Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Transcription

FROM THE STAFF
The
Yale
Herald
Dear Readers,
Maybe you watched PBS Kids when you were a child, and
maybe you remember the rap from Arthur: “Having fun isn’t
hard—when you’ve got a library card.” And maybe now, here,
you find yourself thinking: I have a library card! Why am I not
having more fun?
I think this quite a lot, which is why I’m so excited about the
Literary Issue—it feels like a remedy for all the fun I haven’t
been having in libraries lately. “Who reads for fun anymore?”
Today, the answer is you.
Many of these pieces are about summers, literal vacations, or
less traditional departures from normal life. There are wedding
dress fittings and tense adoptions, family feuds and almostdrownings. I think these pieces offer the best of what reading
is—a departure, but one that lingers with you once you’ve
returned and gets you through the last couple weeks of being
begrudgingly not on vacation. I hope you take a second to step
into these spaces, to let them linger with you, and to have fun.
Anxiously,
Libbie Katsev
Literary Issue Special Editor
Volume LIX, Number 11
New Haven, Conn.
Friday, April 24, 2015
EDITORIAL STAFF:
Special Issue Editor: Libbie Katsev
Editor-in-chief: Lara Sokoloff
Managing Editors: Sophie Haigney, David Rossler, Lily
Sawyer-Kaplan
Executive Editors: Kohler Bruno, Colin Groundwater,
Micah Rodman, Alessandra Roubini, Olivia Rosenthal,
Maude Tisch
Senior Editors: Alisha Jarwala, Katy Osborn, Andrew Wagner
Culture Editors: Jordan Coley, Sarah Holder
Features Editors: Kendrick McDonald, Charlotte Weiner
Opinion Editor: Josh Feinzig, Anna Meixler
Reviews Editors: Carly Lovejoy, Jake Stein
Voices Editor: Libbie Katsev
Insert Editor: Jenny Allen
Design Editors: Emma Fredwall, Emma Hammarlund
Graphics Editors: Ben McCoubrey, Chris Melamed
Assistant Design Editor: Kai Takahashi
Copy Editors: Zoe Dobuler, Maia Hirschler
BUSINESS STAFF:
Publishers: Karl Xia
Director of Advertising: Pehlaaj Bajwa
Directors of Finance: Olivia Briffault, Kevin Chen,
Ellen Kim
ONLINE STAFF:
Online Editor: Austin Bryniarski, Anna-Sophie Harling
Bullblog Editor-in-chief: Carly Lovejoy
Bullblog Associate Editors: Austin Bryniarski, Jordan Coley,
Jeremy Hoffman, Caleb Moran
The Yale Herald is a not-for-profit, non-partisan,
incorporated student publication registered with the Yale
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If you wish to subscribe to the Herald, please send a check
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Please address correspondence to:
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The Yale Herald is published by Yale College students,
and Yale University is not responsible for its contents. All
opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not
reflect the views of The Yale Herald, Inc. or Yale University.
Copyright 2015, The Yale Herald, Inc. Have a nice day.
Cover by Ben McCoubrey YH Staff
2 – The Yale Herald
THIS WEEK
Incoming
Fling fashion
I ordered 50 flash tats from Amazon
and have been toning my
upper midriff for WEEKS now.
Outgoing
Senior crushes
Wanna make out before
you leave for the infinite abyss
that is the Real World?
In this issue
6 – Fiction by Ariel Katz, MC ’15.
8 – Poetry by Sydney Gabourel, TD ’15, Malini Ghandi, MC ’17, Caroline Kanner, JE ’17, Stephani Kuo, PC ’17, A. Grace Steig, SM ’16
Friday
TUIB’s Bees ‘N’ Cheer
SSS
9:15 p.m.
Saturday
10 – Scene by Ruthie Prillaman, JE ’16
12 – Non-fiction by Katy Osborn, BR ’15
15 – Poetry by Sophie Dillon, DC ’17
Spring Fling
Old Campus
3 p.m.
16 – Fiction by Oliver Preston, JE ’16
Tuesday
21 – Summer reading suggestions, by your friend Herald
18 – Fiction by Irene Connelly, BR ’17
Organ Improv Showcase
Trinity Episcopal Church on the Green
4-5 p.m.
Wednesday
Yale Farm Work Day
Yale Farm
1-5 p.m
April 24, 2015 – 3
CREDIT D FAIL
THE NUMBERS
Game of Thrones
outpacing the books
TV SHOW WATCHERS, OUR DAY HAS COME!
Game of Thrones is diverging from the books. Thank
you, George R. R. Martin, for being the world’s slowest writer—it nearly makes up for how you killed
everyone we’ve ever loved. Never again can that
asshole in section ruin tomorrow’s episode by trying to impress his crush with the finer details of an
11,000+ page fantasy series. Never again can your
brother threaten to tell you what happens to Daenerys Targaryen’s third dragon, Drogon, unless you
buy him the 17+ video game he wants. Now we can
watch the show with our book-reading friends without wanting to slap that smug look off their faces.
Because now they’re just as confused as we are!
Where is Jaime going? Where the hell has Rickon
been this whole time!? No one knows! Muwahahaha
welcome to my world.
Reading for pleasure
The other day, I remembered that I have books on my shelf.
Running with this exciting development, I decided to open
one. A spider crawled out of it. Actually. Really. A spider. So
yeah I haven’t been reading for pleasure recently. In February, my English teacher told my class, “If you’re reading
for pleasure, you’re doing it wrong.” Half my class started weeping, but I was kind of relieved. But then we went
around in a circle saying our favorite book, and all of mine
were from last semester’s syllabus. So that’s not perfect either. I need to find a way to be literarily cultured but also be
able to binge watch Game of Thrones. I’ll get back to you
with my plan.
Literary prefrosh
There is no way in hell your favorite book is Uno, Nessuno e Centomila, an obscure surrealist novel that you read
in Italian which, by the way, is your third language. Stop
showing off. Please. Just stop. If I hear someone mention
their SAT score or how many APs they’re going to take when
they get home I will curl into a ball and roll away. I don’t
care what your high school rank is. I’m just trying to make
it through today without anyone realizing I ran out of deodorant. Yes, I got your “April is the cruelest month” reference during Monday’s sideways rainstorm, but can we just
talk about something we all actually care about? How about
Game of Thrones?!
–Madeleine Colbert YH Staff
Index
66 Number of books on the Directed
Studies syllabus
1273
Pages in War and Peace, the
longest book on the syllabus
2 Weeks spent discussing War and Peace.
18 Papers written in DS this year
125 Number of students enrolled in DS
first semester
98
Number of students enrolled in Directed Studies second semester
Sources: 1) DS syllabus, 2) War and Peace 3) DS Syllabus,
4) My blood, sweat, and tears, 5) DS administration 6) DS
administration
-Anna Lipin YH Staff
Top five Books that you don’t
want to see on your hookup’s
nightstand
5 – American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis.
Finance.
4 – I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, Tucker Max.
Purchased from Urban Outfitters.
3 – Fifty Shades of Grey, E.L. James.
Worse: any of the sequels.
2 – Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace.
Liar.
1 – On The Road, Jack Kerouac.
Total fuqboi.
–Charlotte Ferenbach YH Staff
Email keyang.xia@yale.edu
FICTION
June
by Ariel Katz YH Staff
“It was defective,” Allison said, setting her coffee mug
down on the table. Of course, what she really said was “We
had been in contact with the mother for eight months. And
then we were sent a video of the child—a little red-haired
baby. We took it to the pediatrician last week and she told us
it had fetal alcohol syndrome.”
She hated that she had to explain all this to the gathered
women. Their furrowed brows and sympathetic hums were
inevitable. Allison nodded through them, waving her hand,
wanting them to do anything but worry over her. “It was
defective”—maybe then she could have gotten some laughter,
maybe then they could have poured liquor into their coffee,
spread their legs wide and begun to truly talk.
But she didn’t want to talk anymore about the adoption.
She wanted them—dared them—to ask about Rita. Rita who
turned thirteen last week, Rita with the gray-blonde hair that
swept past her hips. No one wanted to mention Rita—they
had heard enough from their own daughters.
“That must have been devastating,” said one of the women.
“It was devastating,” Allison repeated. She said this in a
soft voice, sure that she was comforting all of them.
“I’VE FOUND ANOTHER BABY,” MICHAEL SAID WHEN
they sat down to dinner. He would not have put it that way if
Rita were home. Allison briefly hated her husband for saying
this, just as she had briefly hated the pediatrician who had
damned the red-haired baby. Though they had agreed not to
name her until she was in the States, Allison had called her
Katrina. Katrina wandered through Allison’s mind, weaving
herself into songs that Allison hummed and mental lists she
made. Names tended to drift into Allison’s head without her
willing—it had been the same way with Rita.
“I didn’t think the agency worked that fast.” Allison felt no
need to untangle and smooth out her speech for Michael as
she had done for the four women who had circled the table
earlier in the afternoon. She had, in fact, said to him in the
car home from the pediatrician’s office, “Defective.” What
she left out then was, “again.”
He paused, cutting his chicken with fervor. She half
expected him to roll his eyes at her, point to the chicken and
say, “it’s dry,” as if they were in some hokey drama about a
marriage falling apart. Michael, of course, never said such
things. They did not fight anymore, aloud.
“I didn’t go through the agency,” he said. “I found a
local agency.”
“That’s impossibly fast.”
Michael looked directly at her. “It was a special case.
There’s a woman I work with—a young woman—who’s
pregnant and looking for a home for the baby. I spoke with
her, and pulled a few strings.”
Allison felt an impulse to protest. She had begun to want
a child from abroad after hearing about overrun orphanages
in Russia. Alone in the house after Michael left for work and
Rita left for school, Allison wept over news stories. In general,
she almost never cried—she was proud of that. As a child, on
a school outing to the public library, she had found a book
of Japanese proverbs. One said: if you accept pain as the
normal state of things, there is no pain. She loved that.
“That’s good news,” Allison said. She knew she ought to
refuse, to insist upon going through the foreign agency, but
that would mean waiting—months, years—and she couldn’t
wait longer. It occurred to her that she ought to be angry, to
dash a plate against the wall, to show Michael she understood
the situation and disapproved, but her arms seemed to have
grown into the wooden arms of the chair.
“She’s due in June,” Michael said. The rest of the dinner
was quiet, until Allison brought up Rita’s logistics. She would
drive to the Allen’s and pick her up in the morning. They
made these plans in the loose way of lunch plans nobody is
expecting to keep.
MRS. ALLEN PHONED AT MIDNIGHT, VOICE TREMBLING.
Allison had not yet gone to bed. She had come to expect this
sort of thing.
“Hello, Allison? This is Carol Allen. I’m sorry to phone so
late, but I think you should come get Rita.”
When Allison arrived it was the usual scene. Five girls in
pajama sets stood on the periphery of a curtained bedroom,
looking at the floor. Carol Allen knelt in the center. And near
her was Allison’s child, shaking, panting uncontrollably,
sobbing. The girls on the edges of the room were whispering
to each other, eyes wide with worry or narrow with exhaustion.
Allison strode to the middle of the room, took Rita’s
wrist and yanked. She screamed, and Allison slapped her
face, momentarily forgetting her audience. “Get up,” she
whispered through gritted teeth, “we’re going home.”
Rita yelled the whole way home (I hate you. You’re a
monster. Fuck you, stupid bitch) and Allison drove, ignoring
her. By the time they came to the driveway, Rita was quietly
crying and said, the walls wouldn’t stop looking at me.
Allison smoothed her daughter’s hair. “Get to bed.”
ALLISON SPENT A LOT OF TIME THAT SPRING THINKING
of the new baby. The name had crept up on her the first night
Michael had mentioned the adoption: June, after the baby’s
projected due date.
Rita had been due in August and born in June. Long before
her birth Allison had called her Perdita, after a child in an old
play she’d read in college. The child was the daughter of a
queen, left in the wilderness to die because the king believed
her to be illegitimate. Before setting her in the wilderness,
an associate of the king named the baby Perdita, because
she was “counted lost forever.” Instead, she was found and
raised by a shepherd and returned to her royal status by
the play’s end. To name the one in the womb Perdita, then,
would be to trick fate. Counted lost, guaranteed living.
During that time Allison had become superstitious,
believing in fate and karma, luck and God. Perdita was
the third attempt: before Perdita was Alex, before Alex was
Cassandra. Alex and Cassandra ended in streams of blood in
the middle of the night. Allison prayed for Perdita.
And when she came early, Allison looked in her tiny face
and felt no hope.
“WILL YOU TRY THIS FOR ME?” RITA SAID, HOVERING A
forkful of meatloaf near Allison’s plate. Rita’s hair was pulled
back with a fluffy green elastic and her nails were bitten into
stubs. Like any thirteen-year-old, Allison thought.
“I made it myself,” Allison said, trying to keep her voice
even. “You don’t have to worry about it.”
“Just try it, please,” Rita said.
Michael looked at Allison, telling her to just take the bite of
meatloaf, just let them continue with their dinner. Rita’s face
was beginning to color, her gray eyes showing hints of cloud.
That had been one of the first calls Allison got: from
Beth Wisman, in the afternoon. Beth’s daughter had told
her mother, casually, that Rita always had her friends taste
her food for her at school: microwave lunches, pizza, peanut
butter and jelly. Allison had laughed and asked what the
problem was with sharing.
“She thinks there could be poison in the food,” Beth
Wisman had said. “She’s having them check to see if it’s
poisoned. I just thought you should know.”
This became the theme of the calls: I just thought you
should know. Then: maybe she should see somebody.
“This is ridiculous,” Allison said to Rita now. She used to
say that in the beginning, when Rita was sure that she had
Lyme disease, or cancer, or strep throat, and would refuse to
leave her bed, or when she and Rita were out and Rita would
have to walk incredibly slowly in order to touch each fence
post they passed three times and draw a circle on the top
with her finger. “Eat your dinner.”
This was the part Allison always found most difficult:
when her daughter looked terrified. It was usually right
before the tantrum, or the silence, or whatever would come
next to make Allison temporarily hate her child. But in the
moment when Rita looked scared, Allison was powerless to
chastise her. She wanted only to hold her, rock her, tell her
that she was safe.
FOR A LONG TIME AFTER RITA’S BIRTH, ALLISON WAS
not allowed to hold her. They had called her Rita by that
point, because Michael insisted Perdita was too fancy, hard
to pronounce. Allison thought Rita sounded like a name
for a seventy-year-old waitress with dyed hair and cat-eye
glasses, but she was too exhausted to protest. Plus, there
was something in the baby that seemed elderly, splayed in
the incubator, held together by tubes and wires.
Allison’s mother had not come for the birth. Michael’s
mother, a round and talkative woman, caught the first
plane from Chicago and was at Allison’s side nonstop,
chattering about how it would all be okay, it would be
just fine, she’s so beautiful, isn’t she so beautiful? Allison
had called her mother to say the baby was coming early,
but there had been no answer. She had worried that her
mother was dead, had passed out and was rotting behind
a restaurant somewhere. But three days later the rasp on
the other end of the phone told Allison she was working
double shifts this week and couldn’t make it until next
month. Allison’s half-sister had just had a child, and, as
Allison’s mother put it, Carlene didn’t have any rich man
to pay her hospital bills.
Allison did not cry during delivery, just as her mother
had not.
THEY MADE THE DECISION AT THE END OF THE YEAR TO
take Rita out of school. For one thing, she had been absent
too many days, refusing to leave her bed, fighting with Allison
about the reality of her sickness. Then, too, there was the
incident of the mural.
Each year the eighth graders painted a mural on the wall
of the gymnasium. Typically, each student got his or her own
little corner to decorate. There were photographs and snacks,
and in the fall the janitor re-painted the brick wall the color
of pale vomit.
Rita’s friends had noticed her corner, painted with small
poems. Longings, the teachers told Allison in the principal’s
office. Mentions of specific weapons. Knife, noose. We won’t
be too graphic.
When she was in third grade, Rita drew
fantastical animals with dog heads and octopus
legs, dragon feet and cat eyes. Allison used to pin
them to the refrigerator.
She never told Michael about the mural. It
was understood that Rita was in trouble, and that
she had missed too much school. But to Allison
it would have been a betrayal of Rita to tell him
about the wall. Rita’s impulse felt familiar to her.
She had been fifteen, caring for Carlene while
her mother was out. After she put Carlene to bed,
Allison sought out her grandmother’s sewing kit,
and with the needle pricked the top digit of each
finger. How pleasurable it had been to be entirely
alone with the small pain. Briefly there was the
thought of a knife, of herself strewn on the floor,
her mother and her mother’s lover stopping in
horror. They came home that night, drunk. Allison
was not asleep, but they acted as if she were.
There were never thank-yous, gifts, family dinners.
Remembering this, Allison’s image of the
pinpricked hands was blotted out with anger at her
daughter. Rita had everything.
a tiny dress with a crinoline skirt. She had spent
a morning arranging these things on her side of
the bedroom, and at night she watched the mobile
rotate slowly under the moon.
Upon receiving the bad news from the
pediatrician Allison had taken everything to the
attic, before she had even removed her shoes or
her coat. Sweating, she had dragged the crib up
the stairs. It calmed her to hear wood scratch
against wood, to feel herself overheat under her
coat—it was better than the consolation from
the pediatrician or from Michael. It was some
physical expression of grief and evidence of her
continued existence.
Now she hauled the crib back down the stairs
as Rita watched with crossed arms.
“Are you going to give it my mobile?” Rita said.
“No. We’re getting it all new things. Why don’t
you help me?”
Just before Rita was born, Michael had made
a mobile for her out of fishing wire and painted
cardboard. He and Allison had sat together at
the kitchen table, him bent over the mobile, her
reading the paper. Every so often one of them
would voice some hope in a casual, almost childish
way. I can’t wait to take her to the state fair and
watch her hold a duckling and drink apple cider.
We’ll bring her to Chicago and walk her through
the museum at Navy Pier. I’ll teach her to sew with
my grandmother’s needles. It was thrilling, to once
again have something to talk about.
Rita had loved the mobile. Now, Allison found
it ugly, just a jumble of misshapen cardboard
pieces growing soft and warped from many humid
summers. She had vowed that the new baby would
have nothing of Rita’s.
Together Allison and Rita set the crib down near
the window. Rita began to tap the bars, drawing
circles with her fingers.
“You slept in a crib just like that, once.”
“Why didn’t you just use my old one?”
“Because it’s beginning to rot,” Allison said
without pause.
It was already hot, one of those years when
winter passes directly into summer, forgetting
spring. The light that came through the window
was too strong, and Allison drew the curtain,
imagining the fragility of the person that would lie
below the window soon. She did not imagine state
fairs or sewing needles, only the feel of a head on
her shoulder.
YEARS AGO, WHEN THEY FIRST MOVED TO THE
house, Allison would not sleep. She would lie in
bed listening to the sounds outside: frogs, birds,
crickets, whatever made the night whirr. On nights
when it rained, Allison imagined herself on a ship,
the fields around the house turned into a tossing
ocean on which she could travel.
She would take Rita outside on mornings when
the tall grass was damp and the ground soft. Rita
would drop to her knees, examining the limecolored lichen on the base of a tree, or the row of
tiny knots that would become redbud flowers in
the coming weeks. What’s this, she would ask, and
often Allison did not know the answer.
Then, she had imagined children’s voices
echoing across the acres, the house filled with
noise, herself growing wide and soft from childbirth.
When she looked in Rita’s eyes, she felt as if her
daughter knew her entirely.
Until Rita was ten, Allison continued to go
into work a few days a week, driving through the
farmlands into town to sit at her desk and type. She
typed memos for other people, typed the minutes
of meetings, answered phones with a cheery hello.
She wore a white shirt with a collar and a brown
pencil skirt that reached her knees, enjoyed the
authoritative click of her heels on tile. It was
necessary, she thought now, that she had those
hours where she remained unknown, inessential. “IT WILL BE GREAT.” THEY WERE LYING IN BED.
The routine was necessary, the production, the The next day they would go to the hospital and
ritual of the skirt and shoes.
meet June. Michael reached out to Allison and
All that stopped once the calls started.
stroked her hair for the first time in a long while.
He had stopped eating dinner with Allison, leaving
IN EARLY JUNE ALLISON BEGAN PREPARING her alone to argue with Rita over her food, leaving
the house again. Earlier in the year, when they’d her alone to wrestle Rita into the bath, to match
first decided to adopt, she had bought a crib and a volume with Rita as she tried to get her to stop
set of baby bottles, a mobile with colorful fish, and screaming. The first few times Rita had insisted on
staying home from school, Michael had
taken time off work. He had insisted it
was a phase. When I was a child, I refused
to walk for three weeks. After a while, my
mother no longer put up with the nonsense.
Now I’m just fine. In this was an accusation of
Allison’s complicity, spinelessness. Perhaps it was
because he had seen her kneel by Rita’s bed, take
her hand. Now he had foregone optimism when it
came to Rita.
Michael and Allison had met at a fraternity
party, although later they would just say “mutual
friends.” She was at the community college, and
he was in ROTC at the local state university. It
had been romantic, the idea of waiting for him for
years, spending days and nights imagining the feel
of his fingers on her thighs, face. And she did wait.
Once the waiting was over, once he had begun
work for the company and made his money, Allison
had been so happy for a break from imagining,
happy to slide into the boredom of the life she
never had thought accessible to her.
“I can’t wait,” she said into the dark.
AS IT GREW OLDER—THE LITTLE GIRL JUNE,
whose name was now Casey—things became
clearer. The straight nose, the short fingers, the
way she furrowed her brow, her gait. She sat still
when told to, and she ate everything. Periodically,
the birth mother would come by, though Allison
thought it had not been an open adoption. She
imagined the whispered conversations: Michael
insisting it was too risky, Casey’s mother pleading.
They were careful not to touch during these visits.
They sent Rita off when she was sixteen, and for
days Allison could not leave her bed.
Graphics by Emma Hammarlund YH Staff
April 24, 2015 – 7
POETRY
Afterlife
Studio in Day/ Night
In a dust-coated country,
you have saved those corn seeds from your mama’s mama
that we bury underneath a sputtered halogen
and fumble and feed them gray water; then
they die and you plant
your palm in the hollow of my cheek.
Eve Minor paints a sunflower twice as tall as she is.
She sits at the top of a ladder in her studio,
face inches from the sunflower’s, lion-eyed.
The sunflower’s face is big and blank and borrowed, like a clock’s.
Sometimes, when I bring her coffee on hot afternoons,
I find Eve Minor asleep,
still at the top of the ladder, face pressed into her hands.
There is a yellow petal on the floor.
The triangles of sunlight in the studio take up too much space,
pushing aside the furniture, swaying the ladder.
Eve Minor’s breathing is shaky, as if in sleep she has finally become afraid of heights.
I watch the paintbrush in her fingers drip orange, dotting the room with accidental
art.
At 5 p.m. daily, a janitor sweeps up the fallen sunflower petals.
He keeps them in a jar.
The petal Eve Minor painted yesterday is now in the hidden jar of the janitor.
She paints over it in black like a warrior.
In the evening, when Eve Minor is gone,
I climb the ladder. At the top, I hold the paintbrush in my fingers and make huge,
sweeping motions with my arms, like a performer. I do not touch the canvas.
I do not think I am afraid of falling—I am afraid of missing what is not missing.
Up close, the canvas is huge. There are a few blocks of yellow but it is mostly black,
and I feel as if I am looking out into a deep night.
—Malini Ghandi
We try again. We hand-pollinate the silks
in the lulls between thunderstorms.
Many sun-ups, many noons are spent
in the crotch of a vacant overpass.
At night we are visited by red lazers
that photograph our tossing and turning,
making keepsakes for the wind;
we dream they are sprites.
Then we wake up. You kiss
your thumb and smooth it on my temples,
and their ache briefly leaves.
We make tortillas, discs
and sulfuric like the lake;
they fill us, then the laughter
regurgitated to feed each other does.
One year a vast gully of starlings lurches above
in migration.
—A. Grace Steig YH Staff
we are young children
learning how to write
calligraphically
we ink our arms with pen
labeling ourselves adjectives
permanent and grown up
we think too hard about
names for future children
we may not want to have
it is lying in the dark with
little to no depth perception, kissing stars
we flay our words
they sound cherry blossoms
glorified autobiography
we lay so quiet on page
it almost makes us feel
three-dimensional, nearly
human
we are told the lines in our
practice books are for following, not perforation
we only want to be able
to sign our names remembered and pretty
we dip pens into bodies like
bread soaking oil & vinegar
narratives beyond ourselves
—Stefani Kuo
POETRY
Dove
We do not sleep with open doors
or upside down sheets. Beware
of upside down dreams – the dog on the roof
crowing sunset, the sun orbiting the moon and you
crouching on its surface mining gold from crater dust,
gold being flakes of stars beneath your feet,
you stand on skies, suspended.
Beware of eyes peeping through bedroom doors
left cracked as if your eyelids could watch
the hallway, shadows cast by nightlights.
Don’t let them intermingle with your eyelashes,
knot themselves into the braids of your hair –
there is always something in the darkness.
My mother’s words, warning, as she tucked
the bottoms of sheets and blankets beneath
our feet, edges around our bodies, guarding
every inch, the spaces between our toes,
the gangly little girl arms that could not
be wings because we were cocooned.
—Sydney Gabourel
Night in Pieces
You lay out your constellation charts on the balcony,
squat among the stenciled stars with your hands in fists,
because the charts say Cassiopeia should be there,
there between the glass buildings and the jagged moon,
above the children in red coats—
Cassiopeia should be there and it is not.
The Boston streets are full of blurry lights.
Below you, the New Years parade has grown tired: the mermaid on the float is starting to yawn,
the head of the Chinese dragon sat down on the sidewalk to rest and has yet to get up.
Ellen passed you twenty minutes ago playing the tambourine:
she waved but the air was heavy with confetti, the blue and orange squares
floating across her face so all you could see are the edges of her lips.
You once tried to take Ellen to a sandwich shop,
found yourself at a little store that only sold striped clothing.
The store had hundreds of tiny mirrors on the walls, so small you could only see
a fragment of yourself – an ear, an eyebrow, the many tilts of a smile.
You have nineteen maps of the sky and no map of the city.
Late that night, when the parade is finished,
you walk through streets filled with wind until you are lost.
The ice sculptures on the Commons are starting to melt—
you watch the woman with wings as her mouth melts away, then her nose, then her eyes.
—Malini Ghandi
I am looking at a photograph of what is left
of a bird—hollow, bones
branching like streams, replaced
by twigs;
she is wingless, long-beaked, still.
Something in her beak asks
me to recall
high-chinned certainty
that the bird my dad loved
was called morning
dove. Because it sang me awake,
and I hadn’t traced the spiral of its coo.
She is deep into death.
It is difficult to tell her apart
from the rock beneath her. I tell
myself that she was a dove.
Watching morning defrost
on the windshield
in the driveway,
windows lowered an inch, the void
between Dad’s cupped hands launching
fine spirals through window-cracks
into the day.
Soon: claws
of five landed morning doves on the glass, scraping
brief glyphs
into the receding frost,
and then the engine, fracas of wings,
blind flaps toward disappearing.
Even the tree
that she, collapsing, fed
is still,
fallen beside her. Even
when she is alive, a mourning
dove exists also in the past tense.
One afternoon, I notice
yellow in the fingernails
on his still-cupped hands;
something new in the branching
of his veins—streams
threatening flood then drought.
I want to ask
if her song changed to anticipate
the dying? If it did—
did the sound
thin or
cascade in the gathering dusk?
It hardly thinned,
I guess, or she answers, and I am not
caught by surprise by this
whorl of birdsong,
turning faster than what hands can hold
—Caroline Kanner
April 24, 2015 – 9
SCENE
The Philpotts
by Ruthie Prillaman
ACT 2
Scene 1
The sound of wood crackling in a fire. A siren in the distance. The sound
of animated voices. 36 hours after ACT I, the middle of the night. A flashlight beam across the stage reveals that the kitchen is blackened with
ash and the window is boarded up. There has been a small fire that
burned parts of the wall, floor and ceiling. The portrait of GRANDADDY
PHILPOTT is badly blackened, though the eyes are still clearly visible.
The electricity has been turned off to the appliances. ROSABEL tiptoes
into the kitchen with a flashlight. She looks around for a little bit, sighs.
Pokes her head out onto the porch. As she’s looking at the porch, ARTHUR
JUNIOR creeps into the kitchen with a flashlight. ROSABEL turns around
and bumps into him.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Yeah.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Well I didn’t
ROSABEL: What’s there to see?
ROSABEL: I hate it when you do that!
ARTHUR JUNIOR: I dunno. It’s the kitchen. I never really
looked at it much and I figured now’s the only chance. It
always used to smell like butter.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Set stuff on fire?
ROSABEL: Say something and take it back! I can never tell
if when you’re serious and when you’re pulling my leg!
ROSABEL: When Ma was around.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Remember that time we tried to make
fried chicken, you and me?
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Do you really think I would try to burn
down my own house?
ROSABEL: Well, we’re about to move.
ROSABEL: Who’s there? I have a pistol!
ROSABEL: Yeah you hit me right on the cheek with the frying pan. How could I forget.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Calm down, Rosabel, it’s me.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: It was a love tap.
She points the flashlight at his face.
ROSABEL: Uh huh.
ROSABEL: Well technically it’s 1/3 Pa’s house and 2/3 Uncle Harris. And no thirds you.
ROSABEL: Oh. Hi Arthur Junior. You look really creepy with
the flashlight like that.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Well, it’s all too bad.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Well I live in it.
ROSABEL: What?
ROSABEL: And I know I turned off the deep fryer. I know it.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: That it burned down.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: There are lots of other things that could
start a fire.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: It’s still my house and I have to live in it
until we move.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Boo!
ROSABEL: Ahhh!
ROSABEL: Yeah.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Shh! What are you doing down here?
It’s 3 a.m.
ROSABEL: I was going to help myself to midnight piece of
chocolate chess pie but I remembered halfway down the
stairs that the kitchen burned down.
ROSABEL: Like what?
ARTHUR JUNIOR: The one in Bassett is much smaller.
There’s barely even room for a table.
ROSABEL: We’ll sit in another room, then.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Cigarettes.
ROSABEL: Well the only person who smokes cigarettes
is you.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: I guess we’ll have to.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: It didn’t burn down. There was a little
fire in it, that’s all.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: And Pa.
ROSABEL: You get used to things. They seem bad for a
while and then you just get used to it.
ROSABEL: Are you saying Pa started it?
ROSABEL: Do you think the leftover pie’s still good?
ARTHUR JUNIOR: I guess so.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: No. I don’t know. It could’ve been the
wires. Or lightning. Or Pa’s cigarette.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Pa probably cleaned out the fridge when
they turned off the electricity.
ROSABEL: Arthur Junior?
They open the fridge. It’s empty.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Yeah?
ROSABEL: I tried to tell if the fire came from the porch
inside or went from inside to the porch but I couldn’t tell.
ROSABEL: Empty. Dang.
ROSABEL: Did you light the kitchen on fire?
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Let me have a look.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: We could go to Seven Eleven.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Me?
ROSABEL: Are you sure you didn’t start it?
ROSABEL: Maybe in a bit.
ROSABEL: Yeah. I know I didn’t leave the deep fryer on. I
remember turning it off and pouring out the oil.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: I just said I didn’t.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: McDonald’s probably has some kind
of pie.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Well, of course I did.
ROSABEL: I won’t tell Pa or anyone. Especially not
Uncle Harris.
ROSABEL: I don’t really want it that bad.
ROSABEL: You did set the kitchen on fire?
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Well you shouldn’t stay in here breathing
in the fumes. They’ll mess up your lungs.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Makes perfect sense, don’t it?
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Do you really think I would’ve set the
kitchen on fire with a chocolate chess pie in the fridge? I
surely would’ve taken it out first.
ROSABEL: That’s what I thought! I knew it!
ROSABEL: Okay, that makes sense.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: You’re so dumb, Rosabel. I didn’t set the
kitchen on fire.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: We should’ve eaten all of it yesterday.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: I wanted to get a good look.
ROSABEL: At the burned up kitchen?
ROSABEL: But you just said you did!
ROSABEL: What are you doing down here anyhow?
ROSABEL: Well even if you didn’t start it, it didn’t work.
They’re still selling the house.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: How do you know?
ROSABEL: I’m not very sorry actually.
ROSABEL: I heard Uncle Harris talking to Pa on the
porch. The new buyers are gonna knock down the whole
thing anyway.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: It’s fine. I don’t blame you. Are you
at least going to get married first? You know all the
grievous sinning.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Why didn’t you tell me that yesterday?
ROSABEL: Of course. You can come to the wedding.
ROSABEL: Then you wouldn’t have tried to burn it down?
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Where are you going to have it?
ARTHUR JUNIOR: I didn’t do it!
ROSABEL: Well we were going to have it in the barn but
I don’t know if that’ll work with the kitchen all burned to
a crisp.
ROSABEL: I don’t mind them knocking down the house. I
hope they build a shopping mall.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: That was gonna be my next business
proposal. A Bass Pro Shop.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Sorry about the kitchen. I didn’t light it
though. I’m just generally sorry.
ROSABEL: Oh it’s okay. We’ll just have it at city hall.
ROSABEL: Ooh, good idea. We do have such terrible shopping here in Martinsville.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Do we even have a city hall?
ARTHUR JUNIOR: What are they building?
ROSABEL: Yeah it’s in the post office.
ROSABEL: Who knows. Like I said, I hope it’s a shopping mall.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: I had no idea.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: What are they gonna do about the
graveyard?
ROSABEL: Dig up the whole thing and move it to Basset.
ROSABEL: And you and Pa can come and Uncle Harris
and Cousin Nathan can come if they really want to but
they don’t have to.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Well I wouldn’t invite them but it’s not
up to me.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: You can’t do that.
The sound of steps.
ROSABEL: Why not?
ARTHUR JUNIOR: I don’t know. It’s blasphemy.
ROSABEL: We could just take the headstones.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: That’s even worse.
ROSABEL: Why? Nobody would know the difference.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: But we’d be leaving the bodies in the
ground!
ROSABEL: Well they don’t care. They’re already dead.
Only we would know and our children would never have
any idea.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: You’re so naive, Rosabel.
ROSABEL: Well, it’s all up to you anyway. You don’t have
to listen to any of my suggestions if you don’t want to.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: What does that mean?
ROSABEL: I’m moving in with Nathan Junior next month.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Since when?
ROSABEL: Since yesterday.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: I didn’t think you were serious about
that.
ROSABEL: I don’t say things and take them back.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: My baby sister!
ROSABEL: I called him after lunch and we made a plan.
ARTHUR JUNIOR: Well then. You’re leaving me all alone
in Bassett. Thanks.
Graphic by Claire Goldsmith YH Staff
April 24, 2015 – 11
NON-FICTION
Girl World
By Katy Osborn YH Staff
T
his isn’t the prettiest room I’ve ever been in, but it has more
that is pretty in it than any room I’ve ever seen. Between
hardwood floors and wood-beamed ceilings that sit too low,
there is floating organza and tulle, lace and jewels and
horsehair-trimmed ruffles—dresses that are never quite white, but
instead ivory or diamond or pearl or dove grey or blush. The walls,
painted a clean mint and regal with paneled white crown molding,
are adorned with 1870s fashion plates from Peterson’s Magazine.
There are two stone fireplaces, and on their white mantels sit
antique family wedding photographs. The furniture has cabriole
legs. The coasters are covered in pearls. The golden chandelier
light catches Swarovski crystals here and there so your eyes can
never adjust to or forget just how dizzying it is—the prettiness.
It is the type of pretty that makes me pause before I step out
of my car—“something borrowed,” incidentally—each Saturday
morning when I arrive at The White Dress by the Shore to observe a
day of bridal appointments. I sit parked for a moment outside this
cream-colored 1763 Clinton, Connecticut, home—with its wide
white porch and a yard that pales in autumn beneath leaves falling
over it like a patterned blusher veil—and find myself in an almost
bridal state of anxiety.
I have the presence of mind to leave my Herschel backpack
in the car, because it needs to be washed and takes up too much
space in a shop in which I’m already too tall. I take an extended
look in the rearview mirror, which shows me that my curls are drying
in a fit of blonde frizz and my skin looks the way flawed skin looks
when you try to fix it with makeup: still flawed. I am reminded
of the foldout blue-and-pink Fisher-Price Dream Dollhouse I had
when I was small, of my unwillingness to let my older sister’s
outdated dolls and dirtied doll furniture inside its walls. There
then was an early curatorial instinct; a keen awareness of what
was pretty, and what was not; an anxiety that it was all beyond
my control. Years later, there was a second idea: that intelligence
and feminism meant not caring about prettiness—and a second
anxiety: I cared anyway.
I practice a smile and a sentence, run through a mental reminder
to be friendly but not overeager, clever but not intellectual,
confident but not loud or unapproachable. I’m not a bride—and at
21 will not be for many years, if ever. But at The White Dress by
the Shore, I am never exempt from being a girl.
Beth Lindsay Chapman, who turned this old colonial into a
couture bridal boutique ten years ago, does not share my anxieties.
Beth herself—once a stunning bride in white taffeta and capped
sleeves—is Queen Bee incarnate: 37 years old, with shoulderlength blonde hair, the coloring of a Barbie doll, and the tiny, wellsculpted body of a college athlete (she had to quit her college
track team because of a hip injury but still exercises six days a
week). She has undeviatingly straight, pearl-white teeth and is
impeccably dressed—on my first Saturday, she wears a knee-length
black leather A-line dress with a trapezoidal cut-out in the back,
black velvet pointed-toe wedges, and a necklace of three large gold
saucers to match her watch and bracelet. She rivals the room’s
beauty and knows Girl World like the big white diamond on the
fourth finger of her left hand. She calls everyone “my dear,” and
says, “Let’s play” when it’s time to think accessories. The first
announces her monarchic hold on the boutique’s femininity, the
second that she still maintains a democratic belief in bridal
fantasy. Let’s regress to when you were small, the latter tells Beth’s
customers. To when you dreamed yourself up for the very first time.
Beth may not share my unease, but she mirrors my instincts.
“Everything has to be perfect,” she says of her boutique—and of
the shopping experience within it. For the most part, it is. This is
a North Pole of weddings, a world that runs on the girly giddiness
of a never-ending engagement, and down to the details everything
is dear. In the bathroom, I find an antique white toilet plunger,
with a clear plastic stem filled with rice. Atop the end of the
handle are two plastic figurines: bride and groom, quite literally
ready for the plunge.
But perhaps the most perfectly bridal thing about Beth’s
boutique—the most dizzying thing of all—is that there is always
room for improvement. Beth’s picture frames are occasionally
tacky, as are the plastic faux-glass chalices in which she serves
her customers water and too-dear stacks of tiny bridal books in
the bathroom and fireplace. The White Dress by the Shore it is not
quite by the shore, either. Clinton sits along the Long Island Sound,
sure, and if you were to go half a mile straight down Waterside
Lane you could drive right through the little blue front office of
Old Harbor Marina and right into the water, but it’s not as though
you can actually see the shore from The White Dress by the Shore.
It’s by the shore in that real estate prices are higher and the last
names are WASPier and even the grocery stores seem to have
historic value. The whole area is invigorated by the proximity, the
possibility. But it’s still by the shore in the way that a little girl who
lives in Orlando lives by Disney World, or that a suburb is by the
city; that is to say: there are gaps between here and there, and they
are filled with aspiration.
JENNY, WITH PLATINUM BLONDE HAIR CLIPPED MESSILY
atop the crown of her head, a full face of foundation, and a body
that’s slightly too big for The White Dress by the Shore’s size 8
sample dresses, has been shopping online for weeks before coming
into the boutique. She walks through the front door to the sound of
a bell (*ting*) on a Saturday at noon, her mother and grandmother
in tow. “Dream a little dream of me” drifts down from the stereo.
Marie, who is studying to be a kindergarten teacher, marrying her
high school sweetheart, and choosing to have a very simple Catholic
wedding, stands in front of the main shop-floor mirror in a lace
strapless Augusta Jones trumpet dress called Jayma. She’s trying
to decide whether her earrings should be oval or marquise-shaped.
(Beth finally convinces her to go oval—“You get more sparkle”).
Beth brings Marie a Kate Spade heel and has her sit so she can
slip it onto her foot.
“I feel like Cinderella,” Marie says with a tiny bit of discomfort,
to which Beth replies, “You should feel like Cinderella!”
Jenny’s mother is impressed. “Isn’t this such a dollhouse?!” she
exclaims. Jenny’s grandmother’s eyes scan the room for a dress
that’s actually white. But Jenny is here for a specific purpose: today
is the Hayley Paige trunk show—meaning the designer has brought
in dresses that are not normally stocked in-house and all purchases
are discounted 10%—and Jenny loves Hayley Paige.
Ask any attendant at The White Dress and she will tell you this:
there are certain basics to choosing a wedding dress. A general
thought to shape—A-line, empire-waist, drop-waist, ball gown,
NON-FICTION
trumpet, sheath, mermaid—is a good first step. Beth can
tell a bride which dresses she should be trying on from
just an across-the-room glimpse. Petite brides should
avoid ball gowns—or risk getting swallowed. Comfortably
curvy brides might consider a mermaid (tight through
the bodice, with a fairly aggressive flair at the knee) or
a trumpet (which flairs more gradually at the bottom,
like the bell of a trumpet). Tall, lanky brides can pull off
a drop waist (also known as a fit-to-flair), a shapeless
sheath, a ball gown. Mostly anyone can do an A-line.
Then, a few other considerations, as every White Dress
attendant asks every bride: How do you feel about lace?
Beading? Sleeves? A corseted bodice? Structured fabric?
But you can breeze through all of this and the biggest
question of all is still in front of you: What kind of bride
do you want to be?
That’s a question brides have been answering with
their dresses since the first time a prominent bride wore
a white wedding dress: 1840, when Queen Victoria
married Prince Albert. Victoria recognized that the
ostentatious royal wedding dresses in silver and gold
that she’d seen before hers were signs of transactional
weddings, sewing tight political and diplomatic
alliances. But she was already Queen, and she didn’t
want her wedding to Albert to look like all the others. So
she eschewed tradition in favor of something simpler,
more contemporary: a white, silk satin and lace dress
with a low wide neckline and a deep V at the waist. She
chose romance, and—with the well-publicized choice of
Honiton English lace to support the struggling domestic
lace industry—patriotism. It rained on Victoria’s wedding
day, but her white dress had its effect all the same. It
was a dress that brides could aspire to: they, too, could
have their day as royalty.
The interim has seen dresses to match aspirations,
aspirations to match each decade. The 1940s meant
wartime frugality: rayon replaced silk, veils were forgone,
trains shortened—while the 50s gave rise to newly full
skirts, layers of rich fabrics. The 60s brought secondwave feminism, with Mia Farrow married in a pixie
cut and a little white dress suit, Audrey Hepburn in a
mini-dress and headscarf. Flowing sleeves, flower head
wreaths, and bridal blouses emerged with the hippie
brides of the early 70s. In the mid-80s, my mother wore
a dress that looked a bit like Princess Diana’s—but with
more lace and smaller sleeves.
What’s been certain along the way is what Rebecca
Mead called in her 2003 New Yorker article “You’re
Getting Married,” the “democratization of princessdom.”
It’s clearer now more than ever, however, that a princess
has infinite options. At this year’s October Bridal
Market—one of two main annual buying events for dress
retailers in the U.S.—runway collections included crop
tops, cut-outs, studded leather, fur-lined sleeves, tealength gowns (back from the 60s) and even a wedding
dress rendered entirely in knitted wool. According to the
2014 American Wedding Study, 11% of brides are now
opting for non-white dresses, separates, cocktail-length,
or jumpsuits.
If variations on the traditional dress aren’t enough
of an indication, we’re also well secured in the Internet
Age—which means there’s always more to see: 75% of
brides are now using social media to gather wedding day
inspiration; 64% are using Pinterest to pin it all together;
63% are using a social-media app to shop. The White
Dress by the Shore’s own website links to its very active
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram accounts,
as well as its blog. The result is an irresistible nexus of
bridal gems, the next always just a click or a scroll away.
It means that the possibilities are unbounded; so too is
a bride’s imagination.
This imagination has become the heart and soul of
the U.S. wedding industry, estimated by The Wedding
Report to be worth $54.3 billion in 2013 alone. There
are more than two million weddings in the United States
every year, and the average cost of each is upwards of
$25,000. The average cost of a wedding dress: $1,200.
BETH SAYS THAT THE THE WHITE DRESS BY THE
Shore is for “classic-with-a-twist” brides, which among
other things means that they will all spend more than the
national average on their wedding dresses. Hayley Paige,
a budding designer known for fresh, flirty, femininewith-a-slight-edge silhouettes, is for the girliest of these
brides. Hers are the ball gowns that flower girls point to
first. Hers are the tulle skirts and bejeweled bodices that
shyer brides eye with cautious intrigue. I do both.
By the time Jenny, Jenny’s mother, Jenny’s
grandmother, newish bridal attendant Tiffany, and I
make it up the stairs to Versailles (all the dressing rooms,
posh little parlors with curtains for privacy, have names:
Versailles, Paris, Nice, Venice, Capri—“Europe is fun
for girls,” Beth explains), Jenny’s mother is laughing.
The ten or so dresses Jenny has selected from the shop
floor are blinged-out, if you will—though in a way that
is expensive-looking rather than gaudy. “You’ve always
loved the drama!” her mom says.
It takes us another two hours to narrow this lot
down to three, by which time the mother-of-the-bride,
grandmother-of-the-bride, and I are all in cahoots. We
crack up at the shifting and heavy breathing that come
from Jenny and Tiffany behind the curtain, and again
when an unexplained foot pops out from beneath it.
I take our camaraderie as one of few Girl World
successes I’ll have at The White Dress by the Shore; one
of the few stretches of time in which I’m able to shake
my inner disquiet. To some extent I chalk it up to a staple
activity of Girl World: girls suspending self-evaluation by
evaluating other girls. But the rest, I think, is something
else. It’s a regression to when I was small and the world
was big; to a Fisher Price Dream Dollhouse; to an early
curatorial instinct; to a keen awareness of what is pretty
and what is not. But this time there is no anxiety. Jenny
is an imperfect bride, only prettyish. But she wants it
all, and for a few hours I think that for at least that one
day—her wedding day—she can have it.
Each new dress Jenny tries on is our favorite, a fact
we convey to one another silently, with a lot of mouthing
and made-up hand signals, until Grandma bows out of
our whisperfest with a resigned “I just like the white one”
(referring to the stark white one—already eliminated).
Lana, from the Spring 2014 collection, is for the fun
bride. It has a twisted sweetheart neckline and a tiered
ruffled skirt lined with horsehair to provide flounce. It
is ivory cashmere and net, and the fabric is textured by
a square, maze-like geometric pattern throughout. I’ve
never seen anything like it. Mom and I love it.
Conrad, from Spring 2015, is romantic. Underneath
is a sleeveless V-neck mini-dress, and over the top is
an A-line lace and tulle overskirt that falls in line with
a tulle overskirt trend Beth swears she started. The
problem is that the sample mini-dress is too small for
Jenny, and can’t be pulled over her hips. We can all see
right through the dress to Jenny’s turquoise underwear.
Grandma keeps saying, “But this one’s see-through!”
Dani, from Fall 2014, is a slightly pink A-line—a
princess gown, through and through. The skirt is English
net, with a tiny accordion fold if you look very closely,
and the bodice (which also has a sweetheart neckline)
is fully beaded in silver and white. By itself it’s the clear
winner of the three, but I think the coloring is lessthan-excellent on Jenny’s also-slightly-pink skin. It’s her
favorite, though, so Mom and I coo along.
Beth Chapman, prompted by our cooing, is in
the room in under a minute. “I love this. Do you love
this?” she says to Jenny, grabbing a veil and a Mari
Elena headband (“Fun fact: this is the headband Kelly
Clarkson had custom-made for her wedding,” she says)
and switching out Jenny’s hairclip. The dress will need
some alternations—all White Dress by the Shore brides
have three standard fittings before the big day, and Beth
has suggested that the cups on this dress may need to
be let out for extra coverage with a custom alteration (all
wedding dresses are made for B-cups). Still, it looks like
The One.
There are now five of us spread around the room’s
periphery facing Jenny, and then six—Paige, a taller
Beth Chapman prototype who is probably my age, is now
in the doorway. She also loves Hayley Paige.
The room falls silent: we stare at Jenny, we stare
at the mirror, we stare at Jenny staring at Jenny in the
mirror and at Jenny in the mirror staring back at Jenny
staring into the mirror. “You’re ready to go, sister,” says
Beth. Mom starts to cry. Grandma starts to cry. Tiffany
starts to cry (“I love weddings,” she says). Jenny says,
“This is beautiful”—I think she means it—and then
asks if she can try on an Ivy Nestor (for a slightly more
bohemian bride). She’s getting married in Bali.
Beth once told me a story about a bride whose
deodorant or cherry body wash (the mystery lives on)
dyed the armpits of her dress “Barney purple” in her
final fitting (“I had to remain totally calm, but inside
I was like, ‘Oh my god, your pits are purple!’”) She’s
told me of brides who “flip a lid” making sure that dye
lots match during early fittings, and says she can’t tell
me how many brides come to their appointments not
wearing any underwear at all. She has a pile in her office
of the appointment records for “problem brides,” so that
she remembers to brace herself each time they return for
more shopping or a fitting. Sometimes “princessdom” is
laced with lunacy.
By the time brides get to their later fittings, a new sort
of princess often takes over. She wears Spanx and the
right bra from the lingerie shop that Beth recommends,
Beneath the Gown. Penny, Beth’s seamstress, has
sculpted her wedding dress to fit this new royal body just
so. This princess looks in the mirror and is certain, in her
newly tailored gown, about what she sees. As one bride,
Jaclyn, once told me in a fitting: “I always see Oprah on
TV and wonder how she looks so good—because she’s
heavy, too. But now I get it!”
I see Jenny in the Ivy Nestor and I know that she
is neither of these brides, not yet at least. She simply
hasn’t found her dress—or if she’s found it, doesn’t
quite know how to go from aspiration to something more
definite. On her wedding day, a bride is supposed to look
the most beautiful and most feminine she ever has, after
all. Jenny isn’t just choosing a dress. She’s choosing a
limit. The most beautiful she can be.
That’s the thing about aspiration: to arrive at anything
certain or tangible, it must be capped.
BETH CHAPMAN’S SPENDING CAP FOR THIS SEASON
is somewhere around $60,000. She chooses her dresses
on an October Thursday, in a petite office at the back of
the house she calls “antique.”
“Her, I want HER,” she says, nodding her head at an
image of a willowy brunette on a runway on the screen
of her 27-inch iMac (turned ninety degrees on her desk
so that Beth’s assistant, Shana, and I can see). She’s
referring to the dress, not the model; strapless, with a
French lace corseted bodice that comes to a slight, wide
V in the back. She is made of white stripes and her skirt
is A-line, folding in on itself in gentle but heavy waves
of organza.
Deauville is her name, like the equestrian, seaside
town in Normandy. In the 1870s, Monet painted Parisian
aristocrats there on the beach in white striped day
dresses and floral bonnets. The details aren’t so relevant,
April 24, 2015 – 13
NON-FICTION
though—what’s important about the name Deauville is
that it’s French, just like every name in the Anne Barge
Fall 2015 Collection shown at Bridal Market just two
weekends ago. Avallon, Castellane, Giverny, Lyon, and
Vendôme—it’s all the same language as couture.
“She’s amaaaazeballs,” says Shana, still in the office
admiring Deauville. She sits opposite Beth at her desk,
and I sit wedged between the end of the desk and the wall
(I really do mean it when I say that the office is petite). I
add amaaaaaazeballs to a mental list of Shana’s effusive
responses to sartorial majesty—notably, “I have a crush
on this!” and, several times an hour, “Dreamboat!”—
while Beth adds Deauville to an Excel spreadsheet of
dresses soon to hang in her boutique.
The job of the spreadsheet is manifold: it helps
Beth to ensure that her order is well-balanced in terms
of size, color, and style; adds up her total expenditure;
and multiplies expenditure on each dress by anywhere
between 2 (“keystone” markup) and 2.5 (with cheaper
dresses marked up slightly more) to determine its By the
Shore price. At this point, Beth’s order total for October
Bridal Market has just ripped through the $50,000
seam, and she continues to remember designers (she
stocks 11 in total) with whom she hasn’t yet placed an
order. (“It can be hard to break up with designers,” she
explains to me. “Some of them I’ve known for years, and
women get emotional.”) The good news, for Beth, is that
with the exception of a few unstructured Theia and Jenny
Yoo gowns (which sell for around $1500), her dresses
sell for between $2800 and $7000. Deauville, in her
quiet glamour, will be priced accordingly at $3950.
Beth has been in the fashion industry for more than
20 years at this point, but it hasn’t always been this
glamorous. Her career began with a summer internship
in the cosmetics division of Liz Claiborne’s corporate
office in Manhattan, as the administrative assistant for
a woman who couldn’t keep an administrative assistant,
due in large part to a “screaming and drinking problem.”
“I basically lived The Devil Wears Prada.,” she tells me.
A large part of her job, Beth recalls, was to cover up her
boss’s perpetual lateness. “Sometimes she wouldn’t roll
in until eleven o’clock in the morning,” Beth tells me,
laughing. “I’d have to keep replacing her coffee so it was
constantly steaming and it would look like she was just
in a meeting.”
After graduating from the University of Connecticut,
Beth was offered a job at Ann Taylor. It wasn’t the
merchandising job that she wanted, though. Beth was
an allocator for shirts and blouses, which meant that
she was responsible—based on analyses of Ann Taylor
sales by store and region—for deciding how and in
what quantities to allocate styles and sizes to stores
across the country. What this taught Beth was a skill
she has carried with her to this day. Beth knew that
Store 286 South Coast Plaza in California sold 2s,
4s, and 6s better than most stores, and that it didn’t
sell any 14s. She knew the reverse to be true in the
Midwest, and that in the South, sleeveless variations
were sometimes necessary. In short, Beth knew to
know your girl.
Allocation was short-lived, and to Beth’s delight, she
was offered a job as an assistant of merchandising a year
to the day after she first arrived at Ann Taylor. She spent
the next ten years working her way up the corporate ladder
to become the VP of Merchandising for Dresses, Suits,
Career Separates and the Special Occasion Division.
By 2004, she found herself in charge of 40% of Ann
Taylor’s volume, “making a lot of money,” and living in
Greenwich—finally, a career with a bit of sparkle. It was
only then, in the midst of her pregnancy with her second
child, that Beth began to realize that the pivotal moment
of her career had come years before. Smitten by the likes
of a man named Mark Chapman, she’d added a new title
to her life résumé. She’d been a bride.
Beth’s mother had been living in Madison at the time,
but Beth couldn’t find a boutique near the Connecticut
shoreline to match her high-fashion sensibilities.
Manhattan gown shopping, meanwhile, had been an
utter disaster. The gowns were filthy. The associates were
rude. Nothing was customizable. Where was the bride
in bridal? Beth eventually sought out a designer named
Carmela Sutera, who worked one-on-one with her to
design the dress of her dreams. In 1997, Beth married
in a white dress by the shore. That should have been
that—but the bridal fever wouldn’t subside.
And so, back to 2004—Beth Chapman decided to
open a shop: The White Dress by the Shore.
And so, back to 2014, to Beth’s office on a Thursday
in October. As the afternoon wears on and the order total
rises by the thousands, Shana and Beth are slipping into a
state of silly delirium that I understand as stereotypically
characteristic of Girl World. Beth, emailing bridal shop
owners in Nashville and Salt Lake City and Charleston to
get their thoughts on various collections, is signing all
her emails “XO” and “Mwah.” Inconsequential banter
flows. Beth is confused by the woman from Kleinfeld’s,
who apparently was less-than-friendly at Bridal Market—
“She used to be so nice to me! Do you think it’s because
she knows who I am now?” Hayley Paige is getting
married soon—“What do you think she’ll wear?” Then
there’s that couple who owns a bridal shop in Utah.
They don’t have children, just cats, as Beth explains.
“It would be nice to sell to a polygamist family—I sold
to two lesbians once, but that’s the best I’ve done,” says
Shana, who then describes another boutique owner,
that woman, as “LITERALLY on crack,” to which Beth
responds, “If I were on crack I wouldn’t have to be doing
this right now,” to which Shana responds, “I think if you
were on crack you would be pretty different.”
From where I sit (still wedged between Beth’s desk
and the wall), the anxieties I tried to leave in the car
are beginning to seep back, like a sheen of grease from
deep in my pores, or like Barney purple pit dye. I shift
in my chair, crossing and uncrossing my legs, my arms,
my ankles. Sit up straight. Slouch back down. Wiggle to
adjust my skirt, wonder if my outfit works. I watch Beth
and Shana and their easy, careless banter, and I want
none of it and all of it.
Just above Shana’s head hangs another of Beth’s
tacky printed canvases. On this one is a Coco Chanel
quote, written in cursive: “Look for the woman in the
dress. If there is no woman, there is no dress,” it reads.
I think about asking Beth what it means.
Instead, I watch as she pulls up another Anne Barge
dress on the screen and pauses. “What’s this one?” she
asks. She didn’t see it at Bridal Market. I gasp, because
it’s beautiful. A deep V neckline with scalloped lace, a
banded waist, and a full, tulle ball gown skirt.
Beth turns to me and says, “I think you’d look so
pretty in this,” And I think that she really must be an
expert, because for the first time since I stepped foot
in The White Dress by the Shore, I picture myself as a
maybe-one-day bride.
And suddenly it occurs to me that I’ve decided what
it means, at least to me.
I’ve decided there is always a woman in the dress,
that I am always seeing a woman in the dress. She
is someone else—a Dani or a Lana or a Conrad or a
Deauville—or sometimes she is a version of me.
But she is never quite me—not exactly. And so she’s
always in my way.
POETRY
Whalefall
Did you know that
after a whale dies
she becomes a planet
for as long as she lived?
Generations of white worms
saga out her putrid
stomach,
it is a meat/sea opera,
a religion of hagfish,
tin can teeth eating
guppy eating see-through
shrimp the size of a thumb.
Fish don’t stand
but I imagine there is a certain
patriotism to
holding ground
on the belly of a dead
whale,
which looks more and more like
the surface of
an undiscovered moon.
the belly of a dear
whale,
now an atmosphere, now a lover.
I imagine it is a beautiful and
horrifying fullness to
look most like a mother
in death.
—Sophie Dillon
Going Through Withdrawal on a Park Bench
The sky is a leaking violet like water that needs to be changed.
I’m on a park bench wondering if I have cataracts
because everything is somehow milky, my stomach feels like
I just ate a doorknob, got something rotten opening up
inside me. I do not know where I close from.
The couple behind me is sharing a drink from a paper bag.
The man sticks his hand between the woman’s legs
when I look away. I feel like I am spoiling something
but mostly I hate them, God, I hate her denim miniskirt
and how she is too old, I hate the rude flesh of his arms
I hate that it is afternoon, I hate that they are enjoying this,
I hate my folded legs and there is nothing better to do
I hate so many things and have no more room left.
I hate so many people without trying.
It is
easy to hate people when they take you back.
My body smells like a dirty penny, like I don’t know where it’s
been.
I take myself back over and over again.
—Sophie Dillon
Now your clean dark hands
all over. all under. I want
you to scoop me out
like a bone sucked of its marrow.
Make me. Then unmake me. Then
do it all over so I forget how
I started.
Make me remember
that candles are a source of light.
Make me remember I am fallen
like a fruit too ripe for its tree.
There are ways in which I understand
violence. This is one of them.
I have bitten off my own tongue
seven times. Every sever left me
more of a scream and still the
days go one at a time.
Make a mourner out of me.
I wish to be an impeccable fossil.
Your stomach swells up and down
like a whole horizon. Every breath
is a sunrise. Good morning.
—Sophie Dillon
April 24, 2015 – 15
FEATURE
Seeing them Again
by Oliver Preston
All they could offer me at Hertz was a Toyota
ragtop convertible. That didn’t seem right. My guy
Dylan looked young and maybe new to the job, so
I asked him again if they had anything else in the
lot. We could go bigger, he said, but there’s a fee.
He clicked around on his computer. His lips moved
silently as he read something to himself. I leaned on
the desk and tried to play sort of chummy with him,
see if we could go bigger and forget about paying
extra, but he didn’t take. I don’t think he actually
understood what I was trying to do. Dylan should’ve
stayed in school, that’s the sense I got.
Convertibles are nice, he said when I finally gave
in to the ragtop. I’d want a convertible. He grabbed
a clipboard and came out from behind the desk.
Now he was leading me to the door and talking
to the empty space in front of him. Driving down the
highway with the top down? I mean, that’s it, right
there. That’s the life.
Well Dylan! I wanted to say as I followed him.
You got me there! Can’t argue with that, Dylan! Really seals the deal, Dylan! But these days I’m trying
not to be too sarcastic with people as a general rule.
Dylan seemed like basically a good guy. I figured
he was at that age when you can say that’s the life
and walk away unembarrassed because you’re just
starting out and you think the things you say are
things to forget. Dylan didn’t see anything he did as
permanent. I could tell by the way he sort of stared
into space as he held the door for me.
We stepped into the lot. I tugged my Red Sox
cap tight over my head. He brought his shoulders
to his ears and squinted in the rain and ducked beneath his clipboard.
It’s supposed to clear up, he said.
You don’t have a jacket? I asked.
The convertible sat alone in the middle of the
lot. It was bright red, with smooth, smooth lines.
Now that it was in front of me I got sort of excited.
As a kid I’d wanted a red Corvette, but only in the
way all teenage guys want a red Corvette—abstractly, I mean. There was probably a girl I liked, or I
just figured it’d be cool if people thought I was rich.
Fantasy stuff. I never tried to save up, and didn’t
expect to lay my hands on anything but my mom’s
Ford Falcon. But now that Dylan had me sitting in
the driver’s seat of the 2013 Toyota Camry Solara,
now that I was learning about all the gadgets—the
GPS, the stereo, the seat warmers, the button you
press to retract the roof—I was suddenly a 16-yearold. I couldn’t wait to open it up on the highway, see
what it could do, maybe get the top down if the rain
let up. The family wouldn’t hold the rental situation
against me if I just explained it to them. They might
even get a kick out of it. Pulling up to the church in
a bright red sports car seemed a fitting homage to
Uncle Nat’s memory. Cousin Dicko always told that
story about running into Nat at the Waltz Family
Pharmacy—not too far, actually, from where the service would be held. Dicko was about 15 at the time.
He and his friends were just horsing around, buying
sodas or something, when all of a sudden a tall guy
with stark white hair, red Bermuda shorts, a Hawaiian shirt and a zebra-print bow tie strolled through
the front door. Who the fuck is that, said one of
Dicko’s friends. Dicko looked where the friend was
pointing and found himself staring down his own
grinning father. He denied Nat to his friends like
Peter denied Jesus. (Dicko always ended with that
line—a great line.) Cousin Dicko. It’d be good to see
him again. Dougie and David, too.
Where you coming from? Dylan asked through
the window as I fired up the engine.
Portland, Oregon, I said. But I was born here
in Maine.
Huh. Welcome back, then. Portland to Portland. Funny.
It’s raining over there, too, I said. And then I
pulled out.
THE DRIVE UP TO DAMARISCOTTA TOOK ABOUT
an hour. The car didn’t blow me away. I pushed 90
for a few minutes and left it at that. I found a radio station playing nothing but Steely Dan hits and
cranked it until everything outside the car was dancing to “Peg.” The birches sagged under the weight
of the water and the pines were sopping and dark.
Now and then the trees broke and I found myself
coasting through salt marsh. The mounds of sedge
and scrub brush were already changing color. This
was Maine the way I liked it. The season was turning, the lobsters were settling into their new shells,
the summer folks were taking their boats out of the
water and clearing the fuck out. It was the time of
year when locals sort of look up at each other and
go: Well, then. Here we are.
I tried to hold Nat in my mind. It was something
I’d been doing a lot since I heard the news. On
Facebook, people in the family wrote long posts that
made it seem like Nat had become a coin they’d always carry in their pocket. I hit like on a few, to participate, but they all made me sort of itch. I spent a
lot of time after that trying to figure out when I last
spoke to Nat. I decided it must have been Christmas—about nine months before he died. Towards
the end, Dicko politely indicated in his newsletters
that Nat was losing his marbles (the word confusion showed up a lot), but I guess all that started
some time in the spring. When I spoke to Nat on
the phone he still sounded pretty sharp. Well hello
CHIP! he said in his famous lawyerly voice, when
I told him who it was. He always uttered my name
with great relish. He liked his words. He’d fallen
and cracked a couple vertebrae the month before,
and was spending Christmas day in a wheelchair at
Dicko’s house. Doug and David were there, too.
They had to get me up the front steps, see,
Nat said. I’m in a wheelchair. Everyone came onto
the stoop to watch the boys convey me into living
room! Dick and Doug and David hoisted me up,
and from my privileged vantage I could see down to
the hedgerow and beyond. It was quiet. The whole
yard has been covered in ice. There’s been a great
storm, you know. Ice everywhere. Power lines coming down. Trees bent clear to the ground. But I’ll
tell you, it was a royal procession! And now I have
before me my Christmas victuals, and I regard my
surroundings and see my family by my side, and I
am happy.
This is what I pictured as the pines whipped past
and Donald Fagen crooned at me through the stereo: the family gathering in a circle around Nat’s
chair, bending, lifting, each doing his share until
together they had brought Nat up higher than even
their heads, ferrying him endlessly up the icy steps
into the warm, dark house.
Well CHIP-O! Nat had said when I guess he
wanted to sort of nudge me off the line so he could
get back to his meal. My thanks for a most stimulating conversation! Sui generis, I might say!
It was dark when I pulled up to the inn. After
checking in I figured I’d get something to eat. When
I went out into the lot and saw the Solara’s headlights and grill looking at me like a big dumb face,
I decided to walk into town. Main St. was wet and
mostly empty of people. A woman stood backlit by
the door of an ice cream parlor. Some guy loped
by with his dog. The neon in the window of Waltz
Family Pharmacy cast a red glow over the street.
Nat would have called me a flâneur, seeing me walk
down the street of my old hometown like that. I had
my heart set on this one restaurant Dicko had taken
me to last time where’d accidentally gotten drunk—
Paco’s Tacos—but I couldn’t find it. I went to the
pub instead. I had a light meal, and entertained
myself by trying to flirt with the waitress a little bit.
She didn’t get it, or was used to that kind of thing
from older guys. My table was by the window. At
one point I thought I saw Dicko’s wife walk past on
the sidewalk, but I wasn’t going to tap on the glass
or anything.
Despite the time difference I was feeling pretty
tired, so I got to bed early. I wanted to be in good
shape for the service the next day.
der. I took that as my cue to go inside. I asked
one of the kids for a program.
You’re Isaac, right? I said as he handed it to me.
Nope, Abe, he said. I’m one of David’s. Good
guess, though. It’s nice to meet you.
DYLAN WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE WEATHER. IT
was bright and clear when I woke up—a real autumn morning. I showered and shaved and took
my flannel blazer from my suitcase, brushed it
off. I had nicer stuff back home in Portland, but
none of it was dark enough. The blazer had gotten a few creases during the trip. I stood in front
of the mirror for a good 10 minutes trying to pat
them out. The room didn’t have an iron. In the
end I managed to make myself presentable. I figured no one would be looking closely anyway.
I hadn’t been to this church since I was about
10—none of us in the family were ever that religious. It was a ways east of Damariscotta, close
to the shore and sort of off by itself. I must have
underestimated how long it would take me to get
there, because by the time I pulled up to the
church the parking lot was full. But I didn’t know
that at first: I turned into the small lot to find
that all the spots had been taken up. I had to
pull an expert maneuver to get out. Here comes
Chip, I said to myself. Chip the Drip in his Toyota
Solara! I could sort of laugh about it. There were
people lined up on the stairs to the church, but
most of them were too old to notice the ridiculous
thing happening right in front of them. I parked
on the other side of the street and walked over.
I didn’t know anyone in front of me in line, so I
just sort of stood there smiling. It was slow going.
All the old folks around me were craning their necks,
trying to figure out the hold up. I could hear bleats
of organ music coming out from the nave. I brought
up the recap of the Sox game on my phone. I hadn’t
watched the night before.
When I got inside, everyone was there—Dicko,
Doug and David, their wives and children. The kids
were handing out programs, and the three guys were
hugging people, shaking hands. Dicko had a bunch
of Nat’s old bowties slung over one arm, and he was
handing them out to anybody who wanted one.
Hey, Dicko! I practically shouted when I got within
a few feet of him.
Whoa, Chip! he said. He actually looked
scared, almost.
His wife brought her hand to his back. We had
no idea you were coming! she said.
Well here I am, I said. Could I get one of those ties?
I made a weird gesture around my neck, I don’t
know. Dicko shook my hand instead.
You came all the way from Portland? he asked.
Yeah, I said. Flew in yesterday.
Give him a tie, his wife said, and Dicko handed me
a tie. I draped it around my shoulders—I wasn’t going
to try to figure out a bow tie.
By now Doug and David had come over. They took
turns shaking my hand, patting me on the shoulder.
I think you win the award for distance travelled, said
Dicko’s wife.
I told them it was no problem. That’s what
you do, I said. You drop what you’re doing, you
pay your respects. I mean, look around you! The
whole team came out!
Dicko was nodding and looking over my shoul-
THE SERVICE WENT WELL, I THOUGHT. THE PAStor kept mentioning that he wished he’d known Nat
better, but all things considered he did a good job.
The kids mumbled through some of Nat’s favorite
poems—that one by Bob Frost about the boy who
climbs birch trees, a few by either Yeats or Keats.
People really lost it at that. I could see Dicko’s wife
shaking in the front pew all the way from my seat in
the back. That kind of hit me—you’d think that a
father-in-law could only mean so much. Then there
was a sort of open mic for people who wanted to
share memories of Nat. Doug said something about
his dad’s generosity as a lawyer, how he was good to
the poor and did a lot of pro bono work. David spoke
to Nat’s love of the outdoors, and said he now realized that, whenever Nat had taken him out camping in the White Mountains or the Sierra Nevada,
he’d been showing David the face of God. Dicko told
the story about the maid’s husband getting buried
in Nat’s brand new suit, and also the one about the
best burgundy in the bouillabaisse. I’d heard them
thousands of times, but they were really the best
stories about Nat.
I almost got up and said something about the
time when my mom was going through one of her
bad phases and I was staying at Nat’s house for little
bit. Dicko and I played a lot of checkers in those
days. Dicko always won. During a particularly bad
game I got really riled up and ended up flipping the
board in Dicko’s face. I couldn’t stop crying—I was
just a kid. Dicko’s mom didn’t know what to do with
me, so she pawned me off on Nat. Nat took me out
fishing for mackerel in his tiny Boston Whaler to cool
me down. We didn’t catch anything and it was windy
and he ended up losing his hat in a gust. Gone to
Davy Jones’ locker! I thought I remember him saying. I couldn’t get the details of the story straight in
my head. I decided against telling it.
After the service there was a reception in the
church basement—one of those linoleum-floor, Styrofoam-ceiling type deals. There was a buffet with
cookies and little lobster salad sandwiches. I’d gotten pretty hungry so I loaded up on food and went
over to the corner, where there was a rack of alcohol awareness pamphlets and a computer playing a
slideshow of pictures from Nat’s life. There he was
as an officer in the army, a teenager playing basketball, there he was splayed out in the snow on
the peak of the Matterhorn. I really wanted to know
who put it together; I looked around the room for
Dicko but didn’t see him anywhere. Abe or maybe
Isaac came up beside me and stared blankly at the
screen. Who’s that? he asked probably rhetorically,
pointing to Iva Bones Stone, his great-great grandmother. I told him, and all of a sudden I was narrating the entire slide show. I’m pretty good with faces,
and I get a kick out of genealogy. It’s like a puzzle
to me. I know science says otherwise, but when I
think of the human race I picture this huge tree that
starts with one guy and then explodes infinitely outward. Sure, some of the branches are dead ends,
but mostly they keep splitting and splitting until nobody knows who anybody is anymore.
A picture came up of Nat as a kid with his arm
slung around my dad’s shoulder. And that’s Nat with
his younger brother Charles, I heard myself say. The
image zoomed until it was basically just a mess of
pixels. I told the kid I needed some coffee, which I
did, and I walked off to the other end of the room.
After a half hour or so I slipped out. Dicko and
Doug and David seemed like they had their hands
tied catching up with everyone, consoling a few people who were still crying. I’d send the guys an email
or something later. When I was coming down the
stairs I ran into Dicko’s wife coming up the stairs.
What are you doing out here? I asked.
You’re leaving? she asked.
I told her yeah.
She nodded and thanked me. How are things in
Portland? she asked. Are you still with what’s-hername? Kids on the way? She smiled goofily.
I just laughed. She seemed liked she knew what
the answer would be from the start. She was just
pushing my buttons.
As I crossed the street she turned back and
yelled, IS THAT YOU CAR? and I just waved.
I DROVE BACK TO THE AIRPORT THE NEXT DAY. I
put the top down, just for the heck of it. On the highway the wind threw my hair around and I couldn’t
hear myself think. I said FUCKER for fun. The word
died in the air. With the road rushing to meet the
Solara, I couldn’t stop replaying the one slide in my
head: Dad’s face coming closer and closer, growing
and blurring until his skin had turned to white noise
and asphalt.
When my mom had started going, I finally really
asked her about my dad. It was the kind of thing
where I knew she would quickly forget I had ever
asked anything. She told me that, when my dad was
alive, Nat never really knew what to do with him.
People didn’t understand mental illness in those
days. She told me Nat must have been relieved
when my dad died, that everyone in that family was
relieved. Visibly relieved, she said. Then asked me
to get her the pan she liked to spit into. Not long
after she died I got the job offer out on the West
Coast, and I took it.
I pulled into the Hertz, feeling like I never left. Lo
and behold, my guy Dylan was loitering outside. He
was smoking a cigarette. As I parked the car, I tried
to cook up something funny I could say to him that
would also encourage him to quit smoking. I put up
the ragtop and stepped out of the car.
No, Dylan said as I came toward him. No, sorry.
I’m on break.
Graphics by Claire Goldsmith YH Staff
April 24, 2015 – 17
FICTION
By the Creek
by Irene Connelly
THE SUMMER I WAS THIRTEEN, AMY’S PARENTS HAD TO
go to Japan for work, and she came to stay with us. I came in
that morning sweaty from a bike ride to find Aunt Anne and
Amy and Amy’s suitcases scattered around the front hall. When
I think about it now, I realize what a scene it must have been to
everyone except me. Aunt Anne would have been brokenhearted
at parting with Amy and anxious about handing her over to her
sister-in-law, my mother, with whom she never got along, all to
follow to another continent a marriage that would disintegrate
altogether in two years. She and Amy had argued about which
sneakers she had to bring, and Amy was still angry, even at the
last moment. At the time, though, all I noticed was that my
aunt stood up very straight near the door and gave directions
in a clipped voice—what Amy should eat, rules about bedtime,
the question of footwear—while my cousin held her hand dispassionately and looked as if they were talking about another
child. The night before, my mother, who loathed Aunt Anne in
kind but felt other people’s problems keenly, had out of nowhere
squeezed my shoulders and said, “I don’t know what I’d do if I
had to leave you here and go to Japan.” By morning, I’d forgotten
about that; I thought Aunt Anne was pretty awful, and nothing
she was saying mattered to me. I wanted them all to go away so
Amy and I could be by ourselves.
We were born in the same year, twin cousins. There were pictures of our mothers reluctantly standing back-to-back with their
burgeoning stomachs pointed out, wearing t-shirts that looked
like nightgowns. But no stranger would guess we were even related at all. Amy was compact, with glossy brown hair; I had a
thick blonde braid my father called a horsetail, and I was growing so fast it gave me leg aches. They called me a chatterbox in
my report card and Amy was reserved, but privately she could
impersonate our mothers with provoking accuracy. Amy had recently kissed her first boy next to the rumbling furnace in her
basement; I had done no such thing. She was three months older
than I was, but it might as well have been three years, and we
both acted like it.
We made all kinds of preparations for Amy’s arrival. My mother scrubbed out the refrigerator, as if Amy would care, and asked
me many times to clean my room, and bought another chair so
we could both sit at my desk. Daddy made celebration steak the
night she came, and salad with halved grapes, and cleared off
the picnic table so we could eat outside, all niceties he usually
reserved for birthdays or if he needed to make up to Mom. He
gave me the salad to dress and after I brought it out and Amy followed with the bread and butter, we sat down in the auspicious
evening air and Daddy nodded at me to say grace.
“God is great,” I said, “God is good, let us thank Him for our
food. By His grace we all are fed; give us now our daily bread.
Amen.” Amy’s eyelashes rested shut against her face.
Daddy clasped his hands over the table, inclined his head,
and thanked God additionally for having brought Amy to stay
with us and prevailed upon Him to give safe travel to Aunt Anne
and Uncle Richard and a safe summer for us at home. He looked
over at Mom, as he always did, to see if the prayer was satisfactory, and she gave an “Amen.” When she nodded it felt as though
Jesus had looked right down to bless our steak and rice, and
dinner could properly begin.
I had made my preparations down at the creek, and as soon
as dinner was over I took Amy there on our scooters. Riding with
her was slow-going, but the sun was still hovering splendidly over
the edge of the neighborhood, and the street smelled of grass
and mosquito spray and other people’s barbeques. My neighborhood was the kind in which all the houses are made from the
same mold, vaguely distinguished by placement of windows and
garages, and we rattled by door after matching front door. In two
years I would be disgusted by how tacky and unimaginative it
all was, but that evening I was happy to glide past houses that
were each a reflection of my own, down to the built-in kitchen
spice cabinets housing identical jars of unused basil. It was my
domain, and enjoying it I got ahead of Amy. “Joy Christina,” she
called after me. “Wait up!” So I did.
At the end of Birch Street, where we stopped and left the
scooters, was the forest. It wasn’t actually a forest; it was a buffer strip of un-cleared land between the neighborhood and the
highway, thin enough that you could see the light-up sign at the
Mitsubishi dealership through the trees and hear frustrated cars
in a traffic jam. In a few years I would realize this, too, how small
and not like a forest it was, but then it might as well have been
the Amazon. There was a dirt path down to the creek covered
by wood planks in the really muddy stretches, and I had taken
it upon myself to fix up the bad parts before Amy arrived, holding nails in my mouth like they did in the movies. I walked first
over my handiwork, and I saw as I never had before the slippery
leaves, the trees twined with furry vines, and the cloudy curtain
of the sky covering it and us. The air was thicker and damper
here than in the neighborhood proper, and when I breathed it I
felt taller and quieter. I had been worried that Amy wouldn’t get
it, but when I turned to look I saw that she did.
“Don’t hold onto that, it’s poison ivy,” I said, no longer selfconscious. When she was down the bank I scrambled after her.
We stood by the creek, which, though the forest might have been
a flimsy sliver, was full and vital, polishing its stones and bearing
along the occasional fish with briskly running water.
“This is perfect,” she said, her sandals softly crunching the
silt by the water’s edge. “It’s like—it’s like a house, outside.”
“Yeah,” I said. To me it was a hunting ground for bugs and
good trash and a laboratory for slingshots, but it could be a
house if she wanted.
Amy bent and rested her hand on the largest rock. “This
will be our table,” she said with decision. “We can have
picnics here.”
I sat on the newly-minted table and searched the ground for
a nice stone, something good to throw. After a while I found it, a
little purple disk, and I wiped the clay off and flicked it into the
creek. Three skips. When you’re thirteen and your body is renovating itself and betraying you at every second, so much goes
wrong between intent and result. But if you’re a good thrower,
which I was, the stone goes where you tell it, and its clean sweep
through the dusk felt every time like the best thing in the world.
“Can you teach me how to do that?” asked Amy.
“Sure, tomorrow.” She sat beside me so our shirtsleeves
touched. The Mitsubishi sign glinted through the trees like a
moon and stars and we stayed there for a while, until it got too
dark to see the water bugs skimming over the creek and we got
on our scooters and went home.
MY PARENTS TOOK THE EIGHT O’CLOCK COMMUTER RAIL
into the city, which left us with half an hour before camp. Amy
got up first and nudged me out of bed after she’d already dressed,
as seeing each other naked, no matter how close we were, was completely outside the realm of possibility. My mother would come in and
kiss us goodbye, smelling of work perfume, as we brushed our teeth,
and then we made our own breakfast. It was cereal mostly, which we
ate standing at the kitchen counter in our garish gym shorts. The windows were open to air out the house and the sunlight came in quiet
and gentle. At eight, Matthew’s mother pulled up in her too-clean
minivan, and we would troop out and lock the door as instructed and
be on our way.
Matthew, by virtue of living only three houses away and liking all
the same things as me, was my summer friend. From the day school
let out we spent our afternoons by the creek, dangling in the water
fishing rods baited with slices of hot dog, trying to set fires, picking
fights. Then in September I would remember how awful boys were
and he would realize how embarrassing it was to have been running
around with a girl all summer, and we would avoid each other assiduously for the school year. It was an arrangement that seemed perfectly
logical until recently, when it had started to weigh on me that while
I occasionally broke the rules and smiled at him in the hall, he never
seemed to care one way or the other. He had a habit of telling me
when I did something praiseworthy, “You’re just like a boy,” which
lately seemed less complimentary than it used to. Once after he said
that I looked in the mirror and realized I might as well be a boy with
my hair pulled back so tight. I undid the horsetail and pulled it over
my shoulders and raised my eyebrows into the mirror; but it looked so
wild, so obviously not how hair was supposed to look, that I did the
braid right back up again.
Then Amy arrived and ferreted me out instantly. “It’s called, you
have a crush on him,” she said, the way my math teacher said, “You
have to carry the tens when you add” to the worst kids in the class.
But unlike those kids who never learned to carry the tens it came
rushing over me that she was right, that I did have a crush on him,
and that it all had the makings of a catastrophe. She was sitting on
our bed very calmly but she was talking about things I didn’t even like
to think about and I was somehow sure Matthew and everyone else in
the world could hear her persistent little voice.
I flushed. “I do not,” I said. “I don’t like anyone. He’s just good
to hang out with.”
“Yes you do, yes you do!” Amy bounced on the bed. “Does he like
you? Has he said anything?”
“He doesn’t even say hi at school,” I said, grabbing my braid.
I suddenly felt like crying, but Amy sat back down. She touched
my shoulder.
“No,” she grinned. “I know you’re not very good at this, but I have
a plan. We just have to fix your hair.”
Amy’s plan was mostly to say things to us like, “Let’s go eat lunch
over here in the shade,” and then run away to the bathroom for an
unbelievably long time. Later she would quiz me. “What did you talk
about? Did he say anything about your hair?” She’d convinced me to
braid it in an entirely new way. Actually, Matthew said nothing about
my hair and we spent a lot of time dismantling anthills, but this
didn’t bother Amy, who said she needed something to think about.
My parents sent us to the catch-all summer camp run by the township
that promised to entertain kids for cheap and consisted of long mornings of flag football and relay races, exactly the kind of thing I loved
and Amy despised. She was terrible at sports, tired out from running
after thirty seconds. She never seemed to have enough water and she
said she couldn’t breathe from the heat. Every day she convinced a
counselor that she was about to faint and needed to go inside and
sit down. During that reprieve she would adjust her gym shorts and
judiciously apply grape Chapstick in the bathroom mirror and then
rest her forehead on the cool tiled wall until someone told her she
had to come on out. When she emerged she looked so bedraggled and
resigned at the thought of having to put on a baseball glove that even
the big boys who were really committed to winning would pick her
for their team and send her to the outfield, where she would limply
raise her hand in what she thought was a catching position every
time I pitched.
When we were at last liberated, again by Matthew’s mother, we’d
put on our bathing suits and go down to the creek, where Matthew
and I would do as we always did and Amy would float on her back
in the water. The day after she came we moved some rocks as stools
around the bigger one she’d named the table, and we had afternoon
meals of crackers and pre-sliced cheese. One day I was sitting with
Matthew, untangling fishing line, and while he wound up the thread
he mumbled to me, “Your legs are nice.” I looked at him and then
we both looked at my legs, outstretched in the sand, which suddenly
did seem nice.
“Thanks,” I said, and we fixed our eyes anywhere else as we finished the line.
After Matthew went home Amy and I sat at the rock table and I
told her what he’d said. Amy whooped as if she’d made a goal. “Yes!”
she said. “I told you, about your hair.” She paced the creek, imagining out loud conversations we would have, thinking of good things
for me to say—mostly lines from her favorite movies—and Matthew’s
most likely responses. I worshipped her for the effort. It was really as
good as anything he could say or do, to have her grinning and coaching me for all possibilities across the table. I was very glad she’d
come for the summer.
AMY TRIED TO SKIP A STONE BUT IT SANK RIGHT DOWN TO THE
bottom, so she lay back in the creek until the water closed over her
pale stomach. “I don’t think you’re ever going to be good at that,”
I said.
“Well, who cares? It’s just rocks.” Above us a flock of crows startled and scattered screeching; we watched them as they settled into
different trees. Something bit my stomach and I slapped it away.
The day was too hot; the fields at the camp shimmered. Someone
had pegged Amy with a football and she was still sulking about it.
At lunch she’d told me loudly that my face was red, and Matthew
and the other boys laughed. I prodded her arm with my toes and she
pinched my foot. I splashed her. She shrieked.
“Why don’t you try wrestling? I bet you suck at it.” I slid in to sit
in the shallow part of the water. Amy said no, long and round and
lazy, but I pushed forward until she edged back into the deeper part
of the stream and started splashing me back. Stirred up, the water
was dusky with sediment; the dirt hit me in the eyes, and while I
rubbed at them Amy gained on me, making waves of water with her
outstretched hands. “Hey, I’m not so bad at this,” she said, smiling
her glittering smile. A small rock hit me in the shoulder and my eyes
stung and I dove under and groped at her ankle enough to pull her
down. This was what Matthew’s older brother had done to us until
we learned to jump out of the way and grab him from behind before
he caught us. But Amy had never learned this and she tumbled right
under; I caught her around the waist and she writhed like the first
fish I ever caught, when I held it flapping out of the water to examine
it. Amy came back up, spitting. “Joy Christina, I hate you—“ It was
funny, how her hair was plastered all around her face and her fingers
furiously rubbing dirt out of her eyes. She was wrong, she was terrible
at wrestling, but this was how you learned. “Watch your eyes,” I said,
and ducked her back under. I had her by the neck and back and rally
she just had to turn enough to get me by the legs, but she was too
dumb to realize it, and I could keep her under the water as easily as
she could paint perfect swathes of makeup across her eyelids. Thinking this strange thought I held her almost absentmindedly, although
I’d meant to let her up. But at last she rallied on her own: she didn’t
get my legs, but she drove a fist into my stomach, and I let go of
her, surprised.
She sputtered to the surface looking worse than ridiculous, terrible.
She was covered in silt and her hands trying to rearrange her hair were
shaking, and when I went to give her a hand—she kept slipping like
someone drunk on TV—she stumbled away from me. Leaning over, she
spat up water—way too much water. I saw that I should not have held
her under so long.
When she was done spitting she stood up and looked at me with
blue lips. “Were you trying to kill me?” she asked in a rasping voice I
did not like to hear.
I cleared my throat. “I was just trying to teach you how to wrestle,”
I said, although we both knew this was not what I had done.
“I thought I was going to die.” She was crying. “I thought you were
going to kill me.”
April 24, 2015 – 19
FICTION
“What? Of course I wasn’t—what’re you—I didn’t
mean it like that!”
“No,” said Amy, struggling out of the water on her
coltish legs. “You did. Anyway, I don’t care.”
I got out too, more easily. I wanted to hug her—
I had never done anything that couldn’t be fixed by
a handshake or a slap on the back—but I knew Amy
wouldn’t let me. She picked up her flip-flops from the
table where she’d left them neatly. They were pink, and
they matched her toenails perfectly.
“I’m going home,” she said finally. “Don’t come
with me.”
I knew I could not, so I sat on the bank for a good
while looking at my own stomach and the dirt smeared
there. I was tired and suddenly, although everything
had seemed so clear and obvious when I was wrestling Amy, my head felt as heavy and sluggish as my
legs after softball practice. How many times had I been
shoved under the water? But none of these times had
been so terribly wrong until today. Around me everything settled, down to the silt at the bottom of the
creek and the water bugs bustling across it. Not a horn
sounded from the road or a light blinked from the car
dealership. For the first time, the quiet was uncomfortable. So I gathered my own shoes and took a long,
damp walk before I went home.
I THOUGHT I WOULD WALK IN THE DOOR TO A
scolding and a time-out and no dessert, but my mother, just home from work, said that Amy felt sick and
was reading in bed, and I shouldn’t make too much
noise. Quietly, I peeked in our room and found she
actually was.
“Amy, I’m really sorry.”
She looked up blandly. She’d cleaned herself up,
and her hair was in a slick braid. “Look, it’s fine,” she
said in a perfunctory way that meant it was really not
fine. “I just want to be by myself for the afternoon.”
“Okay,” I said, and like a roly-poly bug prodded by
a kid and then abandoned, she curled back around the
book and I went out into the hallway. But I couldn’t
find any way to fill the time before dinner. I sat on the
couch and got up, I wandered through the living room
and looked through my mother’s makeup drawer and
got a glass of lemonade and opened the window and
closed it again. I could not remember ever having felt
so guilty.
Daddy said grace over the chicken and Mom nodded approval, but it didn’t feel so satisfying as it always had. I felt as though I had left the world in which
Jesus presided over family dinners. Afterwards, Amy
said she would go for a walk and gave me such an
empty look that I didn’t try to follow.
“Joy Christina, is everything alright?” my mother
asked, face drawn in.
I thought about telling her so I could be chastised
and absolved but instead I said we were fine and went
to bed.
THE NEXT MORNING WAS SATURDAY, SO I SLEPT
until the sun woke me up and I saw a note in Amy’s
precise writing on her pillow. Meet me by the creek
at 10. Don’t worry about yesterday. It was 9:15, so I
brushed my teeth and braided my hair and had a bowl
of cereal, and then I made two ham sandwiches and
put them in my lunchbox with a bottle of lemonade. I
would bring her a picnic lunch. She’d like that.
I walked lightly over the planks to the creek, recognizing every warp and dip of the path. The forest
was starting to resume its old, calming aspect and I
cheered up somewhat. I’d done something stupid, but
Amy couldn’t be mad at me forever. The day before
yesterday she’d said I was the best friend she ever had.
While I waited for her to come I skipped rocks
one after another into the creek. Three skips. Four. A
bad throw sank to the bottom. When my watch read
10:11 I heard Amy coming down the path. Following
her was Matthew.
“Hi,” I said. “I made a picnic.”
“Okay,” said Amy, smiling. “But first Matthew has
something to say.”
My chest thickened the way it always did when it seemed
like Matthew might say something important. “What?”
Matthew looked at Amy, who nodded. “Amy says
you attacked her yesterday.”
“What? That was a mistake—I said sorry—Amy,
you didn’t—“
“She said you did it because you like me and you’re
jealous that I like Amy and not you.” Matthew’s cheeks
got red like a doll’s when he was nervous or hardpressed, and they colored now with the admission. He
was embarrassed, maybe, that it had come to this and
he had to speak of these things to me, with whom he
had spent so many afternoons talking about baseball
and birdcalls and never who liked whom. But once the
thing was said, he braced himself. There was no taking
it back now, and he tilted his chin up as if to say how
utterly certain and contemptuous he was.
It had never occurred to me that Matthew might like
Amy and not me. She was my crusader, she had thrown
herself into obtaining him for me. But Amy was good
at making you see what she wanted. I looked at her hip
cocked calmly in her gym shorts and thought that he
must worship her. She was magnificent. I needed to
make some vehement denial, to say very loudly that
he was gross, but I knew if I tried to speak I would
probably cry.
“But you can’t—“ he stopped, and started again.
“You can’t make me not like Amy. She’s prettier than
you and I never want to talk to you again since you
hurt her.”
He looked at Amy and she nodded again, in confirmation, and if I weren’t so blind to subtleties I
would’ve realized how rehearsed his speech was. Instead, I thought it was the most perfect and heartfelt
declaration of love and hate I’d ever seen, and I think
I did cry.
Amy told me later that when she’d gone on her walk
after dinner she marched over to Matthew’s, and said
she wanted to talk to him. Under the pink evening sky
outside his house she confessed she knew he liked her,
informing him of this so firmly he realized at once that
he did, and after that she spooled out the story of how
I’d pounced in jealousy. She told him she’d kiss him if
he said what she needed him to say. They did kiss, she
admitted, after I’d stormed off, sitting on the stones
we’d dragged around the table. It’s long after the fact
now, but I still feel sorry for myself when I think of
how I looked at them with my picnic lunch in hand;
when I think of Amy looking after me as I fled, and
then leaning in so the love of my thirteenth year could
kiss her on her small mouth. But then, thinking of my
sunburned arms as I pushed her under the water, not
so much.
I SWORE ETERNAL ENMITY IN MY ROOM ALL AFternoon and only stopped crying for dinner when I had
to face my parents and Amy, who looked less victorious than she should’ve. But by the next morning I
wasn’t furious, only limply sad, and lonely at having
run out of friends, and mad at myself, because notwithstanding everything, I just wanted to go play at the
creek with Amy. Instead, I sat there all day by myself
while she pretended to be sick again and ate toast and
jelly in bed. I had no plans of revenge; I couldn’t have
thought of anything to compare to the day before even
if I wanted to.
But as it turned out, a lot can be accomplished
through sulking. The routine of plain days, we both
realized, was more satisfying than the most decisive of victories, and there could be no routine—no
setting the table together, no giggling lunches at
camp—while I was hiding on the other side of the
bed or the far corners of the backyard. Lots of things
changed over the years, but I always had my routines
with Amy, who was my closest friend for a long time
after that summer. Between us there were no frosty
dinners, as with our mothers, and when I finally had
real boyfriends I found myself introducing her without
compunction, only a faint ruefulness. As strange as
it seems, I think we loved each other more after we
learned how to inflict harm.
Some days after that Saturday, when my mother
was starting to ask what was wrong, and did I think
Amy was homesick, I was fixing my hair before dinner when Amy’s small face appeared behind me in the
mirror. She put my arms down by my sides and undid
everything, so that blonde strands ballooned into her
face, and I felt as loose and unfettered as in that moment when I took off my training bra and let my hair
free before bed. We stood there for a moment, and
then she gathered it all up and patiently wove it into
the most beautiful braid I’d ever seen.
REVIEWS
Graphic by Jake Stein YH Staff
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Chill cover. Nice title. We judge books by their covers. But also Haruki Murakami is a contemporary best
seller. His work is known for being surreal and for capturing existential themes of human existence and all
that lonely sort of stuff. Although he is Japanese, his fiction seems definitively American in style. He may
well be the voice of advice for our generation, and this is one of his better-known books. It is worth a read.
The Goldfinch by
Donna Tartt
We don’t know what all the hype is about, but
it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, so that’s
something. We plan to read it this summer. You
should too.
The novels of Tolstoy
and Dostoevsky
We are reading all the novels on the syllabus for
LITR 245 this summer, because we were supposed to read them this spring…
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who know the jest, and those who don’t. We
don’t know yet. We want to know. We suspect it may have to do with the book’s wacky parabolic
structure, or its endnotes, or its references to film etc. But we don’t know yet, and we are going
to know, after we read it for four months this summer. It’s 1079 pages.
Sakuteiki thought to be
written by
Tachibana Toshitsuna
The Sakuteiki is “most likely the oldest garden planning text in the world.” –Wikipedia. It was written in
the 11th century, and to be quite honest, it’s super
confusing. We know about rock n’ roll, but in this book
rocks pretty much talk. According to this manual, placing stones is the most important part of gardening. Get
your stones in order this summer.
This is How You Lose
Her by Junot Diaz
This book is about a compulsive cheater trying
to find love. It’s supposedly better than The
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (which we
have read). In any case, Junot Diaz is an important contemporary author. His writing is also super fun to read, which is perfect for the summer.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to
the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
This guide is ALMOST as important as the Sakuteiki, because we will have to evacuate Earth pretty soon, leaving our rock gardens behind. The Hitchhiker’s Guide is a
science fiction comedy, and it is pretty accurate in terms
of its portrayal of the space-time continuum and general
relativity, etc. All cool things.
April 24, 2015 – 21
Lara.sokoloff@yale.edu
yale institute of sacred music presents
Yale Schola Cantorum
Juilliard415
david hill, conductor
Thursday, April 30 · 7:30 pm
Woolsey Hall · 500 College St., New Haven
Music of Beethoven, Haydn, Kellogg,
and Williams
Free; no tickets required. Presented in collaboration with The Juilliard School. ism.yale.edu
YALE INSTITUTE OF SACRED MUSIC PRESENTS
Beethoven’s Sacred Music in Context
Keynote Speaker
Speakers
DANIEL K.L. CHUA
De-secularizing Beethoven
NICHOLAS CHONG
JAMES HEPOKOSKI
EFTYCHIA PAPANIKOLAOU
FRANZ SZABO
Friday, May 1
1:00 – 6:00 PM
Sterling Memorial Library Auditorium
128 Wall Street
Free; no registration required · ism.yale.edu
BULLBLOG BLACKLIST
I want that
C more than I’d
normally want an A
make-up class in the
prof’s house
oh no this
tank is ugly
and shows my
nips
haha
yeah your
daughter’s so
cute when she
shoves spaghetti in her
face with her
hands
doing too
well in a Cr/D
class
drunk ordering a
Spring Fling tank
who needs this
garbage network??
“yale wireless”
blue cheese
it’s actually moldy
which is why
it tastes like
my grundle
when you fall
asleep in class and
have to ask your prefrosh for notes
tongue
hairs
did
you
know you
have hairs
on your
tongue
that shit is
so gross
and that’s why I
chose Yale!
when
people do their
nails in the
library
cute
color but
I’m really trying
to focus on schoolwork rn
April 24, 2015 – 23

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Transcription

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