When I was eleven years old, I survived the Apocalypse.
As a Methodist in Mississippi, I went to church more often than the preacher. I was in the midst of reading the Left Behind series of novels, which the adults at church carried around as if they were sequels to the Bible. The story hinges on the Rapture, in which true believers are swept out of the clothes they’re wearing and into the eternal bliss of heaven. Those who don’t believe—or, at least, not as hard as they should—are stuck on earth for seven years of horrors before God performs another culling. I’d stay up late reading, then fall asleep listening for the horn that would signal the Second Coming. Sometimes I’d jolt awake after dreaming that I was one of the unlucky souls who couldn’t hear it.
One Saturday morning I stumbled out of bed to a conspicuously quiet house. I had two younger sisters, and our home usually sounded like a zoo during lunch hour. I walked into my parents’ room and found their clothes perfectly laid out on the bed: my dad’s gym shorts and orange T-shirt on his side; my mom’s pajamas on hers. Panicked, I went into my sisters’ room and found the same scene: empty puppy-dog and Barbie pajamas, as if the girls had vanished into the ether.
I ran into the street. There wasn’t a soul around. I couldn’t even hear a car driving in the distance.
Back inside I picked up the phone. My aunt Libby and aunt Debbie never left their house except to get food or play the penny slots. Surely they would answer if they were still among the living. When my call went to voicemail, I began to cry. My nightmares had become reality. I’d been left behind. I wouldn’t even get to see an R-rated movie.
Preparing to go it alone, I flung supplies into a backpack: granola bars, a Sports Illustrated magazine (not the swimsuit issue; God was watching), and some clothes that would hopefully one day fall to the ground without me in them.
The phone rang, and I snatched the receiver. It was Aunt Libby, and I could hear Aunt Debbie behind her. As I explained my morning to them, they alternated between sympathy and fits of laughter.
“Your parents are at a soccer game with your sisters,” Aunt Libby told me. “I’m sure your mama left you a note. The clothes were probably laid out because she was going to do laundry.”
I hung up and went back to my room. There was a note in Mom’s handwriting hanging from the basketball hoop above my door, telling me where they’d gone and when they’d come back.
Relieved, I found my bike lying in the front yard and shot out of the driveway, eager to see what possibilities another day on earth had to offer.
Cory Gunkel
Silver Spring, Maryland
My grandfather and I have always struggled to communicate. He cannot speak English, and my Mandarin is limited, but our misunderstandings seem to go deeper than language. When, as a child, I asked for an “American breakfast,” he would replace the usual congee and pickled cucumbers with pancakes topped with maple syrup—and cucumber. When I moved from California to the East Coast, he told me I would return. (I have yet to.) When I chose a career in rural medicine because I wanted to connect with people, he told me he was glad I’d make good money.
Whenever my grandpa and I call each other, instead of talking, we sing the Mandarin song he used to sing to me as a child. He’s forgotten some of the lyrics, and I’ve never memorized them all, but we stumble our way through. He chides me for forgetting the words; I resent him for sometimes skipping a verse that I do know. Yet amidst all our conflicts is a fundamental sense of love and caring that pushes us to keep trying, again and again.
Kelly Dunn
New Haven, Connecticut
Gregory was my boyfriend of three years. While I was on vacation with him and his parents, we decided to have high tea at a fancy hotel. There was a wait for a table, so Gregory and I wandered into a nearby jewelry store. Though we had only briefly discussed marriage, and never seriously, we began to look at engagement rings. Our mood was playful. Mostly we made fun of the ones we thought were too large and showy. I did see one style that I liked, however, and asked to try it on. The two women assisting us smiled. As Gregory and I continued to browse, the store clerks looked like they were trying not to laugh. Gregory became defensive, muttering that the women were making assumptions about him because of the casual way we were dressed. “I could buy that ring if I wanted to,” he said. “I could buy two!”
Deciding we’d had enough, we walked out of the store and immediately ran into Gregory’s parents. My boyfriend angrily began to describe how the women had laughed at us because they’d thought we couldn’t afford such nice jewelry.
“They weren’t laughing at you,” his mother said. “They were laughing because I was outside the window jumping up and down!”
Andrea Gordon
Melrose, Massachusetts
At the age of eight I didn’t know what repossessed meant. I just knew our family was having a grand adventure, camping on the living-room floor after our furniture was taken away. Though we sometimes “borrowed” coal from the bin next door and vegetables from the garden down the road, I never thought of us as poor.
Then a nosy neighbor—seeing that my siblings and I were skinny, needed baths, and had no heavy coats in the winter—decided to inform public officials. Afraid their children might be taken away, my mother and father piled us into the car and left for another city. That neighbor didn’t understand the determination of two kind but uneducated parents with five mouths to feed. Nor did they realize we had an abundance of the thing that mattered most: love.
By the time my siblings and I graduated high school, we had heat, running water, and warm clothing, with a little help from local charities and more-understanding neighbors.
Lorelei Joseph
Woodland Hills, California
I was Black Girl Number Four in the freshman dorm of a Southern women’s college. It was the 1970s, and girls of color were welcomed with “come to dinner but don’t date my brother” hospitality.
When Danielle, a white girl, invited the four of us to a party down the hall, we all said we had other engagements. Later I was reading in my room when I heard the music and felt the beat of Creedence Clearwater Revival. I went to Danielle’s and spent the night dancing and waving my arms, a beer in my fist.
After the party, whenever Creedence’s “Down on the Corner” came on the radio, my Afro swayed, and my slide sandals bopped.
Black Girl Number 1 chided me for listening to John Fogerty sing about “nigga’s happy beat.”
“I think they’re saying, ‘Nickels at your feet,’ ” I replied. “Censors wouldn’t allow words like that on the radio.”
“Why not? You’ve heard ‘Brown Sugar,’ haven’t you? White people treat us any damn way.”
I never again attended one of Danielle’s parties, but I still listened to Creedence in secret, alone in the car, where no one would ask why that hypocritical sista was grooving to white-boy music. I loved “Fortunate Son” and “Bad Moon Rising.” The bluesy tones and sassy lyrics somehow transcended racial barriers.
Recently, out of curiosity, I looked up the words to “Down on the Corner.” The line is “Bring a nickel, tap your feet.”
Darn that John Fogerty. If only he had enunciated more clearly, I might have had more friends.
Eleanor Jones
Annapolis, Maryland
Growing up, I idolized my brother, who had long hair, wore torn jeans, and smoked pot. I wanted to be antiestablishment like him. So I wore what he wore and refused to get my hair cut.
Around then I also started noticing I was attracted to boys, though I didn’t admit it, even to myself. I knew what the word gay meant, and I had heard it used only as an insult. What I didn’t know was that straight could mean the opposite of gay. To me straight meant straitlaced, part of the mainstream culture I saw myself rebelling against.
When I was fourteen, I was waiting for my sister in the mall and got into a conversation with a man sitting next to me on a bench. At one point he asked me, “Are you straight?”
I was wearing my T-shirt and ripped jeans, my hair as long as a girl’s.
“No,” I said defiantly. “Can’t you tell?”
I had inadvertently come out to him, and with such confidence. It would take me years to feel that confident again when coming out to someone.
Nathan Alling Long
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
One Sunday morning after Mass, Father Bob approached me and suggested we schedule a time to talk. He said he didn’t want me to go home feeling upset because I disagreed with his homily. I had no idea what he was talking about. I’d thought the homily was fascinating, and I told him so.
“But you were scowling through the whole thing!” he said, laughing. “I was sure you hated it.”
It wasn’t the first time someone had misread my expression. I frown when I’m concentrating. For a long time I didn’t realize this, and by the time I knew, the habit was too ingrained for me to quit. My ex-husband called it my “critical bitch” face. In course evaluations my students would often write, She seems really mean, but she’s not.
I tried flower-essence therapy to smooth out my aura. Three times a day I shook the small blue bottle to activate its energy, placed five drops beneath my tongue, and chanted my mantra. Nothing changed. So I scheduled a series of Botox injections. They relaxed my forehead, making me look young and placid. I couldn’t frown even when I wanted to. But I also couldn’t focus my thoughts. It was as if my furrowed brow was so connected to my brain that suppressing one disabled the other.
Still, people reacted more positively to me after the Botox. Class discussions got easier as students started talking more. At the end of the semester my course evaluations were the best I’d ever had.
Kathleen Pfeiffer
Rochester Hills, Michigan
Five years after the end of my first marriage I went on a date with a man named Moe. Warm and easygoing, he seemed to have a solid career, a good group of friends, and healthy relationships with his family. Plus he was tall and Jewish. I was pinching myself.
Toward the end of the evening he told me he was leaving the next day for Brazil on business; maybe we’d see each other when he got back in a few weeks, he said. I took this to mean that he wasn’t interested. When he didn’t text after the date, I assumed I had been right.
Late the following evening I got a call from an unfamiliar number. I let it go to voicemail, thinking it was a telemarketer. About ten days later I clicked on that voicemail, and my heart leapt. It was Moe calling shortly after he’d arrived in Brazil to let me know how much he’d enjoyed our date. By now he was surely thinking I wasn’t interested.
I called him immediately and apologized, explaining that I hadn’t expected to hear from him while he was in Brazil. He laughed and said he’d had a hunch I would call eventually.
We met for dinner soon after he returned. Taking my hands in his, this man—who’s now my husband—told me with a grin that if he wanted to talk to me, he’d call, not text. “You just have to pick up,” he said.
For more than a decade I’ve done my best to keep an open channel of communication. Whenever I find myself making assumptions about what he means or overanalyzing a problem between us, I remind myself to “pick up the phone.”
Miriam Storch
Chacala, Nayarit
Mexico
I knew next to nothing about boys or sex in the summer before seventh grade. A devout Catholic, I had dreams of becoming a nun, preferably the flying sort, like Sally Field on TV.
When I started junior high that September, I found myself in awe of the godlike eighth- and ninth-graders. I also started to notice that boys weren’t always the irritating idiots I’d previously thought them to be. Sometimes they could actually be nice.
One ninth-grade boy stood out from the rest. He was a head taller than everyone, with a wide smile and a booming laugh. I would watch from afar as he joked and tussled with his friends. His last name was Bates, and in my mind he was king of the school.
One day I heard some boys in the cafeteria referring to him as “Master.” I thought the nickname quite appropriate for the lord of junior high. Why wasn’t anyone using it to his face? I decided I would be the first. He was certainly worthy of it.
A few days later I saw him coming toward me and figured this was my chance to bestow upon him his well-deserved title. I stepped in front of him and proclaimed proudly, “I have a nickname that I think we should all be calling you: Master Bates!”
Before I knew what was happening, he picked me up, tossed me into a garbage can, and kept walking. I heard a few kids laughing as I climbed out and went to class.
Why had he been so angry? For the life of me I couldn’t figure it out.
It wasn’t until I was in college that I learned the second meaning of what I had said.
E.T.
Port Townsend, Washington
When my fiancé and I were looking for a place to rent in California, friends of ours told us about a vacancy in the mobile home park where they lived, and we arranged to meet the husband-and-wife landlords. The man took one look at my brown skin, announced there was no vacancy, and walked off. The woman followed him and returned a short time later, saying there had been a “misunderstanding.” She began to describe a different property where we’d be “more comfortable.” My fiancé explained that we were interested in this location because it was close to our friends and to the military base where we were both stationed. Perhaps realizing the trouble she would invite if she refused us, the landlady agreed to show us the place, and we moved in soon after.
Having been born and raised in a rural Texas community where Hispanics were the majority, I was naive to this sort of racial profiling. I wouldn’t remain that way.
Our rental was across the street from the park’s pool. One day a Black friend of mine and her fiancé were visiting, and we decided to sit by the water. My friends’ arrival did not go unnoticed by the resident “surveillance system,” and it wasn’t long before several old-timers showed up with rifles and ordered us to leave. We weren’t about to protest, especially after a sheriff’s car arrived as reinforcement.
When our lease was up, the landlady came to inspect the trailer. As she wrote us a check for our full security deposit, she said, “I’m surprised how clean the place is.”
The incidents at the mobile home park were just the first of many that I experienced, both in California and in my travels around the country: vacancy signs magically disappeared, there were no tables available at mostly empty restaurants, and business owners decided that I needed to be closely watched. Eventually I found a place where I was warmly received and formed friendships that last to this day.
Estela Bernal
Portland, Oregon
In college I wrote a poem about my grandmother’s house, describing the orange shag carpet, the burgundy leather throne chairs, the striped curtains covering the front windows, and the tiny glasses used only for orange juice. I emailed the poem to my mother, and she printed it out and gave it to Gram.
A couple of days before Christmas several cousins and I gathered in Gram’s kitchen to bake desserts. When I opened a cabinet to get a glass, Gram said, “Make sure you don’t grab an orange-juice-only one.” And she went back to stirring.
During spring break I was sitting on Gram’s living-room floor, scratching her dog’s belly, when she said, “Hope my orange carpet isn’t too itchy.”
While I was home for the summer, Gram and I lay on her couch watching golf and Oprah. When the sun from the window struck the TV, I reached to pull the striped curtains closed. “Hope they aren’t too heavy,” Gram sniffed.
I gave up and asked why she kept making references to my poem. She just said she was surprised I wanted to hang out at her dingy house with its ugly carpeting.
“Did Mom tell you what my assignment was?” I asked.
“Write about an old house with judgment?” she replied.
“Write about a place that makes you happy.”
“Well,” Gram said, “that would have been nice to know.” And we went back to watching Oprah.
Kelli Wescott
Rockland, Maine
My wife, Jo, and I were moving from Palo Alto, California, to the small town of Galena, Illinois. She stayed behind at first to manage the logistics at our old home, while I rented us a house on a farm and started my new job at a publishing company. After a week or so in Galena, I got a call from someone in town with the same name as me, Nick Murray. We marveled over the coincidence, and he told me the reason for his call: some letters from Jo had been mistakenly delivered to his house. “You wouldn’t believe the trouble I’ve been in with my wife,” he said with a laugh. “She’s wondering who this woman is in California.”
Years later I arrived at work late one morning, and everyone looked at me in shock. It turned out the local news had reported that Nick Murray had died when his car was hit at a train crossing. My coworkers had been mourning me for a couple of hours.
I wish I’d looked Nick up. It would have been easy in that small town.
Nicholas Murray
Sandy, Oregon
When I pick up my seven-year-old daughter from day camp, she prances to the car in the fairy costume she picked out this morning. Each day the kids dress up to match a theme chosen by their teenage counselors. One day it’s animals; another it’s pajamas. On our way home she tells me the theme for tomorrow: “It’s sexy day, Mommy!”
Surely I’ve heard wrong. I ask her to say the theme again, and she repeats that it’s “sexy day.” When I ask what her counselors told her to wear, she can’t remember but thinks they said to tie a string around her hips.
At home I make a call to the camp. It goes to voicemail. I begin to fume as visions of Toddlers & Tiaras invade my head. The last time I went shopping for my daughter, all the little girls’ clothes were styled for women: short shorts, cropped tank tops, off-the-shoulder shirts. I start mentally composing angry letters to the camp’s directors. I picture myself storming into the office the next day and delivering an impassioned speech about children being coerced into early adulthood.
When my daughter and I arrive at camp the next morning, I look around for kids in inappropriate outfits, but most are in their regular playclothes. I see a couple wearing bell-bottoms.
My daughter’s counselor greets us dressed in a peasant skirt and a brown suede vest, with flowers in her hair.
“What’s the theme today?” I ask.
“It’s sixties day!”
Ali Zidel
Santa Cruz, California
I met Alex after college. His mother was European; his father, Arab. Alex had mostly grown up in his father’s country, but his English was flawless, and his cultural attitudes were Western. Despite our different upbringings I thought of him as a like-minded peer. Alex soon charmed me into becoming his girlfriend.
Early in the relationship he asked if I’d ever had a boyfriend, and I said no, thinking that I had gone on dates and fooled around with a few people, but I’d never been in a real relationship.
A few weeks later I was telling Alex about a funny bad date, and I mentioned kissing the guy. Alex started crying and told me I had ruined everything. It turned out that, to him, my saying I’d never had a boyfriend meant no kissing, no cuddling, not even spin the bottle as a teen. He made it sound as if he’d bet his romantic future on me and lost.
By my own moral compass I had done nothing wrong, but I loved Alex and figured I could prove my loyalty to him by remaining faithful. Somehow that was not enough. Alex kept making me bend over backward to prove my love. He interrogated me and threw tantrums.
At a friend’s wedding someone made a comment to me about the cute guys we’d once met on a ski trip, and Alex acted as if we’d gone to an all-night orgy. Another time a male college friend who was in town called me late at night, and Alex got so upset I almost took him to the ER. Once, when we were walking down Fifth Avenue in New York City, I turned to look in a store window, and Alex said, “I saw you checking that guy out!” The more I protested, the more he insisted I was unfaithful in my heart. I grew so exhausted by Alex’s meltdowns that I did whatever I could to prevent them: I looked straight ahead when walking in public. I threw out my photo albums and cut off contact with old friends.
In the end Alex cheated on me, then broke off our relationship. I didn’t realize how emotionally abused I’d been until I experienced the freedom of his absence. I got myself back. But I may never get back the friendships that I sidelined for his sake.
J.E.
Laguna Beach, California
In 2011 I was caught driving through South Dakota with fifty-two pounds of marijuana. During my subsequent time in prison I ended up in a facility that had a dome-shaped structure at the back of the yard. I learned this was a sweat lodge, and one day I was invited by some of the Lakota men to join them in a Sunday sweat. They warned me beforehand not to ask for a break: “If it gets too hot, pray harder. That’s how your prayers reach heaven.”
The sacred ritual served as a rebirth for me. The lodge was the only place in prison these men could demonstrate vulnerability. Each round of water poured on the hot stones was followed by a round of prayer in which people spoke their truths. The heat and drumbeats rose until our sweat was indiscernible from our tears. Leaving the lodge, we stood in the snow in our underwear and shook hands, steam curling off our bodies.
At lunch the next day I ended up seated next to one of the elders from the sweat, a big Lakota guy with leathery skin and long white hair. He had encouraged us to pray for the guards who harassed us every day, saying they were serving time in prison too. I told him now that I appreciated what he’d said about the guards. He didn’t acknowledge me, just stared ahead as he chewed. I went back to pushing food around my tray.
Finally he growled, “Well, I used to be a real asshole.”
I was pretty sure I shouldn’t agree with him, but I also didn’t want to provoke his smoldering anger, so I nodded slowly.
Without warning he stood up from the table and slammed his hand down on its surface, making the trays jump.
Once I stopped flinching and opened my eyes, I saw on the table in front of me a styrofoam cup of rainbow sherbet, the little wooden spoon resting neatly on top.
Christopher Wang
Santa Cruz, California
On the day my father would end his life in 1961, I was playing Monopoly with my best friend in my family’s summer cottage. I was about to take my turn when the telephone rang, and I answered it. It was my father. He asked me to tell my mother he was tied up at the office, and if he wasn’t home on time, she should start their dinner party without him. I said I’d give Mom the message and ended the call with a breezy “Bye, Daddy,” to which he answered, “Bye, sweetheart.”
That evening he drove his car into the garage of our house near Boston and left the motor running. His body was discovered hours later, after the police had been called to search for him.
At ten years old I believed I could have stopped my father from killing himself if only I had uttered the right words during our phone call: I love you, Daddy, or I miss you, Daddy, please hurry home. My mother was too distraught to comfort me, which only added to my guilt. When I was excluded from the funeral and burial services, I took it as proof that she blamed me for his suicide.
My beliefs followed me into adulthood, shaping my relationship with my mother and leading to years of reckless, self-destructive behavior. Eventually a therapeutic treatment called “eye movement desensitization and reprocessing” helped me untangle the incapacitating magical thinking of my childhood.
During the last decade of my mother’s life, our parent-child roles were largely reversed due to her Alzheimer’s disease. Thanks to the EMDR therapy, I was able to offer her the care and affection that had been missing from our relationship for most of my life.
Stephanie Shafran
Northampton, Massachusetts
The man behind the desk at the bank asked me why my mother was waving her hands and acting crazy. Only seven years old, I turned to Mama and signed, He says you crazy. Embarrass him. I already knew he wouldn’t give her any money.
She signed a response for me to convey.
“She’s not crazy,” I told the banker. “She’s Deaf. She needs a loan to buy tires.”
I was glad when the man looked as embarrassed as I felt.
Situations like this one have occurred throughout my life. Hearing people have often excused these incidents by telling me the person just didn’t understand. This explanation was satisfactory when I was little, but as I grew up and learned more about American Sign Language (ASL) and my Deaf heritage, I lost patience with such “misunderstandings.” If people are genuinely interested in learning about Deaf culture, I am happy to educate them, but if they’re unreasonable or assume they know better than me, I’m not always kind.
I used to work as a sign-language interpreter in the psychiatric ward of a hospital. ASL has a wide range of styles depending on the Deaf person’s background and education, and interpreters need to negotiate the ASL proficiency and the English proficiency on both sides of a conversation to facilitate understanding.
One day I was working with a Deaf patient who was primarily an ASL user and had minimal English. I had to expand extensively on the English-language questions for him to glean their meaning. The psychologist asked what had brought the patient to the hospital, and I signed for quite a while as the doctor waited. The patient responded, and I voiced his answer.
Next the doctor asked if the patient was in pain. Again I signed for a long time. Growing impatient, the doctor stopped me and demanded I tell him each sign I was making. I explained I couldn’t do that, since I was signing ASL, not English. It was my job to communicate with the patient in a way he could understand, for both their benefits.
“Well, I don’t know what you’re saying, and I’m not OK with that,” he said.
Still faced with misconceptions after all these years, I remained professional.
“I’m saying what you are saying,” I assured him, “just in another language.”
Allyne Betancourt
Bancroft, Idaho
After purchasing my first house, I called my younger sister, Jen, who was between jobs, and offered her $1,000 plus airfare to build a sauna in the basement. Jen was a brilliant Ivy League grad who excelled at fine woodwork but seemed stuck in a cycle of low-wage work. We spoke on the phone often, and she was a friend and confidante to me as well as a sister.
Our relationship hadn’t always been that way. When we were kids, our parents fought a lot, and we retreated into our separate cocoons of safety. I’m seven years older than Jen; looking back, I wish I’d offered her comfort and reassurance. Instead I teased her as much as she teased me. Then I went away to college, leaving her to face our parents’ messy divorce alone. As we became adults, though, we reconnected and made amends. I was honored to be the first person Jen came out to.
Before she arrived in Minneapolis, I assembled the sauna materials, including the cedar boards she had requested. I took time off from my teaching job so we could work together on the project. Jen was the expert, of course. I just schlepped lumber. We had to yell to communicate with our earplugs in and masks on. There was a lot of laughter, mainly over how little I knew.
Jen’s last night fell on a Sunday, and Sundays have always been stressful for me as a teacher, as I tend to procrastinate on my prep work for the upcoming week. Still, I wanted to enjoy our remaining time together, so I bought tickets to an evening puppet show, and Jen and I took a picnic dinner to the park.
When we got back to the house, Jen said the ceiling boards in the sauna still needed to be installed, and she wanted to show me how. I told her it was too late. She offered to email me instructions, but I sensed she preferred to finish before she left, so I said OK, we would just go to the basement and wrap it up. Jen looked confused but agreed.
For the next forty-five minutes we set boards and hammered them in at an ever-increasing pace. Finally I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I told her it was a school night, and I had to go to bed.
Angry and exhausted too, she said, “I’m just doing this because of you.”
“Well, I’m only doing it because of you,” I shot back.
I wish I could say we broke into laughter at the ridiculousness of us both wanting not to disappoint the other. But the truth is, the goodwill we’d developed over the years immediately evaporated. We left the basement stewing in feelings not felt since childhood.
After Jen returned home, we discussed by phone how we each could have handled the situation differently. Despite our efforts to reconcile, we both nurtured some remaining hurt. After all those years the pain was still just below the surface.
Name Withheld
My family called it “the wedding china”: white porcelain dishes with a pale-blue flower motif. There were two plates and two cups with saucers—just enough for a couple. I always believed my parents had received the set as a wedding gift. Perhaps they’d promised themselves that one day they’d be able to afford another place setting or two.
That never happened. There wasn’t enough money, with dentist and grocery bills to pay and shoes and dresses to buy after ours grew too worn even for hand-me-downs. But those dishes traveled with us throughout my childhood as we moved from state to state, and they occupied a place of pride in every house.
Decades later, after my father developed dementia and we placed him in a nursing home, my mother moved into a small apartment and gave the wedding china to me. I stashed it in the highest cupboard in my kitchen. Dealing with Dad’s disease had made me want to forget. Only after his death did I pull the dishes out to look at them. There was just one saucer left, and one cup was chipped—no doubt from being transferred in and out of boxes. I pictured my parents as newlyweds, opening a bow-wrapped package. They’d had a simple wedding in a small Texas town. Who would have bought them such a gift?
When I asked my mother, I found out I’d been mistaken: The china hadn’t been a wedding present. My father had bought one place setting for their first Christmas together, and a second for their next shared holiday. The December after that, I was born, and the bills piled up, and then my siblings arrived.
Raised in an orphanage during the Depression, my father never had fine dishes growing up, but they were one of the first things he bought for the family he and my mother created.
I keep the cup with the chipped rim on my dresser. Sometimes I hold it, but I never drink from it. Its emptiness reminds me of everything I never knew about my father.
Lisa Rizzo
Portland, Oregon
Living with the involuntary tics of Tourette’s syndrome is awkward to say the least. Although many who see me violently shaking my head or twitching my arm seem to understand these movements are out of my control, others think I’m purposefully trying to annoy them.
That was the case for me growing up, especially in middle school. I’ll never forget taking the sixth-grade standardized test: As I worked my way through the problems, I broke the silence every few seconds with my twitching, grunting, and tapping.
“Ke . . . ke . . . ,” I muttered.
“Please stop,” one of my classmates said.
“Ret . . . ret . . . ,” I said under my breath, unable to suppress my tics.
Although the exam ended soon enough, my classmates’ dislike of me didn’t. Occasionally I’d try to explain why I was making sounds, but the other kids didn’t listen. They thought I was looking for attention. It wasn’t until the end of eighth grade that I finally managed to convey why I was doing it and that I could not just stop when asked.
Before middle-school graduation our teachers asked us to write letters wishing one another well in our journeys through high school and life. The letters my classmates wrote me were almost all apologies for not understanding my condition.
Fay Martinolich
Nashville, Tennessee
I was born in Romania, and when I was two, my family moved to Montreal, where I grew up speaking French. When I was ten, we moved again, to Tennessee. Barely able to speak a sentence in English, I feared I’d never belong in the United States.
At home it was hard for me to express myself to my parents; my Romanian was as limited as their English, and I couldn’t share in their cultural jokes or memories. At school I felt distanced from my friends because I’d been raised with Romanian food and traditions—and generational trauma.
As I grew older, I became critical of my parents. They hardly ever let me do what other American kids did because those activities were strange to them. Although they’d gone to college in Romania, they didn’t know anything about applying to or attending an American college. They’d only recently begun telling me they loved me because, in Romanian culture, it’s not often said aloud.
Though I kept these opinions to myself at first, a few years ago I began sharing them with my parents, bringing up the past and talking about how it had affected me. Finally, during a conversation that had escalated into an argument, my dad burst into tears and asked, “Am I the worst dad in the world?”
I started crying too, and we hugged. Though it broke my heart to see the pain my criticism had caused him, I am thankful I spoke up, because it has brought us much closer.
G.S.
Nashville, Tennessee
The two of you seem to want the same things: a life partner, intimacy, companionship, a good laugh. You’re both older, with careers and grown children. You go on trips to Canada, Belize, Mexico. You take dancing lessons, go paddleboarding, skinny-dip. You talk about retiring together and moving to Portugal.
But he gardens and loves his quiet time, while you like to be on the go, backpacking and sleeping in your tent as much as possible. His family jokes that he’s dating a travel agent. Coming home from a trip, you bemoan the return to reality, while he’s glad to be back; his garden needs attention. You help him set up an automated watering system for when you’re away. He comments on how his plants have suffered since he met you, and he starts wanting to be away less.
Three years go by. You begin to think the relationship is built entirely on misunderstandings. Conversations go in circles. You say one thing; he hears another. You try to explain your needs; he thinks you’re bossing him around. Affection turns to annoyance. It’s not that he doesn’t want to spend time with you, he says—he doesn’t want to spend time with anyone.
Dismantling the relationship is simple. He returns your lawn chairs; you return his calculator. He once said you saved him from everything that was wrong in his life. Now it seems he is done being saved.
Gretchen Wick
Kalispell, Montana
My first meditation retreat was at a center where participants were expected to take the vow of silence seriously. We had to relinquish our cell phones at check-in and were instructed to avoid speaking to one another. Each of us was given a private bedroom and bathroom, to minimize the opportunities to communicate.
I committed to the vow with enthusiasm but was soon dismayed to hear talking coming from a neighbor’s room. Though I couldn’t discern the words, the cadence was unmistakably human speech. Since the voice alternated with stretches of silence, I surmised that my neighbor had secretly kept her phone.
I considered notifying the retreat manager (we were allowed to leave notes in a receptacle on her door), but I didn’t want to come off as a tattletale. Instead I left a note requesting earplugs.
The earplugs muffled the sound but didn’t completely mask it. I attempted to block the noise in other ways, including tying a shirt around my head. When those efforts failed, I resorted to using the sound as a meditation focus. I noted how my response to the talking differed from my response to the sounds of birds outside my window. The speech, however quiet, felt like a personal assault on my ears, but my mind permitted the birds’ loud chirping to blend into the background. Though I congratulated myself on this insight, it did little to diminish the grating on my nerves.
On the final day of the retreat, after the silence was officially broken, I made small talk with my neighbor, and she confessed the retreat had been challenging for her. She had recently had a stroke, and her recovery included learning how to speak again. She’d worried that being silent for ten days might cause her speech to regress, so she’d practiced daily exercises alone in her room.
A prayer entered my mind: May I remember the lessons learned in this moment.
Katie Hoody
North Newton, Kansas
