Her hips seemed so wide in that position, tapering down from the wraparound skirt to legs that were girl-like. She watched her hair turn from yellow to brown with the wetness.

Around noon, with her hair now sticking to the back of her neck with perspiration, she heard the screen door slam once, then again. It was odd for him to come home in the middle of the day.

She went to the kitchen but he was already gone. This was the way he did things. She looked at the kitchen table for a box, some sign of the gift she was sure he would sneak in and leave her just as he had every anniversary. She heard his truck backing down the dirt drive. There was no chance she’d catch up with him.

This time of day, the sun came in through the slatted windows and settled on the yellow linoleum in stripes. Now she saw it. There lay her gift, basking in the sunlight. A gray-green lizard the size of a shoe. It stood so still she thought it was fake. A joke he had played on her, like the time he told her he was fixing the kitchen faucet and put a gag faucet where the real one had been. She remembered how she ducked and screamed, thinking she would be splashed with water when the new faucet came off in her hands.

But this was not plastic. He had tied a long piece of thick string from one of the lizard’s ankles to the kitchen table. Around the neck was a thin yellow crinkly ribbon that she had seen him pull out of the junk drawer the day before. She had suspected it was to wrap her gift. The ribbon was tied sideways around the animal’s neck in a bow. The lizard squinted as it turned its head slowly to look around the room. Its bulgy, liquid eyes scared her. She moved and the thin plates of skin on its back stood up. Now it turned its head swiftly and the scales rippled as if it were shivering.

She heard herself sigh, rubbed her hands on her skirt, and walked toward the white pine cupboards, making a full circle around the lizard’s body. It watched her. She found an aluminum pie pan under the sink and grabbed the pitcher of cold water from the refrigerator. She put the pan on the floor, poured the water in, and inched it over to the animal with a broom, backing away quickly and waiting to see if it would drink. The lizard sat on its squat legs and narrowed its lids into slits like cat’s-eye marbles. It appeared to be asleep.

Throughout the day, she kept going to the kitchen to check on it, afraid it might get loose in the house. In the late afternoon, she stood a distance away and threw a leaf of Bibb lettuce by the pie pan. She didn’t want anything to do with it, but she didn’t want it to starve. The creature, startled, was set into motion, skittering back and forth, first in one direction, then another, yanking itself back again and again by the string. For a while, she took a seat across from it, leaning forward. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, she said.

She finished cleaning the house and had no choice now but to come back to the kitchen. She had to clear out everything to wash the floor, which meant moving the tables and chairs and putting it somewhere. Outside was where she wanted it. She could tell him it escaped, ran away. But that wouldn’t be honest and if they had promised each other anything when they married, it was honesty. Letting his gift run away, or rather, pushing his gift out the door, wouldn’t be a white lie. It would be flat-out deception.

She moved the chairs into the hallway and tried to untie the string, cursing him for making a knot she couldn’t undo. She went to the junk drawer, took out the scissors and, grasping the string, clipped it quickly and led the lizard toward the kitchen door, then the porch, like a dog on a leash. When she opened the screen door, the lizard tried to run back inside, as if it were afraid of the outdoors. She pulled it along, but it planted all four paws firmly on the floor. Its nails made a pitiful sound on the linoleum, then became stuck on the doorjamb. She gave a tug and over it rolled, like a child’s toy truck. Another tug, and it was up again and furious and ran towards her. It followed her the whole length of the porch until she scooted over the banister and tied it to one of the posts. She walked around to the back of the house and let herself in.

What a gift, she thought. Her present for him was wrapped and put away in a bedroom drawer days before he suggested they skip gifts this year. She had bought him a new jacket and white shirt. She undid the ribbon to look at them, then replaced the clothes and surrounded them with tissue paper. They looked so nice she took the shirt out again and held it up to her cheek. It felt so crisp and cool.

When the day had cooled, she bathed and changed into a fresh cotton dress and lifted her hair away from her neck to pin it up.

*

“What’s it doing out there?” he said when he came home. “Don’t you like it?”

On the table, she had put a candle and the gift box in navy blue paper and the good dishes, but he didn’t look at those.

“What’s it doing?” she said absently, for she had taken him to mean that the thing was doing something interesting or different and that she should go and look.

The lizard stood very still, as if it might be dead. The bow was gone.

“Why’d you put it out there?” he said.

“Because it belongs out there,” she said as she closed the screen door.

From the heat, his black hair had separated into individual strands, making him look older and scraggly.

“You didn’t like it,” he said and began to follow her around the kitchen.

She retrieved his favorite pasta dish from the oven and the salad from the refrigerator and he followed right behind. Their bodies made a shadow on the yellow floor that looked like the silhouette of two shy, hesitant boxers in a ring.

“Oh, I like it,” she said. She was intent on getting the dinner ready and didn’t look at him. “I like it just fine. You didn’t pay any money for it, did you?”

His face looked tight.

She motioned toward the window with her cooking mitt. “It’s just that there’s a million of them out there, and it’s a shame to throw away good money after one.”

“I bought it, all right? Cheap. From a guy at work. I thought you’d like it. I thought you’d think it was funny.”

“I do think it’s funny. I laughed.”

“It’s really neat,” he said, trying to convince her. “It looks prehistoric or something.”

She made him sit through dinner before opening his package.

She expected him to say, I thought we agreed, but he didn’t. Instead, he looked eager, put his glass down, and said, “Well, let’s see what this is.”

He seemed stunned for a moment when he saw the clothes and then whistled low as he lifted them out of the box. He felt the material, ran his fingers down the length of the lapel, and smiled at her. “This is a good one. But what‘s it for? God knows there’s nowhere around here to wear this.” And then he laughed and said, eyes crinkling, “What have you got up your sleeve? I think you must be up to something, baby doll.”

“They’re interview clothes. You’ll need something nice to interview in if you try to get transferred back home or if you go to another company. Isn’t that why we came here? So you’d have a better job after this one? The next step up, you said.”

He went back to examining the jacket, rose half out of his chair and sat down again.

“Isn’t it?” she repeated and motioned with the back of her hand to the open bedroom door. “Try it on.”

He was standing now. He had the jacket on and went to the mirror, looking at himself this way and that, sizing up every angle.

“I told you,” he said. “I’ve got to put in a couple of years first before I’d even try to move on. You don’t just go looking for another job when you’ve hardly been here. You have to pay your dues.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I was hoping that once you were here for a while, you’d like it.”

“What’s there to like?” she said. She began biting some ragged skin on her bottom lip. She fingered the rim of her glass. She knew her voice sounded bitter but she didn’t care. “You told me about the place. Patience, you said. You’d have to be brain-dead to have this much patience. To want to live here. You’d have to be a fool.”

He stepped in front of her. “I’m a fool then,” he said, sticking his hands in his pockets.

“You’re a fast learner. Everyone has always told you that. You’ll find another job. You don’t have to stay at that place.”

“You don’t want me to blow what I have, do you? If they get wind of me applying other places it won’t look good. And if I go in there now and ask the boss for a transfer back to where I came from, they’d die laughing. There are other guys, ahead of me, willing to pay their dues.”

She thought of those other men and what they and their wives must be like to be so patient, so accepting. She found herself wondering, for the first time since they had been together, what other kinds of men she could have married. Maybe I should have waited, she thought. And then she thought, I’ve heard about this. This is how things change.

“You act as if I don’t know what I’m talking about,” he said. “They said I’d have to wait two years for a transfer. At least two years.”

“Oh, great,” she said, fingering the glass again. “I’ll be dead in two years in a place like this.”

He smiled at her.  “There she is. My melodramatic sweetheart.”

He removed his jacket and draped it neatly over his chair. He stepped behind her and put his arms around her.

“Look,” he said. “Baby doll. This is nothing. We’ll laugh about this later. It’ll be a story. Like a joke about how many miles we walked to school when we were kids.”

She looked through the window to where there was a thin stream of orange light across the horizon and nothing more. Some people might think the sight was beautiful. To her it had become barren.

“Let’s eat,” she said. “It’s getting cold.”

And in the end, after they had finished dinner and lain together and after she waited for the movements of his body to cause hers to shiver, she turned on her side and closed her eyes. He put his hand on her hip and said in a whisper, “Baby doll? You still awake?”

She was in the lazy space between wakefulness and sleep and, so, didn’t answer. She thought she heard the animal stumbling off the porch, down the steps, and into the night, finally free.

Before she dreamed, an image came to her of the liquid eyes. As she began to fall asleep, her body jerked, quick and hard. She felt as if she were jumping straight up into darkness.

***

Rumpus original art by Aubrey Nolan.

On Marital Fidelity: Its Personal and Public Benefits

Editor’s Note: This essay is the second in a three-part series that, in recognition of Fidelity Month, reflects on the importance of fidelity to God, our families, and our country. You can watch a recording of Public Discourse’s recent webinar on Fidelity Month here. 

In the famous story of Penelope from Homer’s Odyssey, we hear about a woman who faithfully waited for her spouse, Odysseus, to return home from war. Despite the attention of more than a hundred suitors, the queen of Ithaca employs diplomacy and cunning to defer their attentions for twenty years, symbolically weaving and reweaving a burial shroud to buy her time. Not until she could confirm that Odysseus had died was she willing to entertain the idea of remarriage. But what about Odysseus? Was he faithful to her?

It depends on how you look at it. During his arduous ocean journey home, he meets up with two separate seductresses. The first, Circe, uses her magic to charm Odysseus into an intimate relationship as she provides for his every desire. After a year of island comforts, however, he asks her to release him and his crew so they can return home.

 

Later in the journey, Odysseus is shipwrecked alone on an island, where the obsessed nymph Calypso makes him her amorous prisoner for seven years. She offers Odysseus immortality if he will stay and become her husband forever. But every day, he goes to the shoreline to weep and pray, longing to return to his wife and son. Eventually, Zeus intercedes, and Calypso is forced to free him. He finally makes it home to an epic reunion with Penelope.

My reading of Odysseus’s entanglements is a merciful one, of a hero who falls but ultimately triumphs in the virtue of fidelity. The commitment to marriage is often fraught with difficulties and missteps, but what matters is turning things around, healing wounds, and persevering in faithful married love.

What Is Marital Fidelity?

In modern lingo, marital fidelity is often taken to mean abstaining from sex with anyone other than one’s spouse. However, this involves not only an oversimplification, but a hyper-focus on the sexual aspect of marriage. If marriage is what natural law teaches it is, namely, the union of a man and a woman who 1) give their whole selves to each other: minds, wills, hearts, and bodies; 2) are open to begetting children; 3) agree to a lifelong union; and 4) are exclusive (no side-partners allowed), then it’s not merely about keeping our hands off others, but primarily about being faithful to the whole gift of self being given and received in marriage.

Therefore, we can distinguish among different kinds of infidelity that offend different parts of the marital union. Infidelity of mind and will involves intellectually desiring or wishing for intimacy with another person outside the marriage bond—which includes neglecting to care for one’s spouse, even if no other person is involved. Emotional infidelity, on the other hand, involves misdirecting the heart, allowing one’s feelings to attach to someone else, and/or neglecting our spouse’s emotional needs. And physical infidelity, of course, involves the body and includes succumbing to outside physical, including sexual, acts of affection, and/or neglecting our spouse’s physical-sexual needs.

Essentially, it is possible to cheat not only through sex but in several ways, including by creating intellectual and/or emotional bonds with an opposite-sex friend other than our spouse. Indeed, intellectual and emotional infidelity are often the ladder rungs that lead to the slide down into sexual infidelity. We are body-soul unities, and the sharing of our souls (through our minds and emotions) naturally leads to the sharing of our bodies. So, guarding marital love includes directing our most intimate treasures toward our spouse and warding off alternative appeals, as Penelope did. Or after falling, getting up again, like Odysseus.

It takes concerted effort to avoid indiscretions on all these fronts, but that is where the complete gift of the will matters. When fidelity becomes difficult and a thousand Siren songs are playing in our ears, we tie our will to the mast and take the necessary measures to avoid entrapments. This is made easier by the positive effort to focus on weaving (and reweaving) the two strands of the marriage, man and woman, into one. Committed couples strive toward a more perfect union every day, focusing on daily collaboration, mutual understanding, forbearance, making compromises, patiently bearing each other’s faults, displaying good humor, and making creative sacrifices to add joy to the daily grind. In this way, the lion’s share of romantic energy and attention is already in the right place, and there’s not much of either one left over for others!

 

Modern Criticisms of Marital Fidelity

Clearly, marital fidelity involves a lot of hard work, so it’s reasonable to ask: is it worth it? For decades, we have been hounded with messages that nonmarital sex, easy, no-fault divorce, cohabitation, and same-sex romantic relationships are acceptable, and that we should lighten up on the commitment to faithful marriage as the one and only ideal. Today, we hear new voices calling for society to loosen further, to consider polyamory and support open marriages and polycules, what academics call “consensual nonmonogamous (CNM) relationships.”

Still other (more cantankerous) voices are calling for society to do away with mononormativity altogether (which, like heteronormativity, is used as a term of disparagement—in this case, toward the monogamous ideal). These voices claim it’s discriminatory to put monogamy on a pedestal over and above other romantic relationships.

It’s worth pausing to ask, do they have a point? Or do the cost-benefit scales still tip in favor of fidelity?

Personal Benefits of Marital Fidelity

Social-science research on CNM partnerships is still in its infancy, but the best data to date are not flattering. Participants report lower overall happiness, relationship satisfaction, and sexual satisfaction than monogamous couples. Researchers hypothesize that this is due to minority stress, or the social stigma that still exists toward nonmonogamous partners. If only society were more accepting, the story goes, these groups would experience better outcomes. However, experience-based wisdom suggests other reasons related to the nature of the arrangement itself (and not external social factors). Here are a few of the more obvious hypotheses.

First, a firm marital commitment engenders deep psychological benefits. Once the promise to be faithful, exclusive, and permanent is given, and after some time living that way, couples experience a deep sense of psychological peace. Essentially, they realize they can trust each other. Neither has to worry about whether interest is waning, if the other has his or her eyes on the door, or if there might be a new partner on the side.

Fear of the future is also reduced, as faithful couples have confidence that they won’t be all alone as they face tragedy, illness, old age, and finally, death, especially the longer they stick together through hard times. And fears about parenting and children’s futures are reduced, as mothers can count on the father’s help and fathers can count on the mother’s help. As both sexes pour their unique talents into the parenting enterprise, a great synergy of their strengths gives children the best start in life.

By contrast, consensual nonmonogamy promotes distrust, insecurity, and fear. With no promises to be faithful, exclusive, or permanent, these relationships are unstable and prone to dissolution. Naturally, real or perceived comparisons to other sexual partners will lead to deep insecurities and frail self-esteem. The cluster of relationships will feel unfair; someone will certainly feel less loved and valued than others in the group.

Those in polyamorous relationships will also be more fearful for the future, as the instability inherent in this arrangement makes for precarious long-term planning and investing. In the case of a polycule, high-maintenance group members (the ill, aging, depressed) will be let go to fend on their own.

Challenges multiply when children enter the question. Fights over different perspectives on childcare and discipline will increase, as the revolving door of lovers means more adult opinions have to be managed about what to do with kids. And there is, of course, a heightened risk of novel sexual disease transmission, with the accompanying stress, accusations, and blaming.

 

Second, permanent marital partnerships accrue material and financial benefits. Faithfully married people are better off financially because they pool their resources, with no sharing with additional romantic partners.

They invest together in their own assets, savings, retirement accounts, and education. This investment includes the manual labor that goes unmonetized—time spent helping with children, chores, and upkeep of other material goods—rather than on outside partners unrelated to the primary home.

Married couples can also sign couple-exclusive contracts with confidence, taking advantage of longer-term opportunities including insurance policies, homeownership, and entrepreneurial endeavors.

Nonmonogamous couples, by contrast, experience greater financial confusion and struggle. Myriad questions about how to handle expenses will bring on stifling decision fatigue. In an open marriage, fights will emerge around who pays for what, lives where, and how much can be spent on new romantic pursuits.

Jealousy seems inevitable as partners spend money on outside relationships, making budgeting an emotional minefield. The instability of polyamorous relationships will preclude much long-term financial strategizing.

Third, faithful marriages generate an ethos of unity. To make the relationship last, spouses must learn to negotiate, compromise, and carve out win-win solutions. Compromise strengthens character and builds emotional resilience. Checks on personal autonomy guarantee growth in selflessness, which leads to more humble service to others, including spouse, children, neighbor, and greater society. Mercy and forbearance are required to hang on, giving rise to more compassionate spouses.

 

But open marriages and polycules foment an ethos of division. These relationships give primacy to each individual’s self-actualization through subjective feelings rather than to spousal unity, so tensions and disagreements will more likely to lead to standoffs and exits than to compromises.

Each partner will prefer to release tension outside, on new distractions and abatements, further weakening the primary relationship. Open marriages and polycules will be more susceptible to division and divorce and will bring that spirit of separation to their parenting style, being more willing to separate children from biological parents and established relational bonds. Questions of paternity, fatherly responsibility, and abortion have the potential to sow deep discord and bitter conflict.

Public Benefits of Marital Fidelity

Besides the personal advantages that marital fidelity confers, there are numerous public benefits as well—especially to children and lower income families.

Benefits to children. About 25 percent of the U.S. Population is children, and this sizable portion of our society is also the most vulnerable, dependent on us adults for their well-being. Faithful marriages provide these benefits to kids: 1) A more stable home, meaning greater stability for the child, a greater probability of a lifelong home and family. 2) A safer home, by virtually eliminating the number one risk of child abuse: an unrelated adult male in the home. 3) Higher quality parenting, due to the gender-balanced synergy described above. 4) An anchor for the child’s identity, satisfying the human desire to know and be loved by one’s biological kin. 5) Better educational outcomes, as these kids are statistically more likely to achieve higher grades and degrees, which are correlated with higher earnings later. 6) Increased financial resources, as described above, including inheritance and family-owned assets.

Benefits to the poor and to working-class men. Other vulnerable segments of our society include the poor, and working-class men. Marriage benefits them in several ways: First consider the  Success Sequence: 97 percent of millennials who follow the success sequence—that is, they graduate from high school, get a full-time job once their education is completed, and marry before having children—avoid a life of poverty. The power of this sequence, which includes monogamous marriage, can catapult many vulnerable individuals upward.

 

Marriage is also associated with better mental and physical health for men. Men faithfully married to a woman are less likely to report depression, and they experience higher levels of happiness. Likewise, men do better financially when faithfully married.

All the above benefits of faithful monogamous marriage ripple out to benefit society as a whole (see graphic). They yield more unified and stable families that strengthen the social fabric. Their ethos of unity generates “a web of trust across generations, giving rise to the acquisition of virtues and immense social capital (pp. 9–10 here).” By contrast, all the instability, brokenness, and infidelity of nonmonogamous unions will pull and tear communities apart, increasing relational anarchy and human harm, especially toward the most vulnerable: children and the poor.

 

Let us acknowledge that, in our wounded world, brokenness is often inevitable. Life happens, and often we cannot live up to the ideal, no matter how much we might try. With compassionate mercy, we can avoid painful judgments of particular people in particular situations. Nonetheless, we cannot give up on fidelity to the marriage ideal, which is the source of human healing, unity, and flourishing. Only when we acknowledge an ideal for what it is—a gold standard by which all other options are calibrated—can we work to shore up less-than-ideal situations to become the best versions of themselves possible.

Those in stable, intact families bear a special responsibility here to reach out to those who are relationally wounded, to share their relationship riches, and to offer apprenticeships in healthy family formation, so as to promote social healing writ large.

Conclusion

Over the past several decades, our civilization has experimented with a number of alternatives to faithful marriage. Yet the evidence is abundant that from a personal as well as a public perspective, we are most likely to flourish when faithful, monogamous, natural-law marriages are plentiful and the norm.

To all our modern marriage heroes, those facing challenging situations and doing all they can to put the needs of their spouse and children before their own self-centered desires, we salute you. Thank you for your national service. You are walking the path of fidelity, which leads to a brighter future for you, your family, and the entire nation.

On Hope

In a piece that stares down tragedy and refuses to give up, Jen Agg recounts the agonizing weeks following her husband’s stroke, which took place at the onset of the pandemic. This is a gripping essay about being strong for someone else, but it’s also a piece about the devils and angels in the medical system: those who think dashing your optimism is some sort of sadistic duty vs. those who understand their role is to offer not only medical help, but most importantly, kindness and hope.

I started describing a stroke as a twenty-car pile-up on the highway of your brain’s quickest route. Recovery is the next car getting off the highway just before the devastation and twisted-up metal of cars blocking the road, except it’s night time, and the power is out, and it’s a thunderstorm and actually, turns out there is no road. So one car slowly and timidly draws a new path where there never was one. Your brain is resourceful this way, but it’s slow going. After a while, all the cars start taking this newly formed exit and your brain learns a whole new way of communicating with your body.

At first it was the destabilizing uncertainty: would it be a bad day, or a rare good day? How could I keep both our moods afloat when I was working really hard on the basics of our survival while maintaining an unbreakable facade of hopefulness? Was there effort in that? I don’t remember. Roland was sad a lot at the beginning and I knew I couldn’t let that sadness drown us both. Many of life’s challenges force reaction and demand a change of perspective, but particularly with health issues, you have to really be committed or the ugliness of it can win. I absolutely refused to let it. This was not going to be the thing that unwound our love—a love born in a fireball of attraction, bonded over a shared enemy and nurtured over decades of simply never being bored of each other or running out of fascinating things to talk about while remaining enthralled with each others’ faces.

The (Female) Intellectual Life

I was a graduate student when I first picked up the iconic red volume of the English edition of the French Dominican priest A. G. Sertillanges’s 1921 book, The Intellectual Life. Beloved by priests, professors, and armchair intellectuals, Sertillanges takes a spiritual approach to the work of the scholar. The book is both mindful of the eternal and attuned to the myriad practical details that support the life of the mind.

Around the same time that I began reading The Intellectual Life, I recall walking into a student lounge to microwave my lunch and noticing that a friend was poring over his own copy.

“Abby, this section is for you, take note,” he said, waving me over and proceeding to read Sertillanges’s exhortation to the wife of the intellectual.

“The wife of an intellectual,” he read, “has a mission that it is perhaps well to point out; it so often happens that she forgets it, and, instead of being Beatrice, succeeds in being merely a spendthrift and a chatterbox.”

He laughed, knowing that I am anything but a chatterbox, before continuing:

Every woman should espouse the career of her husband; the father’s toil is always the center of gravity of the family. In that is productive life, and therefore also essential duty. And this is all the truer as the career embraced is nobler and more laborious. In such a case life in common centers round something very lofty; the wife should take her stand on its height, instead of trying to draw the man’s thought down from it.

At the time, I merely rolled my eyes and shot back a retort about the duties of the husband married to an intellectual. But his jest percolated in the back of my mind. Indeed, as I continued my own reading of Sertillanges, I noticed increasingly the ways in which his vision of the intellectual life seemed incompatible with the lives of many of the intelligent women I knew and admired. Today, having left the academic world to care for a young family of my own, this tension is even more apparent to me.

My intention here is not to denigrate Sertillanges’s work, which is excellent on the whole. Even the passages cited above contain a fair degree of prudent advice, even as his characterization of wives is perhaps a little unkind. But there is need for a treatment of the intellectual life that does not assume the possibility—or even the desirability—of withdrawal from the demands and interruptions of children. Sertillanges acknowledges that the intellectual can derive from his children “strength, inspiration, and one of the forms of his ideal.” But he also describes the way in which they “now and then tease and tax” the father—who is evidently not responsible for the daily details of their care.

Finally, in Word on Fire’s September 2022 release, With All Her Mind: A Call to the Intellectual Life, I found such a treatment. The slim hardback volume, edited by Rachel Bulman, is a collection of essays by women from a wide variety of states in life: religious sisters, homeschooling mothers, successful academics.

These essays tend to fall into one of two categories. The first contains affirmations that the intellectual life is indeed for you—even if you are not engaged in formal academic work, even if your hands are full with babies to feed and dishes to wash. The second contains practical and spiritual advice on cultivating the virtues and the habits of an intellectual, from academics young and established, religious sisters, and wives and mothers. The result is a book that both calls its reader to greater spiritual perfection and provides concrete encouragement for her daily life.

The Inclusivity of the Intellectual Life

Christian women are accustomed, even now, to being made to feel small by those who assert that the vocation of a woman must look one specific way. Feeling victimized by those who would try brashly to narrow our understanding of feminine vocation, many women proceed defensively to wield the choices that they have made for themselves and their families against their fellow women.

With All Her Mind, in compiling the hard-won wisdom of women from many different states in and ways of life, encourages its reader to cultivate compassion toward women whose balances of work, family, children, and study look different from her own. The intellectual life need not be a source of competition among women, but instead ought to find a place in each of our lives.

In encouraging every woman to accept the calling to the intellectual life, With All Her Mind focuses perhaps most intensely on those women who have left the traditional workplace in order to stay at home with their children. This is not to the exclusion of working mothers or young professionals or tenured faculty members or women without children. Instead, I think it reflects the reality that these women are most likely to exclude themselves from the conversation about women and the life of the mind.

 

“How do I even find time to cultivate a reading life beyond reading The Runaway Bunny over and over again?” she might ask. “And if I do, oughtn’t I feel guilty for taking time away from the work of caring for my children and for my home?”

Rachel Bulman addresses this mindset in her introductory essay, in which she describes her hope that With All Her Mind will be read especially “by young mothers, young career women, college students, and even high school students.” Bulman acknowledges that women drawn to the intellectual life tend especially to be tempted to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

“I know that one of my greatest obstacles to enriching my mind is the lie that, in order to think, I must devote myself to hours of reading and some sort of academic work,” she writes. For those whose vocational obligations—whether at work or in the home—do not include such activities, the intellectual life can seem out of reach. But it needn’t be.

In fact, those women who feel that the intellectual sphere has no space for them might be suited in a special way for the life of the mind. In her contribution to this volume, “The Joy of Thinking,” Emily Stimpson Chapman recounts her growth from a precocious child into a young woman who craved the good opinion of teachers. She shares how the “desire for praise slowly overtook delight as [her] primary motivation for reading.”

This drive for success did not satisfy her, however, and she ended up dropping out of graduate school. It was not until her reversion to the Catholic faith years later that she rediscovered the delight of learning for the sheer love of it: “I wasn’t pursuing a career. I wasn’t seeking a certain grade. I wasn’t doing what my parents, professors, or bosses wanted me to do. I was reading because I wanted to read. I was reading because I wanted to learn more and understand more.”

Women whose days are filled to the brim with diaper changes and carpool lines are freed from the temptation to turn the intellectual life into a metric of success. Instead, we are able—in the time we are able to cobble together—to pursue truth for its own sake.

Jennifer Frey, recently appointed the inaugural dean of the Honors College at the University of Tulsa, argues in her contribution to this volume that women uniquely combat the “workism” that is so prevalent in our culture. As a result of our near-idolatry of work and productivity, we tend to define leisure only in relation to it. Leisure therefore becomes merely the period of rest and relaxation necessary in order to dive full-throttle back into our work. “Nor is this mentality confined to the breadwinner of the family,” Frey writes. “[Stay-at-home] mothers can also define the value of their lives in terms of purposeful domestic work, which never seems to end.”

She cites John Paul II’s Letter to Women, in which he argues that “a greater presence of women in society . . . will force systems to be redesigned in a way which favors the processes of humanization which mark the ‘civilization of love.’” Leisure entails a receptive taking delight in the true, the good, and the beautiful. Frey highlights the fact that Catholic tradition points to a woman as the most perfect example of proper leisure: “Mary spent a life in earthly contemplation of the highest earthly object—the face of her son, Jesus Christ.”

Why does John Paul II think that women have a unique ability to model leisure? Frey argues that it is because “women, as mothers, teachers, and caregivers, have a natural closeness and special bond to children, who are creatures for whom work is alien and leisure natural.” The intellectual life is not meant to be an anxious, grasping pursuit but rather the contemplation of a worthy subject. I know that my own ability to contemplate in this way has only increased as I have observed the simple, dependent posture of my son. In him, I am able to see more clearly what the beatified life will someday—God willing—look like.

Women need the intellectual life, and our society needs women to pursue it. Fulton J. Sheen famously said that “the history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.” If we recognize the importance of a society that takes delight in truth, goodness, and beauty, then we ought to look to women to show us the way.

 

Intellectual Habits for Busy Lives

Even once we recognize the possibility and desirability of pursuing the intellectual life regardless of our primary vocation or day job, we often remain stymied by the realities of our day-to-day life. Thus, many of the contributors to With All Her Mind provide in their essays practical advice and encouragement for cultivating the intellectual life amid the demands of children and families.

Tsh Oxenreider shares her own experience of how the intellectual life can support and enliven a woman’s vocation as wife and mother, recounting that her writing career began as a refuge from the scourge of postpartum depression. Encouraged by a therapist to take up a hobby, she started journaling and then blogging. Now, she is the author of several books. “Making space for my words cleared space in my mind, which breathed much-needed life into my soul,” Oxenreider writes. “I became more present in my daily life. I became more myself.”

Writing is worthwhile even for those who harbor no aspirations for publication or recognition of their words. It gives women a place to work through their thoughts, to grow in wisdom, and to cultivate an imagination that is better prepared to meet the challenges of her daily life with courage.

The same can be said of reading, as Haley Stewart does in her essay on “Becoming a Bibliophile.” Stewart prefaces her love letter to the reading life with a quotation from the play Shadowlands: “We read to know we’re not alone.” In this day and age, both women and men are plagued by loneliness. Women in various stations in life experience feelings of isolation equally: the twenty-something watching all of her friends get married, the married woman aching for a baby while looking at a negative pregnancy test, and the stay-at-home mom desperately missing interaction with other adults. While many turn to social media in order to ease their loneliness, studies suggest that the internet only exacerbates feelings of disconnection.

In the pages of books, however, we can have fellowship with the greatest minds from across the centuries. “Through the gift of books we can ‘speak’ with others through pages written on the other side of the world hundreds of years ago,” Stewart writes. Even a few pages stolen while holding a sleeping baby or while sitting on the metro will enrich our lives—a lot more than scrolling through Instagram will, at any rate. As children get older, families can work to build a habit of reading together—whether this looks like parents reading aloud or each member silently reading his or her own book. I have benefited greatly from holding a virtual book club with friends who live far away—both as a way of sharing something I love with friends and as a way of finally getting through some of the longer tomes on my to-read list.

 

But the intellectual life is not merely a retreat from the demands of home, work, and family. Instead, as Leah Libresco Sargeant considers in her essay “Pursuit in the Drudgery,” even the hidden, repetitive tasks of our daily lives can themselves be an experience of growth and life. Sargeant observes in her young daughter a delight in the monotony of everyday actions. For her, this calls to mind the attitude toward work espoused by St. Josemaria Escriva, who wrote that “[before] God, no occupation is in itself great or small. Everything gains the value of the Love with which it is done.”

When we offer our “unremarkable work” to God, we acknowledge that we do not need to write books or stop wars in order to receive His love. As Sargeant writes, “If we can invite him into our dullest moments, our least exciting tasks, and our monotony, we will have fewer spaces where we feel abandoned by him or that we are tempted to hide from him. Our quiet, not-obviously-interesting work is practice in remembering that our whole lives are his.”

John Paul II, in his Letter to Women, goes through various categories of women and thanks them for their contributions to the world and to the Church: wives, mothers, educators, working women, consecrated women. He considers the women who have demonstrated heroic virtue and brilliant intellect, women like Saints Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena. But he closes with praise for ordinary women, those who “reveal the gift of their womanhood by placing themselves at the service of others in their everyday lives.”

As conservatives, we tend to praise those—admittedly praiseworthy—women like Amy Coney Barrett who manage to “have it all.” This sometimes results in implicit denigration of the intellectual capabilities of those women who have chosen not to, who have withdrawn from professional and academic spaces.

Indeed, though conservatives who have achieved professional or academic success do praise the work that women do within the home, they too often condescend to it as simple or less important. With All Her Mind makes abundantly clear that the homeschooling mother of eleven can be just as much called to the intellectual life as the president of a university, providing not a criticism of Sertillanges but a widening of his vision that will benefit women and men alike.

My first marriage was an illusion. My second, real magic

He fanned the deck and asked me to pick a card, any card. "Now place it where I can't see it"

Storm Cycle

This is the story of Ayesha, who was sold by her family to an older man — sadly not an uncommon practice in the Sundarbans region where she is from. Mitra offers strong reporting and a genuine insight into the characters involved in this one tale of many.

Their past haunted them, the present drove wedges between them, but Ayesha and Sumaiya agree on what they seek from the future. Both want justice. Before I left their house in June last year, Sumaiya declared that she will grow up and join the police force and course-correct everyone around her.

Self-Exclusion and the Wounds of Sin: A Response to Cardinal Robert McElroy

I was thinking about Julia Flyte as I read the recent essay by Cardinal Robert McElroy in America. Lady Julia is a central character in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited. Married to a divorcé, and living out of wedlock with Charles Ryder, she has a near breakdown late in the novel when her callous brother explains why he cannot bring his fiancée Beryl to Julia’s house: “It is a matter of indifference whether you choose to live in sin with Rex or Charles or both—I have always avoided enquiry into the details of your ménage—but in no case would Beryl consent to be your guest.”

Julia’s response is powerful for expressing her awareness that, as much of an ass as Bridey might be, “He’s quite right. . . . He means just what it says in black and white. Living in sin, with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, year in, year out. Waking up with sin in the morning, seeing the curtains drawn on sin, bathing in it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, feeding it, showing it around, giving it a good time, putting it to sleep at night with a tablet of Dial if it’s fretful.”

This confession anticipates her final conversion of heart as her father is dying, a conversion that Charles could see coming “all this year,” and portending the end of his relationship with Julia.

Structures of Exclusion?

I’ll come back to Waugh, who in 1947 wrote a penetrating analysis of Brideshead for MGM, which was thinking of making a filmed version of the story. But first to Cardinal McElroy. The central concern of his essay is with the “structures and cultures of exclusion that alienate all too many from the church or make their journey in the Catholic faith tremendously burdensome.” Much of what he says of these exclusions will strike most Catholics as reasonable: certainly the poor, racial minorities, the incarcerated, and the disabled have all, in various ways and at various times, been marginalized in unacceptable ways. The cardinal also notes that the “church at times marginalizes victims of clergy sexual abuse in a series of destructive and enduring ways.”

What does it mean to speak of “structures and cultures of exclusion” in these contexts? The meaning will vary from case to case, but it is worth spending a moment on the last mentioned. For one might judge that in, for example, the case of Fr. Marko Rupnik, structures and cultures of opacity, secrecy, prestige, lack of concern for procedural justice, and the marginalization of women religious contributed to an egregious series of harms and a remarkable (and repulsive) valorization of the man who perpetrated those harms. Catholics might indeed hope that the institutional structures and culture that made such abuse possible over so many years will be the object of serious scrutiny and reform among the members of the hierarchy.

More surprising, and controversial, is the turn Cardinal McElroy makes late in his essay in a discussion of “exclusion” of those whose lives are discordant with the Church’s sexual teachings. Discussing those “who are marginalized because circumstances in their own lives are experienced as impediments to full participation in the life of the church,” the cardinal notes that these “include those who are divorced and remarried without a declaration of nullity from the church, members of the L.G.B.T. community and those who are civilly married but have not been married in the church.”

Cardinal McElroy is not, as he makes clear, discussing those who, having remarried, now live chastely, or those who, experiencing sexual desires or orientation toward acts at odds with Church teaching, live in continence. Rather, his concern is with those who because of their acts are “excluded” from the reception of the Eucharist. That, he argues, is at odds with the Church’s witness to “radical inclusion and acceptance,” which cannot be predicated on a “distinction between orientation and activity.”

 

Cardinal McElroy’s arguments on this point are worth more sustained consideration than I can give them here, but the four substantive points he makes seem to me mistaken or distorted in their emphasis. I will work backward, since it is the first that I want to focus particularly on, through a brief discussion of Waugh’s memo.

The fourth of the cardinal’s points is that sexual activity is not at the heart of the hierarchy of Christian truths. This claim is not, however, unqualifiedly true, since marriage is the central sacramental image in the New Testament of the relationship of Christ to His Church; it is likewise the central image in the Old Testament of the relationship of God to His chosen people. And again, marriage is a prominent scriptural image of the Kingdom of Heaven, which is to be like a marriage banquet. This imagery teaches: it is unclear how human persons could know what they do of God and His relationship to human persons if they did not understand marriage and its potential for bringing forth new life, if they did not understand the norms of exclusivity and fidelity that flow from marriage, or the norms that exclude all sexual activity outside marriage.

The third claim is essentially a restatement of the very view that Cardinal McElroy is defending: that Eucharistic inclusiveness, rather than Eucharistic coherence, should be the guiding pastoral norm for the Church. But he gives little to no attention to the opposing view, that, in Pope Francis’s words, “This is not a penalty: you are outside. Communion is to unite the community.” But, the cardinal might respond, is this not a putting of the excluded outside the community? Could he or she not be invited in?

The short answer to the first of these questions is negative: central to the Church’s teaching about sin is that it involves a self-separation of the sinner from God and His Church. The problem, which McElroy’s essay invites us to ponder, is how this claim can be squared with the appropriate answer to the second question: “Could he or she not be invited in?” For the answer to that is an unhesitating “yes,” a yes that, we will see, is central to Waugh’s understanding of Brideshead.

The cardinal also, in making this claim about Eucharistic inclusion, makes reference to Pope Francis’s Gaudete et Exultate: “grace, precisely because it builds on nature, does not make us superhuman all at once. . . . Grace acts in history; ordinarily it takes hold of us and transforms us progressively.” Perhaps then the demands of Christian morality are too burdensome for those whom grace has not fully transformed. But while it is certainly true that perfect virtue does not happen “all at once,” the Church teaches that all persons have a sufficiency of grace for the avoidance of mortal sin—the kinds of sins that result in self-exclusion from communion with the Church and a full relationship with God.

Cardinal McElroy’s second point is concerned with conscience: “While Catholic teaching must play a critical role in the decision making of believers, it is conscience that has the privileged place.” Again, the claim is only half true, since for a Catholic, the Church’s teaching must play the privileged place in the formation of the Catholic conscience.

 

The Wound of Sin

But now on to what I take to be the central dilemma posed by Cardinal McElroy, and to the import of Waugh’s memo regarding Brideshead. The first of the “dimensions of Catholic faith” that support Eucharistic inclusion is this:

The primary pastoral imperative is to heal the wounded. And the powerful pastoral corollary is that we are all wounded. It is in this fundamental recognition of our faith that we find the imperative to make our church one of accompaniment and inclusion, of love and mercy. Pastoral practices that have the effect of excluding certain categories of people from full participation in the life of the church are at odds with this pivotal notion that we are all wounded and all equally in need of healing.

Much, even all, of this is true. But it leaves unanswered the key question: what is the nature of the wound? And, given the nature of the wound, what is the key to radical inclusion?

The answer to the first question is sin, a concept scarcely addressed in the Cardinal’s essay. Sin is the central wound suffered by all humanity, and it is her awareness of that wound that makes Lady Julia’s response to her brother so powerful.

By its nature, the wound of sin involves rejection of the way laid before human beings by God. But that way is born neither of arbitrary command, nor of contingent means to the external end of eternal happiness. Rather, God’s way is the way of human happiness, and what He commands is only what is truly fulfilling of human nature.

God, in His commands, commands only what is fulfilling for human persons; but that fulfillment is precisely what God desires for his human creation. And so in rejecting the guidance of the natural law, or of revelation, human beings render themselves incapable of fully realizing the offer of friendship that God extends when he offers them a way to their own fulfillment. Sin damages the person and the person’s capacity for relationship with God simultaneously. It is thus a radical self-exclusion from the communion of those whom God has called both to fulfillment and to perfect communion with Him.

 

“Twitch upon the Thread”

How is it that such self-exclusion is to be overcome? How is it that radical inclusion is to be achieved? Let us return to Evelyn Waugh’s memo. The answer to this very question, he says, “is in no sense abstruse and is based on principles that have for nearly 2,000 years been understood by millions of simple people, and are still so understood.”

Waugh identifies three principles that should be retained in the film adaptation of the novel:

The novel deals with what is theologically termed, “the operation of Grace,” that is to say, the unmerited and unilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to Himself;

Grace is not confined to the happy, prosperous and conventionally virtuous. There is no stereotyped religious habit of life, as may be seen from the vastly dissimilar characters of the canonised saints. God has a separate plan for each individual by which he or she may find salvation. The story of Brideshead Revisited seeks to show the working of several such plans in the lives of a single family;

The Roman Catholic Church has the unique power of keeping remote control on human souls which have once been part of her. G. K. Chesterton has compared this to the fisherman’s line, which allows the fish the illusion of free play in the water, and yet has him by the hook; in his own time the fisherman by a “twitch upon the thread” draws the fish to land.

Waugh’s directives speak for themselves, but a few brief comments are in order. First, grace operates as the “unmerited and unilateral act by which God continually calls souls to Himself.” This is the foundation of the Church’s claim to radical inclusion: all are called by God, and this calling is truly radical, for it fulfills no need on God’s part, or desert on ours.

Second, God has a plan for each individual, and the paths by which one might be led to accept God’s offer might be radically different from person to person. For every person, however, the path will lead through sin, for again, sin is at the heart of the brokenness of all human persons. There is an additional lesson about radical inclusion here, convergent with at least some parts of Cardinal McElroy’s essay: while sin inevitably ruptures full communion, the efforts of the Church to overcome such ruptures must be unceasing.

Finally, the Church has the divinely given responsibility of continuing to “hold the line,” so to speak, identifying for its members what is and is not sin, and giving the appropriate twitch to the line to call back each member to God’s plan for him or her. Waugh’s, and Chesterton’s, metaphor is antithetical to both images we find in McElroy’s essay, that of an open door—too passive, not enough fishing—and that of an ever-expanding perimeter—too formless, no sense of boundary. The genuinely corresponding “inclusive” image to the metaphor of the twitch on the line is rather the apostles’ net, filled and overfilled at Christ’s direction, without bursting or breaking. The net is not ever-expanding and formless; rather, like the stable in C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle, it is bigger on the inside than on the outside.

Too often the Church has been Bridey, insensitive and cloddish in its pastoral care of sinners; Cardinal McElroy is correct to note the failures. But it has also failed, and now no less than in other times, to speak truthfully while resting assured, again quoting Waugh’s memo, in “how the Grace of God turns everything in the end to good.”

Gay Marriage, Civil Rights, and Christian Virtue: An Interview with David French

In today’s interview, David French joins Public Discourse editor-in-chief R. J. Snell to discuss French’s new position as a New York Times columnist, gay marriage, and how Christians should engage in politics. 

R. J. Snell: Thanks so much for being with us for this interview and congratulations on your new position with the New York Times. Are there issues or topics you hope to explore there that would be different than at the Dispatch or elsewhere?

David French: As far as I know, I’m going to be writing about the exact same themes and issues and topics that I’ve written about at the Dispatch and the Atlantic. In fact, that’s why the Times wanted me, so I could continue to write about those themes. So I’m going to write about religion, I’m going to write a lot about law, culture. My military experience will come into play in my writing as it has at the Dispatch and the Atlantic.

If you’ve seen my work over the last many years, law, culture, religion are all three big themes that I have addressed quite a bit. We are in an era at the Supreme Court where we have this conservative majority and we’re likely to have this conservative majority for the foreseeable future. It’s important to have folks who understand conservative jurisprudence writing in mainstream publications. Conservative jurisprudence is the air I breathe. I understand what’s going on at the Supreme Court, and I understand the various nuances of conservative jurisprudence. So that’s going to be an important part of what I write about and what I address.

It’s also really important to step outside of the news cycle often and take a look at the larger cultural and religious trends that are shaping American life. And Dean Baquet said right after Trump was elected, a lot of the media doesn’t “get religion.” You can’t understand America without understanding America’s religious landscape. So I’m going to be writing quite a bit about that as well.

RJS: Some have disputed what they understand as a tension or contradiction in your commitments. Particularly your commitments to both civil libertarianism and religious freedom. How would you articulate your position and the tensions or lack of tensions?

DF: Well, I think religious freedom is an aspect of civil libertarianism. So religious liberty, free speech, all of that, those were encompassed in the First Amendment. And so I would say more people frame the distinction as a tension between my commitment to civil libertarianism, including religious freedom for all people, including people who have dramatically different religious beliefs from me, and my Christian orthodoxy. That’s where people see a lot of the tension. I don’t see that tension at all, really.

I think of two of the great founding documents in American history. Of course the most famous of the founding documents is the Declaration of Independence, where Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that we’re endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and then goes on to talk about how governments are tasked with defending that liberty. And then the lesser known, but very important document is John Adams’s letter to the Massachusetts Militia, where John Adams uttered the famous statement that our constitution was made for a moral and religious people and is wholly inadequate to the governance of any other.

The entire letter is fascinating because what he’s basically saying is that our constitution is not strong enough, the government is not strong enough to dictate public morality. Rather than dictating public morality, it depends on public morality. So he talks about how certain vices are so terrible that left unrestrained, they would cut through the cords of our constitution like a whale goes through a net.

So I think of these two documents as framing an American social compact. It is one of the primary responsibilities, not the exclusive responsibility, of government to protect the liberty of its citizens. It is the responsibility of citizens to exercise that liberty towards virtuous purposes. That’s your social compact. When I’m interacting with the relationship between the state and individuals, I’m going to defend the liberty of individuals. When I’m interacting with individuals, I’m going to urge, especially when talking with fellow Christian believers, Christian virtues, I’m going to urge various civic virtues, defend civic associations, defend those institutions that are advancing civic virtues. So I don’t see those things really in tension at all. In fact, I think that the defense of liberty, in many ways, is necessary to holistically pursue virtue in the private sphere.

 

RJS: For some, that answer makes sense, but others think things have changed. They might have been friendly to that argument some years ago, but when they look at the contemporary United States, they see decadence and decline, even the absence of public morality, which that compact depends upon. What had been obvious no longer seems obvious. What would need to happen in our society for you to rethink your commitment? Is there a breaking point where you would think, “that’s not working out; I need to reconsider”?

DF: Yeah. The difficulty is that if you look at some of the worst moments in American history, it’s when the government has violated that social compact, when it has said for certain communities of Americans, you have fewer rights. Or when it has put its thumb on the religious scales in some decisive way.

For example, you don’t have to go far back in American history to find the Blaine Amendments, these anti-Catholic state constitutional amendments that were designed to protect public schools, which were deemed and viewed at that time as essentially Protestant schools free from Catholic influence. Here was a world, in many ways, that a lot of the more “New Right” folks want, which is the ability of the government to put its thumb on the religious scales. We had that. It didn’t work very well.

We’ve had many times in American history when the government had the power to reward friends and punish enemies. Again, this is what much of the New Right wants, and it didn’t work. It was inherently unstable. It was unjust.

 

What I see in modern America is something maybe a little bit different than what other folks see. I think the nation vis-à-vis its laws is far more just than it has been at virtually any point in its previous history. Racial discrimination is outlawed de jure. You have an extension of the First Amendment to all American communities. You have greater religious freedoms in a concrete way than we’ve ever enjoyed in the history of the United States. Is this government treating its people justly? We’re far from perfect. We have a lot of problems, but we’re better than we’ve been.

When it comes to public morality, the other side of that social compact that asks us to exercise our liberty for virtuous purposes, things are a lot more mixed. Now, in some ways, we’re better. We should never minimize the advances we’ve made in really eradicating the kinds of brutal personal racism that used to mark American life. There’s a news broadcast from the 1970s in New York where there’s a black family that’s moving into a local community. And the amount of unbelievable, overt racism directed at that family blows our minds here in 2022, and that’s not that long ago. 1970s is my lifetime.

We often take a look at things from the standpoint of sexual morality. We think the changes in sexual mores have fully defined the increasing decadence of the American public. But we are complicated creatures. There are many ways in which we’ve gotten better, and there some ways in which we have gotten worse. We tend to completely overlook the ways in which we’ve gotten better and then say, “Well, this is just not working out. We have to make big changes.”

But in fact, even when it comes to sexuality, I think that we are actually in the middle of a number of really important and meaningful conversations about sex and sexuality, and there are actually some positive signs. Many negative signs for sure, but also some positive signs. I don’t know if you saw Christine Emba’s recent book about how the consent-only culture has harmed women. There’s been a rising groundswell from both religious and secular sources rethinking the way in which we have constructed a sexual morality that is entirely experiential as opposed to a relational. Disconnecting sex from love and relationship has not worked for millions upon millions of people. A free society isn’t immune to negative social movements, but it is able to react to and reform negative social movements in a way that more authoritarian countries often are not.

I’m not going to say that from a moral standpoint, we citizens have upheld our end of the bargain. In many ways, we have not, and that has caused a lot of suffering. But it is also the case that a free society is able to reform itself in ways that totalitarian societies obviously do not and cannot.

RJS: How would you respond to those who suggest that the inner logic of liberty and the anthropology of liberalism have a directionality toward the destruction of the family, fragmentation, and soft tyranny? Sure, it’s not as bad as hard tyranny, but we’re moving to soft tyranny as an inevitable logic.

DF: I’ve always been confused by the phrase soft tyranny. Is it tyranny if it’s soft? I don’t know exactly what that means. When I see the phrase soft tyranny used, this often means there are powerful people who don’t like me. It’s not that they can actually control me. It’s not that they actually are shutting down my church. They’re not destroying my family or my relationships, but I’m a dissenter. I’m on the outside looking in, and there are people who don’t like me. That term, soft tyranny, needs a lot more definition before I’m going to start to question liberal democracy.

RJS: I take them to mean it’s not the state itself, but cultural forces, business forces, those sorts of things.

DF: Yeah. Again, unimpressed by that concept. But some of this, I think, is also due to what your conception is of what it means to live as a Christian in this world. I never for a moment have understood the scriptures to say that there is a system of government that is going to make it easy for me to live as a Christian. In fact, I’ve been guaranteed the opposite.

So if my standard is, well, I find it difficult to live as a Christian in this culture, therefore we need massive governmental reforms and greater governmental authority to make it easier for me to live as a Christian in this culture, number one, the track record for that historically is really bad. Number two, in many ways, what you’re asking for is trying to construct what is biblically, in many ways, an impossible system. I’m not so sure it’s possible to make the systems and the engines of culture hospitable to the gospel message by force of law.

And number three, we have seen time and time again that it is difficult to live authentic Christian lives even in many of America’s Christian institutions. If you look at some of the most powerful Christian institutions in America, part of Christendom, for lack of a better term, some of them have been deeply and profoundly corrupt. The most prominent apologetics ministry in the United States was run by an abuser of women. You have perhaps the largest Christian camp housing one of the worst superpredators in American life for a decade plus, and then covering it up. You could go down the line. And time and time again, I hear Christians say, “We need more Christians in power.” And I’m thinking, “Do we, though?”

 

Think of January 6th. If you had told young me that there will come a time when the chief of staff is an outspoken evangelical, one of the president’s personal lawyers, outspoken evangelical, the House and Senate Republicans are staffed with outspoken evangelicals, the young naive me would have said: “Justice must be rolling down from the heavens.” Instead, what was rolling down from the National Mall was a mob listening to praise music as they stormed the U.S. Capitol building.

I do think you can use the engines of government in ways that are deeply and darkly oppressive to Christianity, but I’m much more skeptical when it comes to arguments that I hear from folks on the New Right about building some sort of Christian nationalism that will preserve what is good in our society and squelch what is bad. I’ve yet to see a government exercise that kind of authority in a just manner.

RJS: Let’s talk about same-sex marriage. You’ve written that you’ve changed your mind on this, and more than once. Is this a fair summary of your position from the Atlantic and Dispatch essays of late 2022?

First, equality and fairness before the law under the conditions of pluralism guides your thinking. Second, there’s an unfairness and inapplicability of using Christian or religious understandings of marriage as normative for civil marriage. Third, civil law is already out of step with the Christian conceptions anyway—think no-fault divorce—and the harms to the biblical understanding of marriage were done by religious hypocrites. And, fourth, you don’t see under the current conditions any grave threat to religious freedom. Is that the arc? What would you add or change in my summary?

DF: I think that’s pretty fair. The way I characterized it in a piece I wrote is that it’s a flip-flop-flip. It’s one position then another, then back to the original. Again, remember, my default position is a more civil libertarian position. So when the initial Massachusetts Supreme Court decision was handed down in the early 2000s, I was not alarmed by it. I’m a traditional, small “o” orthodox Christian, and I have a biblical view of marriage, which I call covenant marriage. And no-fault divorce is utterly alien to that scriptural conception. It is as separate as night and day from the scriptural conception.

So when civil marriage was being changed to include same-sex couples, in my view, that was not the same thing as walking into my church and saying, “Okay. Marriage has changed.” Those were two different things.

Then you began to see what a lot of people presciently warned about, that some people who will attempt to isolate and render as second-class citizens individuals who believe in traditional Christian marriage, or what are called covenant marriage in my writing. This is something I encountered time and time again in my religious liberty work. “Oh, you don’t have the new view of marriage? Well, you can’t operate in this college. You can’t have a student group in this college,” or, “We’re going to threaten your accreditation if you’re a Christian university.”

RJS: Soft tyranny, as it were!

DF: Well, it’s pretty hard when you’re using the operations of the government to kick someone off campus, or take away their tax-exempt status. That’s government action. That’s not somebody making me feel bad. I can handle that.

That’s when you began to see this concern emerging that said, “Look. If same-sex marriage becomes law, then the institutions and ideas of covenant marriage are going to be rendered second-class.” And I said no to that arrangement, absolutely not. If supporting same-sex marriage means treating those people like me who uphold covenant marriage and belong to institutions that uphold covenant marriage and want to foster it around the culture, if that means that people like me have to become second-class citizens, no deal. So then along comes Obergefell, and when Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, he seemed cognizant of this issue. He very clearly wrote that there are people of goodwill on both sides of this issue and the law should respect and protect both. I remember reading it and thinking, “Nice words. We’ll see.”

Since then, in the seven, now coming on eight years since Obergefell, there has not been a single significant religious liberty loss at the Supreme Court. Religious liberty has continued to advance. And many of the wins were by supermajority, seven to two, nine to zero. This was really surprising for folks who thought that Obergefell was the beginning of the end of religious liberty.

When the Respect for Marriage Act came up, it tried to (imperfectly) respect religious liberty. If I was writing the bill, it would be different, but it imperfectly said, “We think that same-sex marriage and religious liberty can coexist in the United States of America, and we’re going to codify that coexistence.” I thought that was absolutely an acceptable compromise.

 

RJS: After the Atlantic piece, you did two Dispatch essays to explain your views in more detail. In one of those, you have a throwaway line—it’s not the core of your argument, but I’m interested in it—where you state that there are both secular and religious arguments against abortion. Are there not secular arguments against same sex marriage? What is the role of reason in how we understand covenantal marriage and civil marriage? Are there secular arguments against same-sex civil marriage? Don’t covenantal understandings of marriage translate to reason?

DF: Let’s say I’m talking to someone who does not share my faith commitments. I have lots of arguments about the value of lifelong marriage and not viewing marriage primarily as an engine for adult happiness.

RJS: Are these mainly sociological arguments, or arguments that can be made about the nature of marriage itself?

DF: I’m not so sure about the nature of marriage itself, but definitely when it comes to arguments based in what we understand about human flourishing. And interestingly, what we see is that there are an awful lot of people who don’t question no-fault divorce at all and would resist a legal regime that repeals no-fault divorce. Yet they don’t live like that in their own marriages: they stick through it, through thick and thin.

One of the hallmarks of the upper-middle-class America is pretty darn stable families. People do not cycle through relationships. They do not cycle through marriages. That stability is the hallmark of upper-middle-class America, even if social conservatism as an ideology is not. There are all kinds of arguments about family stability, the inadvisability of divorce, the destructiveness of divorce, the challenges of loneliness. You can make these arguments to people who don’t share my preexisting faith commitments about marriage.

RJS: Those are sociological arguments, or arguments about human flourishing. As you know, some of our colleagues at Witherspoon wrote the What Is Marriage? book, in which they ask, using secular reason, about the nature of marriage itself. They claim that if you don’t accept the conjugal view of marriage you lose any principled and rational basis for why marriage needs to be permanent or exclusive. If you don’t provide arguments about the nature of marriage itself, what’s your limiting principle to disallow throuples or five-year marriages with options to renew? Such arrangements might have negative effects, but do you have a principled reason against them?

DF: Well, so five-year marriages with an option to renew would actually be more binding than the current no-fault marriage. It’s mind-blowing to realize literally a refrigerator warranty is more binding than a marriage under the law. That is no exaggeration. So when people have talked to me about the sanctity of marriage prior to same-sex marriage, it’s been an eye-rolling thing for me because I think either they don’t know what no-fault divorce is, or they think that has sanctity? What? No-fault divorce is the codification of a sub-contractual view of marriage.

It’s hard for me to see the argument that there’s something fundamentally sacred about that civil arrangement. I see why government has an interest in delegating the sanctity of a relationship to the citizens. I see why there are defensible governmental reasons for the no-fault divorce construct of marriage, especially given long histories of extraordinary problems with domestic abuse in intimate relationships, and the difficulty people had traditionally in extricating themselves from physically abusive situations in years past. But it is difficult for me to see the moral interest in that construct. So that’s why I’m not persuaded that that particular construct was worth excluding same-sex couples from. That’s where folks lose me.

And this is magnified by the idea that, if you have a same-sex couple and they’re raising children, you’re going to come in and change the law, and suddenly, they’re not married, which has all kinds of down-line ramifications for everything—from financial arrangements, to healthcare relationships, to child custody. My goodness.

While at the same time preserving this sort of no-fault situation that heterosexual couples have, it’s hard for me to see the justice in that because that’s where the reliance interests come into play. You have a million-plus people in this country who have built their relationships around these legal arrangements, and then to yank it all away strikes me as profoundly unjust, even cruel.

RJS: You claim there’s something quite different between a covenantal marriage (I would call this a sacramental marriage) and a civil marriage. The circles don’t overlap, is how I remember you putting it. But on one understanding, and this would be my own, the logic of revelation or grace can’t contradict the logic of nature. Even more, the logic of revelation or grace presupposes the logic of nature. Grace presupposes nature, grace perfects nature, and grace elevates nature. If in the domain of the civil or the natural, we’re creating something out of step with the logic of revelation and grace, we’ve got something deeply wrong with our understanding of the natural; we have something that can’t be true, that doesn’t follow the logic of either nature or grace, or we have double truth. God’s general and specific revelation would contradict one another, and that just cannot be possible. How do you think about that?

DF: What do you mean creating?

RJS: Well, we create laws, positive law. I take civil law to be a construction of the state. But I also take a just civil law to be one in keeping with the logic of grace, and open to it because grace presupposes nature. (That’s Aquinas’s phrasing.) Do you agree? What should we do if the civil law contradicts the logic of covenantal marriage? How do you understand the relationship of nature and grace? I think you’re going in a different direction than I would.

DF: Yeah. I don’t quite see it that way. I don’t think the civil law is creating anything. It’s recognizing relationships in a pretty precise legal way. So the civil law cannot create or destroy my marriage. My marriage—

RJS: Your covenantal marriage?

DF: That’s the only marriage that I know. The civil law cannot create my marriage, nor can it destroy my marriage. It can recognize it and provide particular sets of benefits surrounding it, or it cannot recognize it, but it doesn’t create it, nor does it destroy it. We can’t think of the state as providing that level of meaning. That’s where I dispute some of this, because I don’t see my marriage as a creation of the state at all. I see it as a union of one man and one woman before God himself. I’m glad that the state recognizes it and provides certain kinds of short benefits that allow me to make, by default, some kinds of medical decisions, and by default possess child custody. But it does not create my marriage. It cannot destroy my marriage.

The question when it comes to the state is not what is the state creating. The question is what kind of relationships is the state recognizing and providing certain kinds of default protections for. It’s a much lower order of engagement. That’s why from the beginning of the debate, I’ve been much more torn about this than many of my Christian friends have been. I look at the role of the state as not an entity that creates. It recognizes and provides particular kinds of benefits to relationships. It’s a much lower order engagement.

 

Perhaps some of this is influenced by, for example, my longtime free speech advocacy. If the state is protecting my speech, it is not in any way endorsing that speech. Or if the state is protecting my religious liberty, it is not in any way endorsing that religion. It is not imbuing that religion with truth or meaning or purpose. It’s just protecting it from oppression and restriction. I think of the role of the state in a different way.

You can really dig deep into this, but one of the ways where I really depart from some of my Christian nationalist friends is they put a lot more meaning around what the state can potentially do to provide some sacred purpose or meaning to a nation.

RJS: One might respond to what you just said this way: okay, fine. So the real marriage is neither going to be created nor destroyed by the state, but the state can recognize the relationship. But that’s precisely why the state should recognize some sort of civil union, but not same-sex marriage, because the state can’t create marriage. Marriage is created by the covenantal logic, and that covenantal logic is going to be permanent, exclusive, involving spouses of different sexes, and so on. Why grant same-sex marriage under civil law? That sounds like creating something, and something false. Certainly, there are opponents to that position, who want same-sex marriage recognized as marriage just because marriage has a sacral quality to them. They didn’t want the recognition of civil unions. They wanted marriage.

DF: Right. Yeah. They absolutely wanted their relationships to have the same legal recognition as the recognition granted to opposite-sex couples. If the state recognized civil unions, but not marriage, even if the set of benefits were identical provided to civil unions as to marriage, that they would still view these as second-class arrangements. There was a validating aspect of expanding the definition of civil marriage. There’s no question about that.

Also, there was almost no constituency on the right for creating civil unions that were identical to marriage, but not called marriage. I remember the days. If you were for civil unions, you were seen as a hopeless compromiser. This was compromise that nobody wanted at the time.

 

It’s also the case that there’s a wide divergence of religious belief regarding marriage in the United States of America. An awful lot of same-sex couples say, “David, you’re wrong. I have a covenant marriage just like you do.” And they belong to religious traditions or to churches that would endorse that wholly entirely and completely, and that my definition of covenant marriage is fundamentally wrong. And that brings into play the question that we haven’t really addressed, which is pluralism. How do we live together across this really big difference? Again, that’s why my default position comes down to respecting each other’s liberties and respecting each other’s desires to live our lives according to our deepest values.

RJS: Final question, and thanks again for doing the interview with us. Clearly, there’s a lot of contestation in the conservative world right now about what it means to be a conservative, what we should do, who we should vote for, and so on. What do you want to tell conservatives about how they should think and act and proceed going forward?

DF: On the voting question, which is one of the more basic questions, I have a two-pronged test that I apply, and you have to pass them both. It’s not one or the other. It’s an “and,” not an “or.”

First, you have to possess personal character commensurate with the office you seek. So the higher the office, the higher demand for character there should be. So there should be character commensurate with the office that you seek. Second, a person should broadly support my political policy positions, my political values. There’s no perfect person, and there’s no perfect policy alignment. But broadly speaking, high character and policy alignment. If you’re missing either one, I’m not going to vote for you.

I wrote about this in my last Sunday newsletter. In 1998, the Southern Baptist Convention wrote a resolution on moral character in public officials. It was extremely brief, but eloquent and powerful. And one of the most eloquent passages of it says that the tolerance of serious wrongs by leaders sears the conscience of a culture, spawns unrestrained lawlessness, and surely will result in God’s judgment. There was a lot of mocking of that sentiment by a lot of the mainstream culture in 1998 when it was drafted, because that was Bill Clinton they were aiming at. We had peace and prosperity and all those Christian prudes. I remember even reading op-eds about how we need to have more European views about mistresses.

 

Is there a statement that’s been more thoroughly vindicated than that? What happens when we tolerate serious wrongs by leaders? It does sear our conscience. How many times are we now seeing people just rationalizing the grossest conduct? It does spawn lawlessness. The scandals that are metastasizing through the American body politic are ripping at the seams of our social fabric. God’s judgment is not necessarily hurricanes or tsunamis or fire from the sky. It can be something as simple as giving us over to our own desires and watching us reap the consequences of our own behavior. A part of God’s constant mercy and grace is consistently saving us from ourselves. God’s judgment will not always save us from ourselves, and many times we reap what we’ve sown. Right now, we’re in a reaping phase of having sown an awful lot of lawlessness and corruption.

This really short-term thinking that says, “I don’t like either one, but one’s clearly a lesser evil,” is exactly what’s landing us in the position that we are in with a collapse of trust in institutions, a collapse in trust in politics, a collapse in competence. If your primary qualification is you’re not the other guy, where’s the emphasis on competence even as a baseline? Somebody has to start taking the long view.

Neither party can win an election without their Bible-believing base. The two most church-going segments of American society, in addition to Mormons, are white evangelicals and black Democrats. Black Protestants are overwhelmingly Democrat. If both these movements exercised a veto authority over low-character politicians, American life would change.

That’s what I would urge for people of faith. Use the power that you actually have. Stop sitting around moaning and groaning that you’re persecuted and you don’t have any power. Come on. White evangelicals are the most powerful faction of one of the two most powerful political parties in the most powerful country in the history of the world. You are not powerless. You are not persecuted. Use the immense power that you have to begin to change the character of our institutions in a positive direction. No more fear-based voting. No more compromises with lesser evils. Use your power to reinforce virtue in this country, or you’re not upholding your end of the social compact. Period.

Postcard from Hudson

The other day we went to Albany so I could return all eight items I had bought online from Athleta. The store was in a giant mall that smelled tragically of Cinnabons. The Cinnabons reminded me of the TV series Better Call Saul, which is set in part in a Cinnabon shop, and the way Saul Goodman was unable to resist pulling a con. He missed his old life. Jail was preferable to feeling unknown to himself.

The clothes in the store were made of fabrics that were “what is this?” and “no.” And there were mirrors, unlike in our house. Richard said, “Let’s go to the Banana.” He wanted a cashmere sweater. There were two he looked great in, and it made me so happy for someone to look good in clothes I said, “Buy both.” He said, “I don’t deserve them.” I said, “No one deserves anything. You are beautiful. Beauty is its own whatever.” One of the sweaters had a soft hoodie thing, and Richard liked walking around in the house in it. The hood came down a little low. I said, “You’re getting a seven dwarfs thing happening with the hood.” He pulled it back a little, and it was perfect.

The next day on our walk, he wore the hoodie over a cap covering his ears. When we recited three things in the moment we loved, he said, “I’m glad we’re walking, although I’m against it.” I said, “Why are you against it?” He said, “It’s too cold.” It was during the Arctic cyclone, and I was wearing my down coat from the eighties. The shoulder pads are out to Mars, and Richard said, “Everyone on Warren Street thinks you’ve been released from an alien abduction after thirty years. They are wondering why you were released.” I said, “Why was I released?” He said, “They couldn’t get anything useful from you about earthlings. It was a total waste of their time.”

I bought a giant wheel of focaccia with salt and olives from a bakery. The grease was soaking through the bag when I got outside. I tore off a hunk. Richard said, “Are you going to eat all that?” I said, “It tastes like a crispy pretzel from Central Park,” and I could see I was missing my old life. The way we live, there are cows outside our windows that belong to Abby Rockefeller. Abby Rockefeller has built a dairy farm down the road where a piece of cheese is either pay this or your mortgage. Richard took a bite of the focaccia. It still took forever to get through the hunk I’d torn off, and my hands froze. I said, “My fingers could break off like one of those corpses holding a clue to their murder.”

Earlier in the day, we’d installed two bookcases in the basement. Richard was arranging the books in alphabetical order. At one time, in New York, the books had been in alphabetical order and every morning I’d walked on Broadway, looking for free samples from the food markets. COVID ended the era of free samples, and now I buy things to eat on Warren Street. The other day I went into a new café. Sun glared from the smile of the woman behind the counter when she said, “All the pastries are gluten-free and vegan.” I wondered if there was something about me that made her happy to announce this or if it had become a cultural commonplace like using the word bandwidth to mean mental space. I said, “I welcome gluten, and I’m not vegan.” She swore I wouldn’t know the difference, and even though I knew she would be wrong, I bought a slice of gluten-free vegan lemon pound cake, which lacked all the ingredients of pound cake. It’s in a bag on the kitchen counter. You can have it.

How we got the bookcases is the mother of a man on Facebook Marketplace had died, and he was clearing out her house. The cases were taller and heavier than reported. Richard wanted me to understand the logistics required to stand up each bookcase and edge it against a wall. He kept saying, “Don’t you see it has to go this way and then that way. Don’t you see it won’t fit from that angle?” I kept saying, “No, I don’t understand, and it thrills me to tell you I will never need to understand, as long as we stick it out together.”

Recently, he found an early book by Louisa May Alcott in one of the free bins on Warren Street. This morning he said, “We didn’t read American literature in school.” (He’s from England.) “Maybe a poem by Longfellow and Moby-Dick.” I said, “Moby-Dick is not chopped liver.” Then I thought that was unfair to chopped liver. If you tasted my chopped liver, you wouldn’t call it “chopped liver.”

I told him about a dream. If I were you, I would save myself and move on from this section. In the dream, we live in a château, and I’m talking to the woman who owns it. First she wants me to take her change and give her dollar bills. Fine. Then there is an enormous platter of lobsterlike creatures. It’s enormous. She holds up one of the creatures, and at first I don’t realize it’s alive. Alive and sluggish. I see the lobsters moving in a jumble on the platter, and I’m horrified for them, for me, for existence as we know it. Why are there lobsters that aren’t quite lobsters!! Why are they so huge!! Then I’m digging in a flower bed, and I think, Ah, it’s time to get the dahlia tubers from the basement. Don’t forget to plant the dahlias. Richard said, “The lobsters are from the zombie apocalypse show we watched with the fungus.” I thought, Yes, and I could see my mind had infinite bandwidth for any old crap fed to it.

A few nights ago, we watched a conversation with Mike Nichols filmed during his last days. He looks emaciated and speaks with his usual clarity and animation. Intercut with the conversation are scenes from some of his films. In one sequence from The Graduate, the camera shoots Dustin Hoffman in his convertible on a California freeway, racing to his future, racing to chaos from a death-in-life torpor—not unlike Saul Goodman fleeing the Cinnabon shop for a life of crime. The camera stays on Dustin’s look of determination, and then it moves to the scenery on his left as he’s racing along, it moves to trees and sky over his shoulder, and then, finally it shoots the road ahead—a tangle of beams and signs and other cars he is driving toward. And I thought that movement of the camera, that layering of shots and the thoughts those shots arouse in the moment and in memory, is exactly what to do with sentences to form a paragraph.

If there were a point to life, the point would be pleasure. I knew a man, an Italian communist, who liked to say, raising a glass of champagne and nibbling a blini with caviar, “Nothing’s too good for the working class.” Kafka’s Hunger Artist explains to the overseer at the end of the story he’s not a saint, nor is he devoted to art or sacrifice. He’s just a picky eater. “I have to fast. I can’t help it … I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.”

I once promised a man who was touchy about his privacy I would keep his secrets, and I kept his secrets. Otherwise I have made few promises, and I have never made a resolution. Today Richard was grumpier than me, and it made me so happy I was nice the whole time we walked. I love my phone. I love the first sip of a cocktail when the elevator drops. There is a woman I don’t love and can’t stop thinking about. I love that I will never understand my connection to her. There is a kind of vulnerability that makes me feel my whole life is stretched out in front of me. In a way, it is.

 

Laurie Stone is the author of six books, most recently Streaming Now, Postcards from the Thing that is Happening (Dottir Press), which has been long listed for the PEN America Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She writes the “Streaming Now” column for Liber a Feminist Review, and she writes the Everything is Personal substack. 

Roxane Gay in Antarctica: The Things We Do for Love

This gentle essay documents Roxanne Gay’s and her wife, Debbie Millman’s, journey to Antarctica. It’s not a racy tale, just a thoughtful look at what the trip meant to them, told from their perspective. A lovely take on shared contentment.

I took a picture of Debbie, bundled in her bright red parka, eyes covered with goggles, beaming as she held the chunk of ice. There were more penguins. We pulled up to a craggy landing and stepped foot on land to . . . say we stepped foot on Antarctica. We admired the landscape, and I was struck by the fact that this really is one of the last places in the world that is largely unconquered. I found an unexpected comfort in that.

A Kind of Common Madness: A Conversation with Liz Harmer

Destructive desire, a brother so psychically contaminated by his twin sister’s sexual life it’s as though her actions are his, a mother who inflames the mutual enmity between her children, social codes as rigid as they are ambiguous: Strange Loops, the second novel by Canadian author Liz Harmer, has the intensity and drive of classic tragedy. The book opens with the main character, Francine—a thirty-three-year-old mother of two, a wife and teacher pursuing a PhD—having an illicit affair with a former student who just turned eighteen. From there, her life unravels with inevitability so fixed it feels damned, as she casts back to the events that led her to this point. Strange Loops offers a complex, ethically tangled engagement with the reckonings of “me-too.”

Harmer is also a widely published, internationally award-winning essayist and poet, writing about madness, motherhood, religion, and obsession. Her debut novel, The Amateurs, was a finalist for the Amazon First Book Award and has been optioned by Riddle Films. I love her bold, intimate work for how it combines an interest in overwhelming, seemingly unassimilable passions with the intellectual effort to make sense of them.

We have been friends for a decade and spoke over Zoom about tragedy, taboo, unmediated experience, and how we perceive the sexuality of teenage girls.

***

The Rumpus: Strange Loops explores the relationship between desire and subjectivity. What interests you about this subject?

Liz Harmer: Two huge things happened to me when I was quite young: I went mad, and I fell in love, in relatively swift succession. I emerged from the hospital at eighteen, and by twenty-two I was married to my first love. These things, of course, formed me, and I’m glad for both. But, for me, the feeling that Anne Carson describes in Eros the Bittersweet—that erotic love can feel like you are finally connecting with the truest truth there is, peering straight down into time, finally seeing clearly—is a kind of common madness. What interested me is how much these peak experiences lead us to compose ourselves, invent a reality to suit the new situation, and also, can cause us to do great harm. When we think we are seeing most clearly, we see most poorly.

 

Rumpus: You’ve said that Loops might be a polarizing novel. Why do you say that?

 Harmer: One concern I have is that it indulges a kind of melodrama. It’s unapologetically melodramatic and larger than life in a way that is not cool. Part of me worries about that being off-putting or seeming unintentional. I’ve also had a few reactions from people in workshops that made me believe we’re pretty confused about what we think a protagonist means. Is a protagonist the endorsement of the author? This character, Francine, who I’m obviously very interested in and fond of, and who is difficult, fascinating, and intense, is making very poor moral decisions and missing something crucial about her own life. But my answer to the problem of likeability has always been that what’s “likeable” isn’t the same as what’s nice or palatable. That what we—what I—really crave is a protagonist that surprises me. 

Rumpus: We think of our culture here in the contemporary West as “permissive” but within the first few pages of Loops you approach the limits of what is permissible and take us into our taboos. What draws you to the forbidden?

Harmer: Yes, we are permissive about some things, and punitive about others, and my long training in the religious community that raised me, also raised me to ask why. As a teenager, I was constantly demanding that my elders tell me exactly why and for what theological reason sex outside of marriage was wrong. Here it says that Jesus will forgive us anything, that we can’t help sinning (even a lustful thought is as bad as adultery), and here it says we shouldn’t get married, and here are a bunch of God’s favorite adulterers. So, I am in the habit of looking at the rules and taboos and trying to ask what their basis is.

When I started to present parts of this novel in workshop, people had very different reactions to the content. One person told me she would never read a novel about a woman taking advantage of a student like this—it was too far (and I understood this, because I found Lolita mostly painful to read)—and then an older man who read it seemed to see that Francine at seventeen trying to seduce her thirty-something youth pastor was in total control. He said the man “didn’t stand a chance.” To me, both of these reactions were revealing. Our taboos and our reactions to the crossing of those taboos shows us something about our deepest beliefs about gender, about sex, about power, etc.

Rumpus: When you said people might find this “not cool,” I wondered, what’s “cool”?

Harmer: Maybe detached, ironic? There’s very little opportunity to have distance in this novel. But I’ve always been interested in the idea that there might be some experiences that are unmediated. This could mean being overwhelmed by art or the sublime; it could mean an experience of madness where you’re approaching something that you can no longer think through fast enough to mediate. Not wanting to have a persona, wanting to be a self that’s really there—this is an old-fashioned desire.

Rumpus: How do you get at unmediated experience in a medium?

Harmer: This is the puzzle I was facing. When I wrote this, I was writing in such a way that I was trying to access something I wasn’t intellectually in control of, which is the closest you can get in a medium to getting at something unmediated. I think I was trying to do something like automatic writing. I was trying to be guided by something that wasn’t clear to me and then in the editing process, to fix it up. I want this novel to feel like there’s less of a gap between the thing and the comprehension of the thing.

Rumpus: Can you talk about the structure you chose?

Harmer: In the first pass I was conjuring feelings and figuring out what was happening. But then when I went back, at a certain point I realized that the novel had three separate time periods and two separate narrative centers and was jumping between loops. I took each section, I made this nerdy infographic where I figured out the number of pages that were devoted to each loop, and tried to balance them out more. There’s a seventeen-years-ago loop where young Francine is having an affair with an older pastor, a present loop where she’s having an affair with her former student, and a section from in-between, where Francine’s family gathers at their country home and have a catastrophic fight during a tornado. At some point, I realized that while the first two loops drove the plot forward to its conclusion, the third didn’t. Instead, the energy of that section is like a tornado—it spirals down in. It doesn’t go forward—it goes deep. This was a very pleasing discovery to me. I placed the tornado loop in the mathematical centre of the novel, which felt like a sinkhole into which all the other events are tumbling. It’s very pleasing to me when the structure of a novel can reflect its themes and content.

Rumpus: Why is it pleasing when form and content mirror each other?

Harmer: Maybe it gets at a very deep pleasure of containment, like being swaddled. Maybe it’s like having a body instead of floating off into space.

My grade three teacher for some reason let me put on plays and cast all my classmates in them. The first play I put on was an adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood. When we got to the final scene, all the actors were so excited to be acting that we just kept going with no script. Eventually the teacher had to stop us and say this is enough. I think about this moment a lot. You just want to keep playing, you want to give your characters more things to say and do, but then you lose the thread completely and there’s no coherent story. I’ve written six novels and published two. The difference between a novel I can finish and one I can’t finish is the presence or absence of a shapely “container,” I call it. 

Rumpus: I’ve often thought that we give teenage boys the grace of seeing their sexual advances and expressions as awkward or messy. With girls, we tend to give them this first-degree level of intention when it comes to their sexuality. Of course, teenagers want to be seen as sexual beings, but I think we see girls as more controlled than they are. When young Francine pursues an older authority figure, how responsible is she for this relationship? 

Harmer: Francine is this very gifted young person who wants to think she’s in control and older than she is and is treated as though she’s older, which was also my experience as a kid. I think it’s a damaging thing we do to girls. We’re provoked by their sexuality and then our provocation is ascribed to them.

As a teenager, Francine takes this epic pilgrimage to throw herself at this older pastor. She’s determined to go down this path. But there are moments here, which, to me, are the saddest, darkest parts of the novel, where she’s alone in this house with him, trying to conjure up the feeling of wanting to throw herself into this thing, but she starts to feel afraid. Afterwards, she’s shaken up. She goes home weeping, and she thinks it’s because she’s in love. But I think there’s more going on there. This is Francine putting herself in a vulnerable position and then trying to be strong enough to withstand what has hurt her. She wants to see herself as older than her years, and the adults in her life also want to see her that way because then they don’t need to be responsible for her. She’s left to believe that she did this to herself and to this older man. She believes he was a victim to her desire.

Rumpus: Then Francine is the older teacher having an affair with a recent student. Were you thinking of trauma and its repetitions? 

Harmer: I wasn’t thinking about it at all because I was trying to write in this immediate way. Later, I discovered that she believes she had been the villain when she was young, and her re-enactment is clearly an attempt to understand what motivated the pastor. So yes, unconsciously on my part and on Francine’s part, this is about trauma, but I wasn’t trying to offer a clear explanation for her behaviour.

I went through something traumatic when I was young and I didn’t acknowledge this to myself until about two years ago. I was so unwilling to accept that I wasn’t in control of what had happened to me and to see that I had been damaged by this experience that I was resistant to the idea of trauma. And I guess I was afraid to write a trauma plot because, you know, we’re “on the other side of the trauma plot.” But discovering that you have symptoms of PTSD twenty years after something happened and that for all that time you did not know that about yourself makes you ask: How many other things do I not understand about my own experience?

Rumpus: Is that what a “strange loop” is? 

Harmer: The title Strange Loops comes from this book I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter, which is a very tender piece of personal, philosophical writing because it’s about his wife’s death and the belief he came to about consciousness and how intermixed our minds are with others. When someone we know well dies, things you love about them live on in your consciousness. So, there’s a sense in which we humans create each other’s consciousnesses. We’re part of a complex system of feedback loops where we take something in, put it back out, etc., and that’s how you create a self. I was thinking about Strange Loops as about creation of a self through others. To me, the main strange loop in the book is between Francine and her twin brother, Philip. They’re so entangled with each other that it’s not clear where one ends and the other begins. They’re like the snake that eats its own tail, or like the staircase that seems like it’s going up but it’s going down. He can’t bear what she’s done as though it’s happened to him.

Rumpus: In a number of essays you’ve written about coming from a Dutch Calvinist Reformed background and the way this impacted your sexuality as a young person. Here you gave Francine and Philip a liberal, secular household. How were you thinking about this obsession with female sexuality but without those traditional overdeterminations?

Harmer: Well, the sections in the past, set during Francine and Philip’s teenage years, take place in the late ‘90s. Even outside of my own stultified, confused sexual education, which was extremely misogynist and sex-negative—the messages were “don’t get pregnant.” “don’t be a slut,” “just get married and go away”—I was thinking of people like Monica Lewinsky and how she had been defamed and villainized even though she was so young, and he was…the fucking president. Our whole cultural attitude at that time was misogynist in a way I hope has changed a little bit, for my own kids.

I felt very unsafe about sex as a young person because, talking about the responsibilities we give to girls, I felt like I was responsible for the effect I was having on other people. For me, one of the grand ironies of my sheltered childhood going to a Christian school was that in order to attend this very conservative school on the other side of the city, I had to take an hour of city buses through the heart of downtown Hamilton. I’d get off downtown and wait for my next bus in front of a strip club. Men were everywhere, and they all thought I was twenty, not fourteen. I had a lot of negative encounters. So, I had a confusing inside/outside perspective on sexuality.

I’d internalized some misogyny but was very interested in rebelling against that so was reading second wave feminism and stuff about sex positivity. I was trying to talk a big game about being open-minded about sex in a context that was completely unwilling to entertain that. I was annoying and provocative to everybody all the time. Even at seventeen, Francine is not coy about her sexuality, and I think it was an intellectual position for her. She is trying on an intellectual position, as I was at that age.

But I also have compassion for Philip. He’s desperate for a meaning greater than his own reality, he’s going through his existential crisis that we do as teens, and he becomes interested in religion as something that will give him that meaning. I made his parents secular, but in a sense, this is a devotion to atheism that I’ve always found similar to being Christian. Even though the family in this novel comes from a different cultural background than my own—they’re also from a higher class than I’m from—I actually feel that psychologically they’re very similar to the more dogmatic, conservative figures I’ve known so well.

Rumpus: The book feels boldly tragic. Is this bucking a trend or are there contemporary works that inspired you?

Harmer: Do you remember The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides? In the press for that I remember Eugenides saying the 19^th-century marriage plot no longer has force because domesticity is no longer a place of high stakes for, say, women. We have divorce laws. We have bank accounts. We can own property. But love and domesticity have been places in my own life of high drama and struggle. The minute I was facing my own divorce, I realized how much traditional gender roles had really infected my own life in ways both subtle and very obvious, and so The Marriage Plot inspired me only insofar as it irritated me.

After I wrote Loops I read Querelle of Roberval by Kevin Lambert (the English translation is by Donald Winkler), which is based on Greek tragedy. It’s written in a way that you don’t have anyone to root for, and instead of God or Fate being the inescapable problem that causes the problem for the individual, it’s capitalism. I’m very compelled by the idea that tragedy as a form offers us evidence that there are things beyond our control, yet that we must bear the terrible consequences of these forces we can’t do anything to subdue. This is coming from my deep Calvinist roots, but what tragedy offers is a reminder that you are not your own. A great modern piety is that we believe in our own agency and we believe in our own freedom and we believe that we can make rational decisions.

I think I’m drawn, in most of the art I love, to the kind of ordinary darkness that everyone experiences: that every one of us, no matter what we might aspire to, is capable of failing to do what’s right, and that failure, no matter how we might explain it to ourselves, no matter how sorry we might be, could have catastrophic consequences anyway. This to me feels like the tragedy of the human condition, and it also feels like the source of some of the most beautiful, terrifying stories people have made.

 

 

 

***
Author photo by Scott Nichols

From the Archives: Rumpus Original Fiction: Emergency Lifeboats: 24 (12 on Each Side)

This was originally published at The Rumpus on September 13, 2017.

 

 

No. It’s my mother’s favorite word lately.

Did they feed you?

No.

Are you happy here?

No.

Do you love me?

No.

 

It’s a Sunday at the tail end of fall. The autumn scents of pumpkin and cinnamon have vanished somewhere with the last of the dying leaves. Above my mother’s bed, skinny leafless branches tap at the glass window in slow rhythmic movements. My mother shifts to her side and draws her blanket close to her face, balling her fists tight under her chin. She shivers like a page caught in a gust of wind.

“No,” she says, although I haven’t said anything. It’s no longer a word, but a sound that’s not meant for anyone but herself. It’s her second day here at Saint Martha’s Nursing Home and although she can’t communicate anymore, I can tell she hates it. Projecting, my husband Jerry said yesterday when I told him about my suspicions. Well, he didn’t say this; he exclaimed it, like a detective would after finally putting together all the clues. He decided I hated Saint Martha’s, I hated leaving my mother here and—as usual—I was making this about myself. Projecting. He was loose with the tongue because he has nothing left to lose: he’s been sleeping on the couch for about two months now, surrounded by his model airplanes and ships. The subject of divorce has been lobbied between us more times this month than a volleyball at the beach.

My mother shakes so much I’m thankful for the rails on each side of the bed. There’s no thermostat in the room, just an absurd antique iron heater that would look out of place except that this whole facility looks like the setting of a Victorian-era novel. Perched on a mountaintop, the structure of Saint Martha’s dates to colonial times when it was used as a lookout during the Revolutionary War. It was abandoned after the war ended and left to rot and ruin, until the late 1800s when it was renovated by Catholic nuns and converted into an asylum. In the 1900s, most of their patients were elderly people with some form of dementia or Alzheimer’s, which led to their decision to turn the asylum into a home for the elderly. This building is so old that all the heat is turned on at the same time—winter. No thermostats; you just open and close the heater’s valves.

I know all of this because I had an argument yesterday with one of the nuns, Sister Frances. She’s in charge of the wing my mother is in, the Alzheimer’s and dementia section of the facility, where they place the residents who suffer from severe forms of these diseases. The ones who repeat the same words over and over like a prayer; the ones who need to be fed and bathed and have their diapers changed.

Sister Frances and I argued because I wanted her to turn the heat on in my mother’s room. She gave me the Saint Martha’s history lesson to explain why she couldn’t do that: it would be too expensive to turn the heat on for the whole building before winter. I told her with what they charged monthly my mother should have her own private sauna if she wanted one. The compromise we arrived on was extra blankets, but even this would take an extra day or two because they “didn’t have any extras.”

I hate to admit it, but Jerry was right about something: I hate this place. But that doesn’t change the fact that I think Mom doesn’t like it either. I like to imagine she’s pretending to be cold, to shiver so much, just to let me know she doesn’t like it here, because that would mean she’s still in there somewhere. I only put her in this place because she’s always been such a devout Catholic. I thought being around nuns and crucifixes might trigger some memories, make her feel more at home, but I’m not so sure anymore. I also didn’t realize these nuns actually operated with amenities from the 1800s.

My mother turns on her side, now facing me. She looks at me through the silver strands of hair that fall across her face.

“No,” she says. Her face is as thin and sharp as I’ve ever seen it. Her eyes are set in deeper than I remember and dark bags hang heavy under her gaze.

“No what, Mom?” I say, standing up from the red cushioned chair next to the bed and walking towards her.

“No.”

“Are you cold, Momma?” I take a measured step forward.

“No,” she says, still shivering.

“Are you hungry?”

She looks away from me and stares at the ceiling as if trying to solve a puzzle. I haven’t been this close to her in a while. For the last month she’s been confusing me with someone else. She’d look at me and turn red and either cry or claw at me. During one of these instances she called me “Marie,” during another she called me a whore. I have no idea who Marie is or was—I don’t even know if she ever existed.

I miss hearing her say my name. Monica, she’d call from downstairs when dinner was ready. Monica, honey, she’d whisper if she found me crying in my room after school. I place one hand on the bed rail and I slide the other into hers. I never get used to the feel of her wrinkled skin, the fluid movement of bluish veins under my thumb, the warmth it radiates. I feel like a child again. I feel like my mother’s daughter for the first time in months.

“Momma,” I whisper.

She stares at me for a few seconds. I think she’s trying to connect the dots. Get the gears grinding. I fear she’s going to see “Marie’s” face in mine. But she looks away. She stares at the wall and coos like a bird.

“No,” she says. “Coo.”

 

By the time I leave Saint Martha’s, the sun has set. Rain falls hard and angry from the dark gray clouds hiding the hundreds of stars that can be seen from this hilltop on a clear night. On the drive back home, I feel cheated. The first time my older brother, Gabe, and I visited Saint Martha’s was during its open house last spring, when the trees were heavy with green and flowers scattered through plains like wildfire. We drove up the gravel path that cut through the green hill like a scythe through tall grass, unprepared for the beauty we were about to see. Saint Martha’s during springtime looked magical: surrounded by flowers and greenery—the whole color spectrum on top of a hill.

Gabe flew in to Massachusetts from California, where he pretends to be too busy “working” to come help take care of Mom. He calls himself an actor, despite being forty-three and only having two infomercials and one tiny non-speaking role in his portfolio, or whatever actors call their résumés. I practically forced him to come so he could check out the facility where Mom was most likely going to end up. I even paid for his airline ticket. He had lived here in Greetlebay and worked as an English teacher at a local high school for about fifteen years before having some sort of identity crisis and deciding he was going to make it as an actor. Coincidentally, this sudden burst of passion happened at the same time Mom started getting worse, when she started misplacing memories and faces as often as she misplaced her keys. I don’t know why I made him come. Why I spent that money. I didn’t really have to bring back my brother, who didn’t really want to be here. Maybe it was my last attempt at keeping the family together—at having a family at all. In the end, his contribution to the decision-making process amounted to, “This place seems fine.”

My house looks unfamiliar under rainfall: a black and blue silhouette in darkness, unwelcoming and eerie. I sit in my car and listen to the engine run lazily, a soft murmur under the wash of rain. I don’t know when exactly it transformed from a home to a house. The blinds are shut, but I don’t need to see inside to know that Jerry is either slumped on the couch eating macaroni and cheese and watching television or he’s hunched over the dinner table, working on one of his model airplanes, or a tiny ship in a bottle. He finds comfort in repetition, in rituals. He’s built the same ten or twelve different models over and over again because he knows them by now and won’t find any surprise or complication in the process. Among his favorites are the F4U Corsair with its tiny yellow-tipped propellers, the American Airlines Boeing 767 because it’s the only airline he trusts, and the red 1917 Baron Fokker Triplane, with its three sets of wings and the black cross on its tail.

For our last anniversary, I gave him a custom-made model set of the very cruise ship we were on when he proposed, the Carnival Liberty. I had to do a lot of research to get the details right, online searches and many calls. Decks on the ship: 16. Balconies: 28 (all on the 16^th deck). Length: 855 feet. Guest capacity: 2052. On-board crew: 920. Emergency lifeboats: 24 (12 on each side). The model is still in the white and red box it came in, gathering dust next to the model planes and ships and bottles. He gave me a scarf that year. One he knew I already owned, because, as he pointed out, “It’s your favorite scarf, but in a different color!” I wish I’d returned it that very day instead of wearing it to work to protect his feelings.

There’s a finished model of a WWII fighter jet gliding in place over the glass dinner table, its target apparently the cheesy white china plate. No Jerry. For half a second I expect to find a note clinging to the model plane (a grey Messerschmitt Me 262) the way he used to let me know he ran out for a quick second to buy more crazy glue or a magnifying glass because he lost another one.

The model plane is dainty and fragile. They’re always lighter than I expect them to be. I hold the Nazi jet by its wings like a baby bird or a dead moth and push with my thumbs until one of the little wings snaps. I consider breaking the other one as well, but settle for one and leave the jet right where it was before I go to bed.

In the morning I hear Jerry creep into the room. He shuffles socked feet and slides closet doors gently, trying not to make a sound. I pretend to be asleep, because I don’t know what I would say or ask if we talked right now. For the first time in years—in our marriage—I don’t know where he spent the night. I know he didn’t come in last night because I got up after midnight to get a glass of water, and where I expected to find a fat blanketed lump on the couch, I found nothing. I shift to my side but pretend to still be sleeping and he freezes for a moment. I hear him open a few drawers and pick up a pair of shoes before leaving the room.

I get out of bed and walk out of the room after I hear Jerry’s car driving away. If someone asks him what his job is, he’ll say he’s a writer. In reality, he works a nine to five in a government building, writing little blog posts about public health and safety. He’s never written a short story or a poem that I know of, and I’ve never seen him writing outside of work. But he likes to pretend things are better than they really are. It’s his way of life: repetition and denial.

Later, at work, my mind is elsewhere, nowhere near the insurance forms I should be filling out. My mind is in Los Angeles with my deadbeat runaway brother; it’s at the top of a hill in a cold ancient building, watching my mother coo at the walls; it’s wherever my husband was last night, watching him do all the things he could have done with a prettier, younger version of me.

Still, it seems absurd—logically—to be angry with him. Even if he was with someone else last night—why should I be mad? We’ve talked about separation many times, called each other many things we can’t take back and put all our belongings in some intangible mental list of division. Most of these conversations ended the same way, me trying to think of new things we could try—marriage counseling, sky-diving, swinging, something, anything—and Jerry saying he’s tired of trying, or that there’s nothing even left to try because we’ve tried it all. Jerry gave up. Jerry is done. He’s been looking at apartments for a month now. We’re only together on paper. Yet, whenever my mind wanders off I picture tiny model planes set ablaze and soaring through the sky or tiny ships in bottles crashing into jagged rocks, pushed by violent waves.

After work, I drive fast to Saint Martha’s, a little recklessly, because I’m eager to see my mother. I’m eager to be in her quiet room and sit by her side and hold her hand while I talk and she listens. I’m eager to touch her hair and tell her stories—her own stories about her own life—and maybe I’ll even sing to her, like the doctors have recommended or I’ll hum, since I don’t have a singing voice. Maybe I’ll finally tell her about my failed marriage.

 

Crossing the threshold of Saint Martha’s entrance feels like stepping into a different world, where time moves at the same pace flowers bloom and the general atmosphere is perpetually that of a wake. I pass by portraits of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, rosaries hung from their top corners; residents who smile at me, who say hello and hi and good morning (despite the sun having already set), who smell like piss, who look lonely. Some of them seem healthy and alive—more so than my mother. And I can’t help asking why not them?

The Alzheimer’s section of the building is one of the farthest from the entrance. When I’m about halfway there, Sister Frances intercepts me.

“Excuse the intrusion,” she says. “I don’t mean to be nosy, but do you know who Jerry is?”

“Jerry?” I’m surprised because Jerry’s never come to visit my mother. “My husband, Jerry?”

“Oh,” says Sister Frances in a tone that would seem grave, if she didn’t dip every word in the same tenor. “Your mother has been calling for a ‘Jerry’ all day.”

This is odd. My mother was never a fan of Jerry. In fact, when I told her that I was pregnant with his child and that I was planning on marrying him all those years ago, she begged me not to do it, not to have the baby—this was the first and only time I heard her say anything so un-Catholic. It was also the moment I realized how hard it must have been for her to bring me up by herself. It had nothing to do with Jerry, but with how young I was and how hard she’d worked to get us to where we were. I was seventeen and she had raised me by herself, during a time when a single mother was treated like a leper. One day she threatened to poison both our meals if I didn’t abort and promise not to marry anyone until I was at least twenty-one. She was joking—maybe half joking—but it never had to come to that, because I had a miscarriage seven months into the pregnancy, a little after Jerry officially proposed.

 

“I’ll have to tell Jerry. I’ll bring him with me next time.”

“About that,” Sister Frances says as she fixes the black veil pinned over the white coif, “I didn’t get a chance to talk to you about this during your first visit—transitions and all of that. We find it’s best—this is completely optional and up to you of course—but we find it’s easier for the patients to transition into living here if their families give them space for at least the first one or two weeks.”

“Space?”

“Yes. We encourage families to—”

“Are you asking me not to visit my mother?”

“Well no, it’s just—”

“My mother is seventy-eight. And she’s frail. She could get a cold and die tomorrow.”

“Oh dear. I think I may have upset you.”

“I think you may have,” I say, more coldly than intended. Before I can say anything else, she bows her head and walks away.

 

I imagine telling my mother, “They don’t want me to visit you for a week or two.” She would be sitting on her bed, her legs crossed at the ankles, a crossword puzzle or a book in her hands. She’d lift a pen to her mouth and pinch it between teeth, the way she always did when stuck.

“What’s a six-letter word for ignoring truth,” she might say, without looking up from the puzzle.

I tell her I don’t know without really thinking of an answer. I’ve made her younger, somewhere in her late twenties. The silver from her hair shed away to make room for a glossy black. Her wrinkles have disappeared and she wears light pink lipstick and blush. For a second I envy her beauty.

“What’s wrong?” she might say and look at me.

“It’s nothing. I’m fine,” I’d say, knowing this answer won’t work. My mother could always tell when something was wrong. She always knew exactly what to say to get me to talk.

“I know you better than you know yourself, Moony.” She only called me Moony on special occasions, particularly when I was sad and didn’t want to talk—post-breakups, job losses, and all the other little failures of life. Days like today.

“Why were you calling for Jerry?” I might ask her.

“Oh, I just wanted to spit on his face one more time, just in case.” She would wait for me to laugh. And I do.

“We’re getting divorced.” Even in this imagined scenario my voice cracks.

“About time!” she would say and maybe throw the puzzle in the air or tear it up. “You’re too good for him, Moony. Too good for anyone! What did I always tell you?”

I know what she wants me to say, but I wait in silence. I want her to say it. And in this scene, she does.

“It’s just you and me in this world. It’ll always be just you and me.”

 

My mom is asleep when I enter her room. I sit next to her in the red-cushioned chair and I’m glad to find she has an extra blanket wrapped snugly around her. I want it to be like when I was a little girl, when I would walk to her room in the middle of the night and crawl into her bed. She’d wake up and she wouldn’t even say anything; she’d just stroke my hair until I fell asleep next to her, feeling safe by her side.

“Mom,” I say, already feeling guilty about waking her up.

She opens her eyes and stares at me without saying a word.

“I’m getting divorced,” I say, and for some reason I wait for her to say something back. She looks over at the wall behind me.

“I’m sad, Mom. I’m so, so sad.”

“Coo,” she says. “Coo.”

 

I come home to find Jerry has moved out most of his things. His underwear and sock drawers are empty, his work shirts and pants are missing as well. The model planes and ships have flown and sailed away from the windowsills and shelves where they once resided. I hope to find the cruise ship I gave him has also floated away, but of course he’s left it behind—he has no need for it. I pick up the dusty red and white box from the floor and open it on the dinner table. I spill its contents over the glass and marvel at the infinitesimal pieces that need to be put together. The bright orange lifeboats stand out among the many dull pieces and for a moment I picture myself sitting alone on one of these lifeboats in the middle of the ocean slowly rocking from side to side, letting the ocean currents guide me blindly to my next destination. I hunch over my dinner table inside my new home and I start building the model set of the place where it all began. Coo, I whisper as I begin to put the pieces together. Coo.

***

Rumpus original art by Mark Armstrong.