Harvard Summer Review Issue 13, Summer 2007 Amy Dennis Amanda Fish Spencer Gaffney Melanie Graham Steven L. Herman Dawn Kotapish Jillian Kushner Rudy A. Martinez Michael McLawhorn Jessica Rogers Sallie Sharp Rebekah Wilson Acknowledgements Acknowledgements The editors thank Michael Shinagel, Dean of Continuing Education and University Extension, and Don Pfister, Dean of the Summer School, for their support of this publication. Director of the Writing Program Pat Bellanca Editor Kimberly A. Parke Managing Editor Jody Clineff Associate Editors Tracy Miller Geary Amy Dennis Cover Design Leonard Witzel Design Amy Lomasney Bob Sweeney The Harvard Summer Review is published once a year by the Harvard University Summer School Writing Program. Submissions for the next issue will be accepted until August 15, 2008. Only work written by students enrolled in classes at the 2008 Summer School will be considered for publication. We ask that submissions be sent as attachments by e-mail to: hsr @ hudce.harvard.edu. 2 | Harvard Summer Review Contents Table of Contents Jillian Kushner, What Harvard Meals Are Made of.................... 5 Amanda Fish, Mountains......................................................... 8 Spencer Gaffney, George......................................................... 15 Melanie Graham, The Danish Herb Garden............................ 22 Steven L. Herman, Ghosts of Partition Haunt Modern-Day India, Pakistan................................ 23 Amy Dennis, Walking with Zoya, 3 A.M................................. 27 Amy Dennis, For Hikaru, Who Works At the Crowded Five and Dime....................... 28 Melanie Graham, Variation on Lucille Clifton’s ‘libation’ for Mark Lunsford, Homossassa, Florida, 2007.................. 29 Rudy A. Martinez, Hablas Español?........................................ 31 Michael McLawhorn, Black Hat Falling................................. 36 Dawn Kotapish, The Weight of Divinity.................................. 52 Jessica Rogers, Henry Parker and the Summer of Love............. 54 Sallie Sharp, Charted Waters................................................... 64 Rebekah Wilson, Dear Mr. Gold............................................. 75 Contributors.......................................................................... 81 Harvard Summer Review | 3 What Harvard Meals Are Made of 4 | Harvard Summer Review Jillian Kushner What Harvard Meals Are Made of Jillian Kushner “I can tell by looking at a student’s plate where they come from,” says Larry Kessel, Harvard’s celebrity Executive Chef. “What I mean by that is that I can tell a student who’s been in private school where there is money and where they are putting out proper lunches. I can tell whether they’ve gone to a public school that is running their own food service, and I can also tell when a student has gone to a public school that has outsourced their food services,” he explains. Kessel discovered these differences after researching cafeteria menus from high schools throughout the country. Though the art of reading plates is not exact, he notes, he can often tell prep school students from their nutritionally balanced dinner plates: students from affluent areas will not usually eat popcorn chicken for dinner. Acknowledging the influence background has on a student’s plate, Kessel serves balanced meals at Harvard to keep students eating healthy. The forty-something Kessel is a nineteen-year veteran of the food industry and a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America. He is a restaurateur who has worked with some of the best chefs in Boston and New York. Kessel brings his experience to Harvard with a plan to revitalize resident dining. “I’m told I’m a little bit rough around the edges,” Kessel admits adding that the fast-paced, ultra-competitive restaurant business is in his blood. “When you own your own business, when you are a chef in a restaurant, you have to make decisions. You want results. You will run over whomever you need to in order to get the results you want. It’s a little different in this position; it’s much more political.” Kessel came to Harvard, in 2002, after closing his Boston restaurant, Atara. Business was slow after 9/11 and, though he had offers to go into catering or to start another restaurant project, Kessel was not ready to jump back into the restaurant business. “You know, after working ninety hours a week for a very long time, it started to interfere with what I wanted to do in my private life,” Kessel says. “I don’t like the idea of being confined to one operation. It just wasn’t for me at that point, so I came aboard here.” Harvard Summer Review | 5 What Harvard Meals Are Made of According to Kessel, the direction of college and university dining has completely changed. Once run by production managers who were not exactly culinary professionals, universities are now turning toward experienced cooks and restaurateurs to run their dining services and are attracting chefs seeking to leave the private industry. “I like to create dishes. I’m a very creative person and have that outlook. I can put out popcorn chicken five days a week, but I also can do something a little bit different. You have the business outlook of running your own department or your own operation. And you usually get your two days off a week. You don’t have to work fourteen or fifteen hours a day. You can get a lot of vacation days working for Harvard, so these jobs are much more desirable,” says Kessel, with a slight smile. Kessel’s office is the size of a dorm room and located in the corner of a loft overlooking Annenberg Hall, where over 3400 meals are served each day during the academic year. Books, binders, and what look like bottles of sauce sit on the shelves of his office. Papers lay scattered around the table. Kessel’s office is in “complete and utter disarray.” He is working on rebuilding his menus as part of a food literacy project. The key points of the project, he explains, are to educate students on how to eat and to give them a variety of healthy foods to choose from. “Budget is always an issue. The question is how well the chef can work within the budget. That’s actually very easy for me,” Kessel explains, although, he adds, the budget for the summer is even tighter than the budget for the academic year ($2.18 per student per meal versus $2.50). The real challenge is to keep the average student happy. Serving 6500 students during the academic year, Kessel has to make choices about how best to please the student population. “I listen to everybody, but also go with my gut instinct, which is that we have an obligation to put out better balanced meals,” he says. To that end, Kessel is cutting the number of entrees served from three to two per night, in order to invest in better salad bars and deli meats. Instead of two pastas, Kessel will serve a brown rice, and will also cut back on bread and serve more stir-frys. Kessel is looking at overhauling the dining halls and installing better equipment. His plans for resident dining are a far cry from 6 | Harvard Summer Review Jillian Kushner popcorn chicken. “I definitely have quite a few more goals I want to accomplish here.” Reflecting on his industry, Kessel says, “There is no such thing as a happy cook,” he says, “I don’t mean that in any bad way. There are two things I firmly believe: The truth is that young cooks cook their best when they cook in fear, and you also cook much better when you are angry.” “Emotion heightens a cook’s senses and helps him prepare better food,” Kessel explains. “Like any piece of art, a meal is best when some heart goes into the making.” Harvard Summer Review | 7 Mountains Mountains Amanda Fish It took twenty-eight days, one hundred and five miles, and twenty-seven thousand feet of elevation gains to learn to live in the mountains. It took a morning to leave them. I was on a month-long wilderness course in the Wind River Range of Wyoming. Most of the ten teenagers in my group were backpacking for the first time. I had hiked and camped before, but I had never been so deep in wilderness. We once went nine days without seeing signs of a single stranger. Like a follower of mirages, I began to hallucinate people: a man in a red and purple jacket coming over a ridge, my mother calling me to dinner from behind a rock. Every day we walked farther into trail-less land and were tossed more violently between pride in our strength and reminders of our vulnerability. The wilderness rewards you. There is the excitement of the land: bear prints and bear scat, the grand curves of snowfields, the delicate silken petals of alpine forget-me-nots. But most of all there is the slow thrill of mastering a routine, of each day walking on two feet from one place to another and making a life there. When walking, the scenery never flies by; it remains unmoved as you pass through it. You begin in a sparsely grassed boulder field on the side of a fishless lake; you dip into a forested valley and ford three rivers; you emerge and climb through dense, calf-scratching brambles to the top of a steep hill; you continue to climb, go over a pass, slide down scree, and settle into a saddle scooped out between two peaks; and, at the end of the day, you could not have missed a thing in all ten miles because you worked for every step. But the wilderness bucks and you have to fight to stay in it. Falling off is just a matter of time. You do your best to delay it by planning every action. For example, you can’t just drink out of a stream when you’re thirsty, because the water is full of diseases. A girl I know forgot to disinfect the rim of her water bottle and threw up for eight months. No matter how tired you are, no matter what the weather, you can’t go to sleep until you have found a campsite; marked out spots for cooking and food storage, each at least one hundred feet from the campsite and two hundred feet from water sources; set up your tent, rain fly, and sleeping bags; extracted every scrap of food, food wrappers, and anything that smells the least bit 8 | Harvard Summer Review Amanda Fish like food from your pack; and wrapped up and weighted down the pack for the night. You can’t leave your food lying out, not even for a minute. I’ve seen squirrels chew clean through a heavily padded pack and several layers of waterproof clothing to reach a bag of trail mix, and two marmots speed silently into the woods carting a full pack on their shoulders as its tourist owner took pictures. In bear country, you cannot ever be sure your food is safe. Most people put their food in their sleeping bag stuff sacks and hang them high in a tree. Bears are excellent climbers; they can shimmy up tree trunks and edge along delicate branches. You look for a branch that’s at least ten feet up, with no branches below it, and or on nearby trees from which a bear could swipe at the bags. You tie a rock to a rope with the food bags at the other end, lob the rock over the branch, and pull the rock end of the rope to haul up the bags. In the Wind River Range, where branches are either densely crisscrossed from head height to the canopy or stripped away by forest fires, finding a good branch and then getting a rock over it can take hours. If you’re hanging the bear bags in the dark, which is most of the time, and working by headlamp, choosing a branch is mostly luck; you just pray that in the morning your food will be where you left it. If you’re above tree line, you try to balance the bags on high, slippery rocks, and then you pray harder. You have to be prepared for any animal, any terrain, any weather, all the time, because once it comes there’s no hiding from it. The world is not your oyster; the world is an ocean and you are an oyster, tiny, sand-gritted, and easily cracked. We spent the Fourth of July, a week before the end of the course, attempting Wind River Peak, the highest mountain in the range at 13,192 feet. We began hiking at seven in the morning at 11,000 feet and dropped our packs on top of a ridge at 12,500. We planned to pick them up later on the way to our next campsite, which lay on the other side of the ridge. The last half mile to the peak was a steep pyramid of blinding snow. The earth was reduced to two triangles: up and to the right, pure blue; and at our feet, pure white. We sang “Stairway to Heaven” as we climbed, kicking out a single set of footholds as we went. I was near the back of the line, where the steps had been carved deep into the snow, smoothed with the scuffing of the boots ahead of me. Once destroyed, a tundra field can take hundreds of years to recover; but here on the snow, our footholds would be gone with the next storm. Once the line paused; probably the person at the front, too far ahead for me to Harvard Summer Review | 9 Mountains hear or to see, was struggling to carve out a step in a patch of ice. We stopped singing, and, right away, all of our noise dropped off without an echo. The snow absorbed every sound. We started again to climb and to sing, but knowing now how quickly the silence closed in behind us. Soon after, we reached the cap of sharp rock—too jagged to hold snow—that marked Wind River Peak. The wind whipped in every direction, as if by whim, breaking the silence of the snowfield we had left behind. We cheered and took turns balancing on the highest point. The sky seemed to circle around us as we looked out at the land on the other side of the ridge, where we would spend the rest of our trip. The other mountains squatted far below; they seemed small obstacles for the week ahead. But we had miles left to go that day, and soon we were stepping back onto the snowfield. We slid all the way down, somersaulting and throwing snowballs, until we reached the bottom. When we looked up, we saw the thunderclouds moving in. In the mountains, the sun heats jagged rocks, and the warm air from the rocks bounces up at odd angles to clash with the surrounding cold air to form a storm. Sharp mountains make fierce weather; bright sun brings sudden storms. By the time we caught sight of our packs, it had started to snow. We ran to them, threw them on, and kept running as the snow swarmed in, stinging, mixed with hail. Lightning would come soon. We were totally exposed, the highest things around. We had to get down from the ridge. Without stopping to think, we took the fastest way down, away from our goal, back the way we had come that morning. I ran as fast as I could, stumbling in the snow and swaying under my heavy pack. The world was now a gray square, punctuated by the sharp tops of black rocks sticking out of the snow and the bright flashes of each other’s jackets. When we saw someone stuck, we yelled and two of us ran to her and lifted her by the armpits out of the powder while trying not to fall in ourselves. Luck kept us from slipping under the snow completely. The lightning came and went. When it was near, we dove for the rocks and crouched, breathless, until it passed. We huddled in lightning position: on the balls of our feet, calves and thighs not touching—you can put something non-conducting, a piece of wood or a sweater, at the back of your knees to rest your thighs, but on this day there was nothing—elbows on knees, fingers on nose. In theory, if lightning hits you, the electricity will flow through your 10 | Harvard Summer Review Amanda Fish body and back into the ground. In practice, lightning position is impossible to maintain; you’re never too terrified to feel your burning thighs. I dreaded the stretches of lightning position and dreaded starting to move again. Finally, my dreads seemed to cancel each other out and I sank into a thoughtless daze, obeying the rhythms of the lightning and waiting for the running to be over. Eventually, the storm ended and we ten and our two leaders made it back to the campsite of that morning, although I don’t remember when or which happened first. I only remember someone yelling, “Happy Independence Day!” and then being back at camp, pounding tent stakes into the tundra, and trying to find a crack in the rocks where we could shelter our camp stoves from the wind. We had no time to lose. It was almost dark, and the next day we would have to climb back over the ridge and walk doubly long to make up for our panicked backtracking. Plus we were soaking wet. If we didn’t get into the tents soon, we would all be hypothermic. My tent group called ours “The Womb,” at first because of its warm red glow and because stepping out into the cold every morning was as traumatizing as birth, and later because it was the only place where we could let our guards down. When we crawled inside that night and got into our sleeping bags, stuffing our wet clothes between our legs so that our body heat could start to dry them, we began to talk about home. We talked about it more each of those last days as we walked toward the end of our trip. We dreamed of dry socks and clean underwear; of mornings that started later than six-thirty and warmer than forty degrees; of beds and pillows and chairs and TVs. We dreamed of being sloppy teenagers again. But most of all, we dreamed of food. Teenagers hiking all day with seventy-pound packs get hungry. Food was the thirteenth member of our group. We carried him on our backs and hid him from animals at night. We hoarded him and fought over him. He was seductive, all-powerful, and inevitably disappointing. We planned our first meals back home meticulously and listened hungrily to the details of each other’s. As we walked, we lost ourselves in visions of fresh fruit and beef tenderloin and peppermint ice cream. Our rations grew pitiful those last few days. We were resupplied every ten days by horseback. By the last ration, our minds on going home, we were careless, using up all the best food right away. By the end, we had a lot of tough cases left, mostly bags of mixed-up powders. We didn’t have fancy vacuum-sealed camp meals. Instead, Harvard Summer Review | 11 Mountains we had a staggering array of dried foods and powders in thin plastic bags. The bags ripped when unknotted or snagged on equipment inside our packs or just wore out so we were constantly consolidating, pouring one leaking tomato powder bag into an intact bag of the same thing. This can be a tricky business; the powders are easy to mix up. Brownie mix and cocoa powder is a bad one; brownie mix is a little silkier and doesn’t have cocoa’s white flakes, but the differences are subtle. Once you combine two powders mistakenly, of course, there’s no going back. You do your best to make something edible out of it. The question is, do you cook the mix like hot chocolate or like a brownie? Our tools were a propane camp stove and a battered bottle of margarine known as “squeeze grease,” the answer to all culinary dilemmas. But some cases are stubborn to treatment. In hot water, the brownie-cocoa mixture clumps, and in the frying pan it congeals into uncookable jelly. Hummus powder mixed with falafel powder mixed with veggie burger powder is, of course, unsalvageable, no matter how much squeeze grease and garlic powder you throw in. And then there’s the worst and the most chronic: mashed potato pearls mixed with powdered milk. We quickly learned that mashed potato pearls are slightly yellower than milk pearls, and that, in the dark, only mashed potato pearls sound like Styrofoam when you squeeze the bag. But we’d still end up eating our granola in cold potato soup. I was thinking about food as we hiked out at sunrise on our last morning. Our leaders had promised our bus back to town would be waiting at the trailhead with cereal and real milk and maybe even fruit. As I walked out of the untouched foothills and into the forest, where our route met up with a trail for the first time in weeks, I listed in my head all the cereals the bus driver might bring, from best to worst. But even if we had nothing but raisin bran, I was sure it would be the best breakfast of my life. A mile from the trailhead, a painfully loud noise tore me from my daze. We were passing through a big green cattle gate with a dangling chain that banged against the metal bars of the gate. The strange sound of metal! And the gate itself, it seemed too big for a man-made object. We were getting close to the end now. The ground flattened and the trail grew wide and worn. The mountains stood strangely distant, behind and far above us. Then the first glint: a car. Another. A third, and a fourth. There was the parking lot. How quiet it was, dusty and deserted at dawn. I had expected a 12 | Harvard Summer Review Amanda Fish giant anti-wilderness party, milling with RVs, their radios pounding. Instead, there were only a few cars, a water tap, and a park regulations sign. Suddenly I wasn’t hungry anymore. I wanted to turn around and run back. I had dreamed of this moment so often, but now I didn’t want to set foot in this parking lot. This, not crawling out of my tent in the morning, was leaving the womb. It was the same feeling of disappointment as coming down in an hour from a mountain that had taken all day to climb. It was the feeling of watching myself slip away from where I belonged—the feeling of being wrongly rescued. But the dirty white school bus was pulling into the lot, and my group was running toward it waving their arms. We were being congratulated, high-fiving each other, tying our packs to the bus roof, untying our boots and peeling off our stinking wet socks. We were pouring juice into plastic cups and passing around Cheerios and cold cartons of two percent milk. Then we were on the bus and pulling away from the mountains with unsettling speed. Wyoming sprawled before us: the empty highways, the hot dry fields, the cattle and skinny horses and stray dogs. Everyone was laughing and groaning as the jolting bus churned the milk in our unpracticed stomachs. The bus driver had warned us not to close the windows, and soon we knew why: as the bus heated up we became aware of our own stink. Reason told me we had smelled the whole time, but I was convinced that the return to civilization had tainted us, catalyzed the transformation of mountain sweat and soil into filth and grime. The wilderness makes you feel clean, even when you’re covered in dirt and full of squeeze grease and dried beans and the anxieties of surviving. The work of the day purifies all, kneads it soft. Your skin, your vision, the liquid feel of your working muscles all become unmuddled. Even your sleep becomes pure. In the wilderness, for the first time in my life, I could stay asleep all night. I think it was more than just exhaustion that rocked me to sleep. In the city, my dreams were choppy and anxious, and I always woke up between scenes. In the mountains, like a dog, I dreamed of running, of the power of moving free and the joy of covering ground. On the bus, our bodies boxed in, our smells stewing, our stomachs struggling with the unfamiliar milk, I began to feel grimy. Back in town, the girls spent an hour scrubbing down in the communal shower. We compared armpit hair and wore out our razors sawing at it. We scrubbed at our ears, elbows, and knees and Harvard Summer Review | 13 Mountains rubbed our blistered feet. We screamed at the stubborn tangles in our hair. And then we stopped laughing and pointed wordlessly to each other’s bodies, to the sharp lines of our ribs, sunken stomachs, shrunken curves. Our jeans fell off; our bras hung loosely on our chests. I flew back home the next day. My mother cried when she saw me. She crowded the table with plates of food. I drank a glass of juice and couldn’t eat anything. Food looked fine until I started to eat it. I went shopping, read fashion magazines, and went to the movies. When I found that I didn’t enjoy any of it, I didn’t know what to do with my discovery, so I ignored it. I forced food down until my stomach stretched back to normal size. I tried on clothes until I cared about them again and watched TV until the rush of color and sound didn’t make me queasy anymore. Sometimes, not often, I dreamed of the mountains. I dreamed of loading my backpack in the mornings and tying my boots; of perfect quiet and perfect dark; of clouds sinking toward me; and of vertigo spinning me on sharp-rocked peaks. I dreamed of the perfect lightness of carrying my life on my back. I dreamed of open space. 14 | Harvard Summer Review Spencer Gaffney George Spencer Gaffney The ground is still soft from the last night’s rain as he stands in the backyard with the garden spade in his hand. He looks down past the clump of yellow flowers his sister threw on the ground, down to the cardboard shoebox that lies just three inches below the dirt he dug only last night. Nathan starts fidgeting behind him. Riley has never exhumed a guinea pig before. Riley counts the stairs as he walks down them Sunday morning. His sister paces in circles on the worn Oriental carpet in the dining room. She talks to the imaginary friends she uses as placeholders for real people, working and reworking social situations, trying to remember how to respond to different cues, mental flashcards for everyday interactions. He looks down at her, smiling sadly. That’s how the website explained it—mental flashcards—when Riley started to realize something was off with Abby and checked her symptoms. Riley gets up some nights for a drink of water and finds her, not in her room, but lying on the bed his younger brother, Nathan, had set up in his own room, telling him about her nightmares while Nathan hushes her in sleepy, patient tones. In the middle of her pacing, sitting pensively in his small metal mesh travel case, is her guinea pig, George. He turns his nose toward Riley and squeaks. “Good morning, Abby,” he says. She looks up distractedly. “I’m talking to myself,” she growls, and goes back to pacing. He walks past her into the kitchen. The sticky sweet of the freshly purchased Chelsea buns and strong burnt smell of instant coffee fill the room. His dad looks up from the paper. “Twenty-six, Riley?” he asks. “Twenty-six,” he responds. His father nods approvingly and returns to the sports section. Some mornings Riley doesn’t count the stairs. But on Sundays he always counts. Sometimes he even goes back up to double check on Sundays. But not always. His father told him that he had put this house over his head and goddammit, the least Riley could do was show some gratitude every morning. “You want me to thank you for the house?” asked Riley. Harvard Summer Review | 15 George “I grew up in a three room house, no upstairs, no attic, no nothing,” spat his father. “And it was more than enough. Look at how much I’ve done for you.” “You want me to thank you for the stairs?” “Every one of them.” So now he counts the stairs. Not as a reminder of his appreciation but because he has nightmares of his father, sawing away one lonely night, taking away a stair, adding a stair, waiting for his error. Now he walks out to the garage. Light streams through the cracked windows, catching flecks of sawdust floating in the air. Riley stands in the doorway, listening to the low whine of the electric sander and the shriek as Nathan brings it down to the long plank of white ash. “Still working on the bat?” asks Riley. “The game’s at seven.” Nathan looks up from the bench, grins, and takes off his goggles. “No, you dope,” he chuckles. “Sam asked me to make him one, too. I finished yours last night.” Nathan wanders over to the cabinet and fumbles with the locks. People who have never seen him run think he walks with a limp, a hitch in his step that seems off somehow. One time, in the locker room, a couple of Riley’s teammates dragged Nathan from the freshman row of lockers and put the brothers side by side, scratching their heads and hooting. Six-foot-three, two hundred and twenty pounds, sinewy and muscular, next to five-foot-nine, one hundred and fifty pounds, scrawny, and meek. Adopted? They asked with fake curiosity. Must be. No way are they related. He wipes the droplets of sweat from his forehead with Riley’s old shirt, one of the many hand-me-downs that comprise Nathan’s wardrobe. He takes the honey colored bat and balances it on his index fingers, one three-quarters of the way up the handle, one right at the sweet spot a quarter turn from the label. “North American White Ash, thirty-four inches, thirty-oneand-a-half ounces, tapered knob. And I shaved the handle down to seven-eighths of an inch so you can wrap your stubby fingers right around it.” The label still reads “Frank Gifford Bat Co.” Nathan and Riley decided that even if their father was just sitting around collecting disability pay, courtesy of a late night encounter with a buzz saw, the rest of the world need not know that their bats were being hand-crafted by a fifteen-year-old kid, no matter how much better his bats are than his father’s. 16 | Harvard Summer Review Spencer Gaffney Riley delivers most of the bats to Dennis Field, home of the unaffiliated Cactus League Low Single A San Manuel Saguaros. Nineteen-year-olds straight out of high school and junior college with no desire for collegiate ball dip green apple-flavored tobacco on the bench and play long toss in the outfield. They take their new bats and swing late on pitches, longing for the days of aluminum and seventy-five mile per hour belt high school fastballs. “Make them lighter,” they say. “What time are you heading over?” Nathan asks. “Around four. I want to take grounders before BP,” answers Riley. The Saguaros are in Tempe, playing the Yankees affiliate. Dennis Field is hosting the Meridian County High School All-Star Game. “You want a ride?” “Nah, I’ll catch a ride over with Laura before the game. It’s going to be a hundred and ten degrees by mid-afternoon.” Riley picks up the bat and takes a few check-swing practice cuts. Nathan really has the gift. The knob on the bottom of the bat subtly moves his hand up a quarter inch on the handle, forcing Riley to choke up slightly. But the balance makes Nathan’s bats true achievements. Resting gently on his shoulder, his weight back in his stance in the imaginary batter’s box of the workshop, the bat has a weight, a bludgeon with all the confidence a blunt object should impart. But as he lifts the bat off his shoulder and begins the slow, clockwise circles behind his head, the bat seems to shake the weight off itself, ounce by ounce. By the time the pitch comes, the bat is just a logical extension of his arm, a wooden appendage. Riley wonders if it’s nice, knowing what you’ll do for the rest of your life at fifteen. Back in the house, past the still-pacing Abby, up the twentysix stairs, through the trap door, up the ladder, on the bookshelf, behind the 1987 World Book encyclopedia volume Spe-Ste, inside the old Folgers coffee jug, past the heavy lock on the steel box, rests five hundred and forty-two dollars and one voucher for a free oneway bus ticket. Riley opens the box, takes the twenty-three dollars he made in tips last night out of his pocket, relocks the box, and puts the key back between the definitions of “Staple Crops” and “Stapler” at the end of the World Book. He takes down the olive duffel bag he bought at the army surplus store and begins to look through his drawers. Three T-shirts, white. Two pairs of jeans, blue. Three pairs of boxers, gray. Three pairs of socks, white with black stripes on the ankle. One copy Harvard Summer Review | 17 George of Moby Dick, slightly yellowed around the edges, but still cream colored when you open the pages. He zips up the duffel bag and stuffs it under his bed. He takes a yellow legal pad and blue pen, thinks a minute, and begins to write. “Man, what a game,” says Nathan from the passenger’s seat. Riley looks over with a half smile. “Two for three with a double and perhaps the most spectacular play I’ve ever seen in left field. Did you see the San Manuel State coach salivating? They’ll offer you a scholarship for sure.” Not bad for my last game, Riley thinks. Raindrops begin to hit the bed of the truck with irregular dinks. “Finally,” says Nathan. “We need rain. It’s been too dry recently. I think it’s messing with the wood.” “I doubt it. The bat felt real good tonight.” He drops the “ly” from “really” whenever he’s talking about baseball. He used to try to correct himself. “Eliza was there. And Laura,” says Nathan. “And they’re the only two who showed up because they’re the only ones people think have any shot with you.” Nathan lowers his voice, as if he is telling a secret. “You have your pick of any girl in San Manuel.” Riley’s last girlfriend wrote him a letter before she went camping in Colorado for the summer. She listed the things that Riley had promised through implication the night he said “I love you” to her for the first time. Kids. Pets. Cars. A house next to my parents. Marriage. College appeared festooned with a question mark as the thirty-fourth item on the list. All Riley remembers was shushing her and saying okay as he drifted off to sleep in her bed. Not that college means anything to Riley. But she didn’t even ask him to run away with her. Or without her. He hasn’t had a girlfriend since. He pulls into the driveway. Lightning blossoms outward from a single bolt, an electric family tree. Nathan darts through the rain to his garage workshop. Riley walks into the house through the side door, the rain and thunder drowning out the usual creaks and moans of the door. The house is completely dark except for the faint glow from the microwave clock and the soft light from the television in the den. Riley turns as he walks to the stair to look in at the den. His father’s head is resting on the back of the leather chair, mouth open, a half dozen empty cans of Bud Light in front of him, and ESPN Classic muted on the TV. One last time he climbs the twenty-six stairs. One last time he listens to Ricky Martin, his sister’s choice of going-to-bed music 18 | Harvard Summer Review Spencer Gaffney for the past ten years, repeating the same lines over and over as the CD skips. Up in his room, he takes the duffel bag out from under his bed, unzips it to double-check he has everything. He takes the World Book down from the shelf. He looks down the spine of the book. No bulge. He shakes the encyclopedia. No clank of metal against the wooden floor. He fans the pages of the encyclopedia. Only a faint breeze that smells like ink and mildew. He checks the shelf. No key camouflaged among the varnished wood paneling. No key in volume A. No key in volume C. No key in volume IJK. If there had been a key in any volume after M, it almost certainly would have fallen out during its flight across his room. The blue lockbox, with the five hundred and sixty-five dollars and the voucher for the bus ticket that Riley had planned on handing to the man at the Greyhound counter at 5 a.m. the next morning, lies closed on the floor, joining the second half of the 1987 World Book on its aerial travels across Riley’s bedroom. Riley throws the pillow off the bed. The yellow legal pad lies blank, the top seven pages written hours before are now gone. He found the letter, he thinks. He took the key. Down the stairs he hoped only to use once more, past the music he hoped never again to hear, out into the rain and the night. The light is still on in Nathan’s workshop. He throws the door open. “Where the fuck is my key?” he bellows over the thunder and the blood in the back of his throat. “What are you talking about?” says Nathan. He takes off his goggles. “What key?” He grabs two fistfuls of Nathan’s shirt and throws him outside. His shoe pounds once into his ribs, once into his nose. He picks him up again and pushes him against the wall. “WHERE THE FUCK DID YOU PUT MY KEY?” Nathan starts to shake, his snot and blood running on Riley’s hands. Riley pushes him again. His own face is wet. He lets go and Nathan slides down the wall, rocking back and forth, his head between his knees. “I’m sorry,” Nathan whispers. “I’m sorry.” A low wail sounds from behind him. Riley turns. Abigail is standing in the rain, hands held above her head to form a cup, a small ball of fuzz enclosed. “George is dead!” she wails. “DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD!” Riley looks at her, stunned for the moment. Now he holds her, her hair slick from the rain as her muffled sobs vibrate through his Harvard Summer Review | 19 George body, saying “Oh, Abby” over and over. She breaks away and walks over to Nathan, her sobs reduced to sniffles, his convulsions reduced to a stare into nothing. “Nathan. George is dead. And we have to bury him. Tonight.” Riley walks down the twelve stairs to the basement. He takes a pair of flashlights and one of his father’s old shoe boxes. His sister insisted it be their father’s. “He wears boots and has the biggest foot,” said Abigail. “George needs room.” He walks back upstairs. The other two are waiting in the kitchen. The blood is gone from Nathan’s nose and he shows Abby the two pieces of wood he nailed together to make a miniature cross. “Why were you awake?” Riley asks softly. “Thunder always scared George. I came down to make sure he wasn’t afraid.” She looks up at Riley. “I don’t think the thunder killed him, though. I don’t think he died scared.” Abby asks Riley if its okay to wear her butterfly boots to a funeral. “It’s okay, Abby,” he says. “Everything looks black at night.” They proceed outside in single file: Abigail at the front, Nathan in the middle holding an oversized umbrella high over their heads, and Riley in the rear, pointing the flashlight around his brother and sister to light the path. Abigail stops. “George always loved bananas,” she says, tearing four yellow daisies out from the garden. She leads them to a spot in the backmost corner of the yard, under the tree the boys had hung a tire swing from, before the rope snapped and Nathan broke his arm. “Here. This is where I always brought him. Dad told me not to take George outside, but I did and he loved it here. He could have run away if he wanted, but he didn’t. He just looked up and squeaked and rolled in the grass. Goodbye.” She looks up at Riley. “Ok. You can bury him now.” Riley stoops down and digs a shallow rectangle with his hands, just wide enough to fit the box all the way down. Nathan drives the cross into the top of the grave. Riley turns off the flashlight. The three walk back in the dark, in silence, in a rain that has become a drizzle and thunder that has become fog. Riley walks up the twenty-six stairs, takes off his muddy sneakers, and falls, still wet, into the bed. He wakes up the next morning with Nathan standing over him, breathing softly. “Hey,” says Riley. “I took your key,” he says. 20 | Harvard Summer Review Spencer Gaffney “It’s ok,” he says. He pauses, then asks, “Did you read the letter?” Nathan nods. “Come on.” Riley gets out of bed and pulls his shoes back on. The sun has barely come up. He wonders if Nathan slept at all. He hadn’t thought he would sleep himself, but he must have drifted off. Nathan leads him outside, into the corner of the backyard. He hands Riley a garden spade. “Are you serious?” “I fed it to George. I didn’t think it would kill him. I didn’t want you to find it.” Riley walks around the grave. “What about after I dig it up?” Nathan pulls a small paring knife out of his pocket. Riley looks at the spade, looks down towards where George now lies in his father’s old shoebox, at Nathan with the knife in his hand. He gives him back the garden spade. “Hold on to this. He’s not going anywhere.” Riley walks back toward the house that is still not quite yet home, but closer than anything he has ever envisioned. Harvard Summer Review | 21 The Danish Herb Garden The Danish Herb Garden Melanie Graham A small laminate invitation on a stick reads: Spas Mit “Eat Me” Silikum, a cowlick of chives Basilikum, a lapel’s worth of basil Dild as fine as butterfly antennae The less-tended Mynte leaves have been given eyeholes by insekt or woodsprites fashioning miniature masks for the coming midsummer revelry 22 | Harvard Summer Review Steven L Herman Ghosts of Partition Haunt Modern-Day India, Pakistan Steven L. Herman NEW DELHI—In a dark room at the Nehru Memorial Museum, an image of independent India’s initial yearnings springs back to life. A robotic Jawaharlal Nehru accompanies an authentic recording of India’s first prime minister designate speaking about independence to the Constituent Assembly minutes before the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947. “It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity,” utters the robotic Nehru. “The ambition of the greatest man of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us but so long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over.” That work sixty years on is not over. Hundreds of millions in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh still suffer from poverty, hunger, or disease. Despite fledging attempts at reconciliation and reflection by some academics and spiritual leaders in the three countries, little has changed since the subcontinent became independent, shedding its shackles of British direct colonial rule, which had lasted for nearly a century. The birth of the Republic of India, in the summer of 1947, was violent and difficult. The country was cleaved to carve out a separate Muslim homeland, Pakistan. Ten million in the subcontinent were uprooted from their homes, and one out of every ten who became migrants in this tumultuous period did not live to reach their intended destination. They were either murdered during the sectarian violence or felled by cholera, other diseases, hunger, or mere exhaustion. Countless women were raped while other daughters and wives were kidnapped and transported across the new international borders. In 1947, Pritam Singh Mahna was a nine-year-old fourth grader in what is now Punjabi Pakistan. Speaking in his New Delhi home as the sixtieth anniversary of partition neared, the memories of that historic time are still strong. “I still remember. Whenever we face August 15, I start weeping,” says Mahna. Ten generations of his family had worked the land there. But Mahna’s father would be the last. Like nearly all Sikhs and Hindus in Harvard Summer Review | 23 Ghosts of Partition Haunt Modern-Day India, Pakistan the predominately Muslim parts of what is now Pakistan, Mahna’s family would be forced to flee. “We would have been murdered by the Mohammedans if the family had stayed,” he says. All of the Sikhs in his village had gathered at their local temple to commit mass suicide. That was preferable to seeing their men forced to cut their hair. But Mahna says they were talked out of the death pact by a Brahmin pandit who convinced them that such human sacrifices would be a sin. One distraught mother, however, did not listen. “She jumped into the well in my presence and she died,” recalls Mahna, who is overcome with emotion and begins weeping when he remembers what happened six decades ago. Mahna’s father convinced neighbors his family had converted to Islam as a tactic to buy time until they could safely escape. The Mahna children thought it was all a game and enjoyed learning select verses from the Holy Quran. Many Indian leaders of various faiths held naïve hopes that they all could continue to live peacefully together in the two new independent nations. Partition, the dividing of British India into a new India and a predominately Muslim Pakistan, was bitterly debated prior to independence. The father of Pakistan, Muhammed Ali Jinnah, would assert that there was no choice but partition to avoid what he termed “consequences too disastrous to imagine.” Jinnah’s Muslim League had resented Congress Party pre-independence demands that the two political groups merge to oust the British. Many Pakistanis continue to feel its giant neighbor, India, believes New Delhi should be the dominant South Asian voice and the smaller states should follow India’s lead, even at the risk of marginalization. “India needs to shed its superiority complex and this is exactly what Jinnah said in 1947,” contends Professor Farooq Ahmad Dar at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. “The problem is India being a bigger country. It’s huge, and their basic problem is they want to deal with Pakistan as a senior partner, which is not acceptable to anybody here in Pakistan.” Partition meant an unprecedented two-way exodus with Hindus and Sikhs streaming out of West and East Pakistan while millions of Muslims sought safe haven in the other directions. Professor Dar’s mother’s family masqueraded as Hindus to flee Pakistan on one such death train. 24 | Harvard Summer Review Steven L Herman “My family was the only family which could manage to reach Pakistan alive,” he says. “And that was because of the trick they used. They were protected by the Hindus and the Sikhs who killed all others.” Manmohan Madhok, now 92, had intended to stay with his wife and four children some forty miles north of Lahore, where they had significant landholdings. “I have sweet memories of that place,” he says. “But we no longer consider that our home. Our home is India now.” His exodus included sleeping with his family for three days on a railway station platform awaiting the train that would take them out of Pakistani Punjab. Madhok credits Muslim friends and the Indian troops for protecting his convoy. He recalls that “town after town” of Hindus and Sikhs were wiped out by rampaging Muslims. It was not uncommon for trains crammed with refugees to arrive in India or Pakistan ablaze or charred – and all dead inside, victims of the sectarian violence. Some of the trains arrived with wheels dripping blood. In others, the only cargo was the severed breasts of women. The arrival of each such train spurred revenge killings on trains headed in the opposite direction. Those who eschewed train travel, for monetary or safety reasons, took their chances on foot. Tens of thousands of those pedestrians, historians say, also were preyed upon. “We were lucky,” Madhok says. As one of the few to receive compensation for his lost landholdings, Madhok would be able to restart in his new homeland on a secure financial footing, initially going into the timber business and then running a chemist shop (pharmacy) for decades. His children are part of the new Indian cosmopolitan elite—working for large industrial concerns in executive positions, living both in New Delhi and abroad. The grandchildren go overseas for higher education and speak English without Indian accents. Like the Madhoks, the Mahna family would flourish and be able to end up buying a comfortable home in one of the respectable upper-middle-class Delhi neighborhoods. But for the Mahnas, it was a long and hard upwardly mobile struggle that came after a decade living as refugees in wooden huts, and the first post-partition Mahna children would be born on the grounds of a cemetery. Partition has haunted bilateral relations. India and Pakistan have fought three times, and the territory that prompted two wars— Kashmir—remains disputed. The third war, in 1971, saw East Pakistan become independent Bangladesh. The two nuclear powers came close to war again, in 2002. Harvard Summer Review | 25 Ghosts of Partition Haunt Modern-Day India, Pakistan While many who witnessed the massacres and fought in those wars remain bitter, there have been signs of reconciliation. Pritam Singh Mahna put his family on the first bus to travel from India to Pakistan in 1999—but just for a visit. He proudly pulls out for visitors the newspaper front pages showing his son and grandson on the historic bus trip. At the Jesus & Mary College of Delhi University, historian Visalakshi Menon finds herself discussing partition with Pakistani colleagues during the increasing number of cross-border academic exchanges. She says the dichotomy of shared roots and continuing conflict shapes the visions India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have of themselves and their neighborhood. “There are really these conflicting emotions. On the one hand there is hostility, and on the other there’s a realization that we have so much in common,” says Menon. “After all, generations of a common heritage cannot be wished away, even after sixty years. That continues as part of our collective unconscious.” Madhok, who lives with his wife in a Delhi retirement home where he is regarded as a crack bridge player, still believes partition was a mistake. “It should not have taken place,” he says. “It was very, very illogical. India was one and it should have remained one. For centuries, Mohammedans and Hindus, they have been living here quite amicably without any grudge with each other, nothing.” While many historians believe partition was inevitable, they also acknowledge it did not become the envisioned panacea for the sub-continent. “Pakistan was supposed to have been the solution to the communal problem in India—the Hindu-Muslim divide that was growing,” says Menon. “But it hasn’t solved the communal problem at all. India still faces a communal problem, a very strong communal problem. And in Pakistan they have their own share of various inter-ethnic conflicts. So it has not brought peace and stability to the region.” In that fateful speech sixty years ago at the birth of independent India, Nehru spoke of his nation’s “tryst with destiny”: “We are citizens of a great country on the verge of bold advance, and we have to live up to that high standard,” repeats the animatronic Nehru, permanently perched at the replica dais. 26 | Harvard Summer Review Amy Dennis Walking with Zoya, 3 A.M. Amy Dennis Dogwoods in the dark lean in like strangers. Zoya says she’ll walk the alley alone. Hollow stomachs of forsythia hold spaces the shape of men and the blackberries are as red as the raw centre of meat. Wait, I say, don’t go without me. But she wants to know why I’m so afraid. Can say nothing about how I once loved a man who hid in the juniper outside my house with jackknives instead of fingers. I bled like a swarm of wasps had descended upon me when he was done, then went back to his empty arms. Think of Gibran’s flute, I used to tell myself, gutted wood in exchange for music. Now I would never slit my wrists for a starved lover and then let him drink. Would no longer crawl into the aching jaw of a wild animal to pull out rotting teeth. I’ve seen coyotes blind themselves with rabbits’ blood, men bruise children while lilacs sugar the grass. I think of this as Zoya turns down a chestnut-soaked street that smells of old skin around a wound. Don’t worry, she calls back. I grew up here. If something was wrong, my bones would scream it. Maybe it’s the trick moon or spider webs silvering her length, but I swear I can see her skeleton glow, bright like some kind of warning. Harvard Summer Review | 27 For Hikaru, Who Works At the Crowded Five and Dime For Hikaru Who Works At the Crowded Five and Dime Amy Dennis In her corner of the corner store, she photocopies for three cents a page, presses against the warm hum of machine, her unborn soothed by drones of light through skin the same way she’s calmed by car headlights through curtains. She feels them move over her like they are the sheer hands of the husband she doesn’t have. At home, when nights are almost without traffic and mist slows the city, she leans against sparse walls like they were a lover’s white shoulders, welcoming her pregnant weight. She wants to know how to harness the light, and hold on to her son when he is separate from her body, moving toward her and away again. Always this brightness and the dark. 28 | Harvard Summer Review Melanie Graham Variation on Lucille Clifton’s ‘libation’ for Mark Lunsford, Homosassa, Florida, 2007 Melanie Graham To this ground soaked with tears, with the blood of children taken from their sleeping beds, I offer this light. I see a father wiping his cheeks where a daughter’s kisses once flew with grace and haste of something that has never imagined darkness; standing over the shallow grave where hope is buried its small fingers broken from trying to break through; touching the ache where a still pillow lies, holding the smell of shampoo, a trace brown hair, small shoes, smaller socks. He finds that fists cannot hold salt. He finds it slips right through and is gone like the tears, like the child of his body. Some believe that our names are different in heaven, a name written on the tongues of angels, unspeakable on earth. And I believe where his child has gone she is called something else, something poured from a vial uncorked by her laughter, spun like silk, or cotton candy. Harvard Summer Review | 29 Variation on Lucille Clifton’s ‘libation’ This offering is for you who was once Jessica and for you who love her— the one who shines with this new blessed name, this new blessed light. 30 | Harvard Summer Review Rudy A. Martinez Hablas Español? Rudy A. Martinez I’ll often find myself in the awkward situation of disgracing my heritage when I least expect it. I could be walking down the street, or waiting for a subway car, or standing in line at the grocery store when I’ll hear, “Hijito.” That soft, sweet whisper of someone calling me “my little son” is like ice water down my back. I turn around to find that little old lady. It’s always a different old lady, but always the same—someone’s Mexican abuelita, so much like my own grandmother: about 4 feet 10 inches tall; short, curly hair streaked with white; a hand-knitted cardigan; the scent of coffee and sweet bread. She starts rattling on at me in Spanish, and, judging by her helpless expression, I can tell she needs directions or assistance with something. Then she notices my face, which carries a mixture of bewilderment, pity, and self-loathing. “Hablas Español?” she asks. “Hablo pequito,” I reply. This is a lie. When I say, “I know a little Spanish,” I really mean that all I know how to say with confidence is “I know a little Spanish.” She frowns, waves me away with a “shoo fly” motion, and mutters something under her breath that I take to mean “traitor!” I don’t speak Spanish. Ordinarily this wouldn’t bother me, but the shame of having to look those old ladies in the eyes and to say “Hablo pequito” with horrific pronunciation is overwhelming. I should know Spanish because I’m Mexican, but I’m not even sure if that’s the right label for me because I wasn’t born in Mexico. I’m not a Latino because I’m not from Latin America. I used to call myself Hispanic, but Spanish speakers don’t like that word. They say it was invented by the US government to lump all “brown” people into one category, so that Mexicans are the same as Cubans, who are the same as Guatemalans, Brazilians, Chileans, etc. Spanish speakers are proud of their particular heritages and would no sooner accept a slap in the face than the title “Hispanic.” I could call myself a Hostess Cupcake: brown on the outside and white in the middle. But I shall first consider identifying myself as a Chicano. Am I a Chicano? I’m told that if my skin is brown and I wasn’t born in Mexico then I am a Chicano. But the term is subjective. To my family, it was always clear who was a Chicano and who was not: Being a Chicano meant being “more Mexican” than we were. The real Chicanos ate Mexican food at home at least five Harvard Summer Review | 31 Hablas Español? nights a week. We loved pizza, mashed potatoes, and chow mein. The real Chicanos hung the Mexican flag on Cinco de Mayo. We hung stars and stripes on the Fourth of July. The real Chicanos went to Catholic Mass more often than on Christmas and Ash Wednesday and could say a proper Hail Mary to boot. The last time we had set foot inside a Catholic church was my baptism (I was three). The real Chicanos could speak Spanish. I couldn’t even recite the chorus to “Feliz Navidad.” Most important, the real Chicanos felt like they were a part of something that generations preceding themselves have celebrated—Red White and Green! Viva la Raza! Si se Puede! I’ve seen this culture, but because I have to use a Spanish Dictionary to know what Raza means, I can’t partake in it. Being monolingual was tough when I tried to learn Spanish as a teenager. Seeing my blond-haired, white-skinned classmates pronounce my own name better than I could was discouraging. In the end, I failed to retain much. I will, however, take pride in the ability to roll my r’s beautifully. What I picked up in Spanish class wasn’t enough to engage in a real conversation. I can say my name: “Me llamo Rudy.” I can say where I’m from: “Soy de California.” I can describe myself in a few ways: “Soy bajo, y intelligente y divertido!” But I doubt that many Spanish speakers care that I’m short, smart, and fun to be around. Most of the little Spanish I know didn’t come from two years of Spanish class. It came from hanging around with a Spanish speaker who didn’t know a lick of English—my great-grandmother. I had a grandma, too, known as Grandma Carmen to me, but I made her speak in English when I was around. English was useless, though, when trying to talk to my great-grandmother, my Abuelita. She used to watch over me as a child when my parents were at work. I watched over her, too. I liked to think I was better company to her than the cockatiels that my grandmother named after members of our family. Slow and steady she would glide in and out of the house with a watering can or a broom, doing the things that made up her days. She was old, but not weak. I used to imagine that she had super powers that were stored in the tight bun of silvery white hair on the back of her head. Her super weapon of choice was her humble wooden cane, which she once used to fend off a pack of wild dogs. But she was also tender. Before dinner, she would wash my hands, and today, whenever I smell Mexican soap, I can still feel her long wrinkled fingers on mine. When she wanted to rest she would sit on her spot at the end of the couch, looking wise and 32 | Harvard Summer Review Rudy A. Martinez grand, like one of those Easter Island statues, even if she was just watching her telenovelas. Small children and old ladies don’t have much in common, though, so she only talked when necessary, and that’s when I learned my Spanish. She would point to the door and say, “Cierra la puerta!” With the understanding that there are only so many things one can do with a door, and that it was already open, I closed it. When I was finished with the snack she had prepared for me (the best rice and beans in the world), she would look at my empty plate and ask with a friendly face, “Quierres mas comer?” Here, her meaning was less clear, but I took an educated guess and nodded my head. Like magic, more food appeared on my plate. At naptime, she would pull the covers up to my chin and sing “Duerme Se Mi Niño,” an old Mexican lullaby about a monster that was going to come and eat me up if I didn’t go to sleep. I understood duerme meant to sleep due to the context of the song and reinforcement of the word. I’m thankful, however, that I didn’t decode the part about the man-eating monster until later in my life. One morning, before the cockatiels started squawking, I caught a glimpse of Abuelita’s silver white hair before it was tied up. Waves of hair flowed down toward her legs, and she looked unprotected there in her nightgown without her mighty bun. I felt lucky to catch her with her guard down, like seeing a doe in the woods before it becomes afraid and gambols away. I saw how frail she was and realized that she wasn’t going to be around for much longer. On her deathbed, she looked peacefully defeated. It was as if she’d finished her life’s work and made her last bowl of rice and beans. When she passed away, my Spanish education stopped. I’m since forced to endure dirty looks from other people’s abuelitas, wishing I had learned more from my own. Spanish is so rapid and incomprehensible to me. No one had the patience to slow it down like my Abuelita. My ear can pick up some of the words, but it frustrates me to know that I’ve heard them—and maybe once understood them—long ago. I also realized that I hardly knew my great-grandmother. What did she do for a living? Who was my great-grandfather? What was her journey to the United States like? My Grandma Carmen is getting older now, too. I wish I could call her up and have more to say than just “Hola! Como estas?” I hear, from secondhand sources, that the chance meeting between my grandfather and her was like the plotline of an old black-and-white Harvard Summer Review | 33 Hablas Español? Hollywood movie, one that involved two strangers and a love note delivered to the wrong Carmen. I’m sure my grandmother could stammer the story in broken English, but she doesn’t have a full command of the language, and I’m afraid most of the beauty of the story would be lost in translation. To hear it told in Spanish—and to understand it!—would be a wonderful thing. Sometimes I wonder why I don’t know Spanish. Why do I feel foreign when I walk into the predominantly Mexican-American barrio where my grandmother lives? How can one family change so much with each generation? My Abuelita, I’m told now, was a farmer who lived most of her life in Mexico. She was a true workingclass Mexican. My grandmother grew up on that farm and moved to the United States with my grandfather where they achieved their dream of opening up a Mexican restaurant. They were true Mexican-Americans. My mother sported an afro in the 70s, and my father grew long hair in the 80s and changed his middle name to Zappa in honor of the rock-and-roll legend. They moved to a beautiful middle-class suburb and are the epitome of true Americans, albeit questionable Chicanos. As without culture as I am, I believe there are a few things that keep me linked to my descendents. When I was born, my great-grandmother took one look at me and said, “Es Chímpas!” Unfortunately, the name Chímpas stuck, though it changed into Chimp, Chimpie, or Cheep-ass depending on whichever transmutation my brother decided to tease me with. I thought it was the worst gift my great-grandmother could have given me. For a while, we tried to figure out what it meant. At first, we thought it was Spanish for a kind of insect. Then we assumed it had something to do with a monkey or a chimpanzee. We settled on my grandmother’s definition: “a wisp of unruly hair that won’t stay put,” which seemed fitting for me. As much as I used to hate it, that special name—Crazy Hair—is now an honor. I am a Chicano because I have a ridiculous nickname, which, I’m told, is a very Chicano thing to have. Sometimes I feel as though I don’t know much about the culture I came from; sometimes I feel “white-washed.” Sure, I eat tamales on Thanksgiving, but my inability to understand the language is what keeps me from la raza. Still, everyday I see other Chicanos who are like me, in that we are living in America where all 34 | Harvard Summer Review Rudy A. Martinez of our families are becoming more and more assimilated. Some live in barrios where people speak Spanish on the street, while some, like me, can’t say a Hail Mary to save their lives. Some don’t consider themselves Chicano at all. Some are politicians, writers, or doctors who live in white-collar neighborhoods. Some know the names of more Holy Santos than others. Some might scorn me for not knowing Spanish. But the culture is not lost in me entirely, and I know that if I don’t carry on the knowledge of my ancestors and of my great-grandmother, then it will be. Although I cannot pass on my Abuelita’s wonderful rice and beans, I can still sing all the words to “Duerme se mi niño,” and I suppose that’s a good start. Harvard Summer Review | 35 Black Hat Falling Black Hat Falling Michael McLawhorn I was perhaps halfway down when the ladder turned to dust. I fell into darkness with one uncomfortable thought: Backup, West, you didn’t call for backup yet. The shock of my body hitting the flat rock floor below left me stunned. When my gaze cleared, I found myself staring helplessly up at the swing of a hanging electric light. Reports of pain staggered in from all sectors of my body, and my mind idly wondered what part of me had hit the lamp on the way down. The last few hours replayed in my mind. I’d found the faith healer in a small Baptist church in the bayou north of New Orleans. He was as good as advertised, praising the Lord and removing illness with a touch. He’d spotted me almost as soon as I’d entered his church. I could see the fear in his eyes, the sweat on his face as I coolly watched him from the pews. I knew he’d run the moment the service ended, and I followed him, back through the swamp and into the half-blocked stone tunnel. I was pretty certain he wasn’t armed. It hadn’t occurred to me then that he didn’t need to be. Lying on the rocky floor, almost delirious with pain, I sank down into myself, waiting for the finishing blow. After an immeasurable moment, it didn’t come. I took stock. Head? I could wiggle it a little, turn it enough to see the pile of wood shavings that had been a thick oak ladder bolted to the wall. It had seemed quite solid moments before. Damn. That could be me. He’s more dangerous than I expected. I hoped he wasn’t strong enough to do that to me. Arms? Both elbows seemed to be all right. Putting weight on my right hand sent lances of pain through my head. My involuntary moan turned into a silent groan. Not the wrist again. I tried pushing myself across the floor with my legs. They, at least, seemed to be in good working order. I reached a wall, and using elbows and my left hand, leveraged myself up into a kneeling position. A glance around the dimly lit room showed no immediate threat. I awkwardly pulled my phone from my right pants pocket with my left hand. In doing so, I felt a jab of pain in my thigh that would at best be a nasty bruise by tomorrow. I flipped the phone open. The screen had the crazed, psychedelic colors of a cracked liquid crystal display. I tried the power 36 | Harvard Summer Review Michael McLawhorn button uselessly for a few moments before discarding it. It would have shamed me if any of my colleagues saw me like this. I pulled myself together. Time for a different approach. I touched my holstered gun for reassurance. Left handed, I had my holster positioned accordingly, which was probably the first break I got. So I was armed. Now where am I? A large room at the bottom of a sixty-foot drop. The electric lamps hanging from the ceiling were all on a single wire, and their swinging motion cast shadows that capered crazily at the corners of my spotty vision. Thankfully, my target had left the lights on when he came through here. Rails for mine carts came in from several dark openings congregating near a small, caged elevator, now long disused. Its cable rose up to a pulley distant above from a large metal case with a crank and gas motor. A wooden table with a few chairs leaned against one wall, and a badly rusted time card punch clock hung on the opposite wall next to a large switch for the electricity. The air stank of wet coal dust. I knew I’d be a sitting duck in the elevator. From here, he could cut the power or the cables. There was no way out without handling the target, one way or another. I ground my teeth in frustration at the impulsive decision to pursue him into the abandoned mine. Retreat was not an option. It was time to consider my prey. He was born Raymond Mercer DuValle to a Creole family in the St. Martin Parish of New Orleans. His mother was the youngest sister of five and the black sheep of her upper-class family. His father was a handsome laborer and musician; probably part African with connections to the Voudoun community. His mother’s family did not support the match, and he’d grown up in the desperately poor parts of the city, surrounded by grifters and pimps. His mother, raised Catholic, turned to a local revivalist mission to keep herself and her son out of wickedness. The echo of something falling rang through one of the tunnels. I swung around to try to place the direction and grew dizzy at the sudden movement. The floor seemed to wobble, and I fell forward, retching. The red streaks in my vomit added a new sense of urgency to my plight. Come on, West. You’re hurt, he’s scared. It’s time to think your way out of this. And that means trying to connect with him. I pushed myself painfully back to my feet. “Raymond.” My voice echoed back to me, rough and strangely distorted. “Raymond, we’re both stuck down here now. We should Harvard Summer Review | 37 Black Hat Falling work together to get out of here. We don’t need to fight. I’ve come to help you. If you just surrender peacefully, this doesn’t have to end badly for either of us.” I took a deep breath and focused my mind. One thing that makes Agents like me able to hunt Deviants like Raymond is that we have talents similar to theirs. Untrained, or mistrained, Raymond’s gifts made him a danger to himself and everyone around him. He’d already left one young woman deranged beyond recovery. His abilities, his difference, coupled with superstition and ignorance would eventually destroy his mind. His congregation, his friends, his neighbors, anyone might be the next victim if, no when, he loses control again. By contrast, I’d been given the best Scientific training. In theory, under the watchful eyes of the Psych Chaplains, I should be able to use my abilities without loss of health or sanity. They would remain predictable and controlled. Controlled by whom? That’s always the sticking point. Fearing another fall, I resisted the urge to shake my head in mute denial. I pushed my doubts down. Too much thought like that might show up on a Performance Review, which might lead to uncomfortable questions and uncertain consequences. “Raymond. My name is Agent West. I didn’t come here to hurt you. I need to talk to you about what you can do.” And what you’ve already done. “I, that is, we can help you.” As my echoes died away, I heard only the distant drip of water in response. I took a deep breath, trying to feel the traces of his passing, to use my talent to think my way into his mind. My nose tingled with the smell of fear and anger, recent and fresh. “I’m sure you’ve heard all kinds of scary things about us, Raymond. I’ve spoken to lots of people just like you. Some of you call us the Men in Black, or Bogeymen, or Black Hats. You think we’re part of a conspiracy or a secret cult, that we’re the bad guys who want to hurt you. But we’re not movie monsters or part of some paranoid fantasy, Raymond.” I was feeling a little giddy. I didn’t know if it was blood loss, shock, or a side effect of trying to open my mind to his. My usual mental focus was wavering, collapsing, and my thoughts skidded wildly in my head. I’m pretty sure I kept my voice steady, though, calm and reassuring. That’s what I tried to do, anyhow. “But it’s just not true, Raymond,” I tried to reassure. “I’m as human as you are.” And that, at the heart of it, was the question 38 | Harvard Summer Review Michael McLawhorn that had been haunting me for the last few months. For years, I’d been trained, no, let me be honest, I’d been indoctrinated. The unusually gifted men and women I work with, day in and out, to protect humanity were officially called P-sensitives. Unofficially, we called ourselves the Awakened. We were trained in the most modern scientific ways to channel subtle and gross energies in controlled ways. One of the types of wild, unpredictable rogue talents that we hunted were designated Deviants, class three: Anthromorphs. They generally looked like humans, like us, in every way. Unlike some of the other classes, they tended to be drawn from or perhaps to the superstitious, the religious, the socially outcast, and the revolutionary. They could be found among the disenfranchised or among young people with few ties. I knew that some Agents betrayed the Order, went rogue, joined the other side. I suspected that some of the Deviants I’d captured had been taken to reeducation centers, with the dream of turning them into Awakened Agents or Scientists, perhaps even Accountants or Chaplains. All of which left me with a moral dilemma: If he wasn’t really human, then perhaps neither was I. And if he was really human, were the things that my Agency, and the Utopian Order as a whole doing to them justifiable? Were they right? Were we the fascist monsters the others saw us as, and they the misunderstood heroes? I didn’t know. I couldn’t know. My legs had grown stiff, and when I moved them, a knife of fresh pain shook me from my reverie. I was trying to get inside Raymond’s thoughts and instead was losing myself inside my own. Brother Gabriel was a handsome man, young and with a powerful presence. While riding a tide of fire and brimstone, his voice could weaken the knees of even the geriatric women of his flock, and it was an uncommon younger woman who didn’t harbor devilish feelings when she saw him. Esther DuValle (nee Mercer) was thrown into desperate circumstances when her husband abandoned her and her six-year-old son to pursue his dreams of musical fame in Chicago. Gabriel helped Esther and took a special interest in her son. Young Raymond was clever and hungry for male approval, having had so little from his father. He threw himself into Bible studies and theology, becoming passionate about Christ even as Gabriel and Esther started to become passionate in an entirely different way. On his ninth birthday, he burst into his mother’s bedroom, eager for birthday gifts and fun. What he saw instead scared and Harvard Summer Review | 39 Black Hat Falling confused him. Gabriel persuaded him to silence, but a distance grew between the boy and his father figure. After a time, Gabriel stopped visiting Esther and eventually left the New Orleans mission for greener pastures. Raymond blamed himself for Gabriel’s departure from their life and harbored a secret shame. “We’re not ghosts, Raymond. We’re people doing a job. Someone once said, ‘If you drop me down a goddamned mine shaft, do I not bleed?’ After that fall I’m bleeding a lot. I’d like to get out of here and see a doctor. Come on, Raymond, a nine-year-old wouldn’t be afraid of me right now.” Raymond started getting into fights in his teens. The records were sketchy, but it appears that his mother may have been sliding down the slippery slope from desperately taking boyfriends for financial security to more mercenary relationships. Some of her boyfriends ignored Raymond. Others saw him as a nuisance or worse. One saw him as something more. Thirteen-year-old Raymond broke his nose and his leg with a baseball bat before the cops finally came. When some of the man’s history with other boys came to light, he didn’t press charges. But Raymond still spent a few weeks in Juvenile Hall before the case was dropped. About that time is probably when he started drinking. “You’ve probably heard terrible things. We kill people like you, or we dissect them to see what makes them tick. That’s just not true.” Not anymore, anyway. In the Academy, I had watched the 1950s training videos and the footage of Agent Hawkins’s court martial, in April of 1962. He’d led an armed team of Agents deputized by the recently commissioned Research Ethics Board on a midnight armed raid into the Bioweapon Research Division. They took the five head Eugenicists prisoner and leaked their research summaries to the rank and file. Hawkins was drummed out of the service at the time, but these days he was a hero to most of us at the Agency. He liberated twenty-seven surviving P-sensitives that night and euthanized those for whom the experimental alterations were too horrible to bear. Eight of those rescued had themselves later enrolled in the Academy. One of them was my Ethics teacher there, Dr. Irving Freeman. He taught us that too much faith in the rightness of our cause could lead to a fatal kind of tunnel vision, and not just for the Deviants we hunted. In my life, on and off the job, 40 | Harvard Summer Review Michael McLawhorn he was one of very few people who seemed more concerned with what was right than what was expedient or acceptable. I’ve always wanted to be more like him. I let my own doubts rise and spill over. I imagined them washing down the tunnels, touching Raymond. Come on Raymond, feel together with me now. I’m not sure I want to bring you in. Now, you try to be just a little less sure I’m your enemy. I don’t want to have to be your enemy. “Raymond. I understand you not wanting to trust me, but are you listening to me? Are you there?” I heard the echoes of footsteps. He was closer now. I could almost feel him listening. Come, on, Raymond. Acknowledge me. Just a little gesture to bring us closer together. “Raymond?” “Stop saying my name!” His voice was cracked, shrill, a bit frightened, and a lot angry. I felt the hum of his emotions, and then, with an elastic snap, an electric thrill shot through my body, from scalp to toes. I’d made contact. I could hear the quiet, fearful murmur of his thoughts inside my head. I began to see into the parts of Raymond my research had not revealed to me. Raymond’s power awoke in him while he was dying, out in the swamps. His young wife had left him after he’d beaten her in a drunken rage. He hadn’t been able to hold down a decent job in the two years since his mother had died. He’d started drinking hard again, right after the funeral. Since then, everything had gotten ugly for him. In desperation for something to eat, he’d gone off into the swamp to poach crayfish. Instead, he’d surprised a rattlesnake and taken a bite to his neck. Lying in the mud, his chest burning, he struggled to breathe. Against his will, his life flooded through his mind, an empty series of failures, shames, and regrets, and then the simple comfort of studying Bible verses with Brother Gabriel. Fragments of psalms he had memorized floated up in his mind. “The sorrows of death compassed me.” The cold grasp of mud about him was the hand of Death pulling his body down. He no longer cared whether he deserved to suffer or to die. With the cold seeping into his hands and feet, the wet green smell of the bayou choking his feeble breath, he surrendered to death. In that moment, he found a final prayer, “Into thine hand I commend my spirit.” In an instant, cold was replaced by warmth. The damp grasp of death was replaced by weightlessness. Light above him blinded his eyes, but after a moment, something like a person, but larger, greater, seemed to overshadow him. A voice that bore only traces Harvard Summer Review | 41 Black Hat Falling of his own spoke to him, through him. “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.” Back in his body, the burning in his chest became a hearth fire of living joy. He floated out of the muck and to his feet. All about him, he could feel the pulse of the wetlands, the life flowing through him and it, tying all God’s creatures together. He could see through himself, his bones and heart and blood. The thin shadow of the snake’s poison burned away in the golden light. Beneath it, he saw a deeper sickness. A brittle, green, glassy vein of damage ran through his body. The light behind his eyes recognized it, but it took him a moment to comprehend. Liquor. And with the name came the power and will to act. He grasped at it, the golden beam of his enlightenment reaching into his own flesh. He tried to pull it from him, only to feel its deep roots catch at his insides, making his blood burn. Tears blurred his vision, but he was determined that this moment of salvation not be spoiled by cowardice. He ripped and tore at the poisonous hunger, weeding his body of its hungry roots. Collected outside him, it looked, to his new sight, like a vicious, many headed snake. It bit and bit at the golden hands of his power, but its teeth could find no purchase in him. He cast it away from him, and when it flew back toward him, he struck it down, dead with a bolt of light. Tears streaked the mud coating his face. His body burned with pain, but he felt alive beyond measure. He exulted for a long moment in his salvation. He raised his voice up in praise to the Almighty and swore to serve him in every way. It was the first promise of his new life, and he knew that he would keep it whatever the price. I fell to my knees, shaken out of my own flesh by the power of Raymond’s vision of Awakening. I knew he’d felt it, too. He knew that I’d been inside his private memory of revelation. Afterimages of Raymond’s golden enlightenment faded in my burning eyes. I reached for my gun, but my hand was shaking so badly that I dropped it. I groped for it when a blow struck me from behind and I was pulled into unconsciousness. I woke up, bound to a wooden chair by wire. I didn’t feel the rough hangover pain from being knocked out; instead, I was suffused with a euphoric delight and ease. My body felt buoyant, 42 | Harvard Summer Review Michael McLawhorn completely without pain or discomfort. Facing me from his own chair, a tanned man in his twenties with dark brown hair and pale blue eyes sat watching me. His buttoned shirt was pressed and white, streaked now with coal dust and grime. His pants still had the neat crease over black patent leather shoes shined to their Sunday best. His long narrow fingers held a gun I recognized as my own. It wasn’t pointed at me, just held cautiously in his lap. He stared at my face intensely, his expression a mix of wariness and concern. “Agent West. May I ask your first name, or did they take it when they gave you your badge and gun?” His voice had the rich New Orleanian drawl, but his tone was arch. He seemed all confidence and self-assurance now. He thought he had me. “What game are you playing at, Raymond?” “If you’re not going to give me your first name, I’m going to ask you to stop being so free with mine.” My gut twisted for a moment. Gazing into his eyes, it was harder not to sense his emotions than to sense them. He was angry and tense enough to be dangerous. “I don’t...my first name is Jubal.” “Jubal? That’s unusual. Were you named after an uncle or an aunt?” His tone was casual, almost friendly. It didn’t seem natural that he was so composed without while so many intense emotions churned inside him. I realized with a flash of surprise and worry that it wasn’t his emotions, but my own that I was sensing. It was strange that they would feel so alien, so unconnected to me. “Jubal is...well, it’s short for Jubilation.” He laughed. I thought, with a distant but familiar flare of resentment, that he was mocking me. But his smile warmed and he seemed delighted, pleased. I was more than a little confused when I heard my voice continuing. “My mother was very spiritual. She thought that all life was a cause for celebration.” I squirmed against my bonds. I knew then that something was seriously wrong with me. I never tell anyone, not even my closest friends at the Agency, about my name. A million miles away from myself, I felt a cold dread forming in my chest. Choking on my confusion, I asked, “Why am I…? You must have... what have you done to me?” Raymond looked thoughtful for a moment before he answered. “I would say that I touched your soul, leaving you more open to your heart. I suspect that a doctor would tell you something about raised endorphin levels or some such. The words don’t change the meaning though.” “How dare you.” I meant the words to be confrontational, but Harvard Summer Review | 43 Black Hat Falling they came out weak, halfhearted, empty of threat or meaning. I couldn’t muster the slightest trace of tangible anger at what he’d done to me. Somewhere, far away, I shivered with fear. “How dare I? Are you even the slightest bit aware of your own hypocrisy? You came to my church where I was spreading the word of God. You came intending to capture or to kill me. And after that, if I survived, you would have turned me over to your precious Agency, which would have tried to destroy my soul.” My euphoria dimmed somewhat in the face of his anger. “That’s not true. We help people like you; we offer to train you, or to cure you.” My protests sounded feeble in my ears. I lacked all conviction. He leaned in close. His eyes seemed to water with sadness, anger, and pity for me. “Would you cure me of my God? Would you train me not to believe in the one who saved me? Teach me to worship false idols in His place? Your people lust for control, for power, and you destroy anything or anyone who won’t submit. This isn’t some Western with white hats and black…actually, no, maybe that’s exactly what this is. Cowboys and Indians. Except, these days, we all know better now, don’t we? The cowboys wanted all the land for themselves, and they didn’t care how they took it. Some of the Indians went peacefully and some fought, but the only thing that mattered was that the men with their guns,” he brandished my service piece for emphasis, “got a hold of everything they decided they wanted.” His contempt hit me like a blow. I reeled between fear of his anger to sadness that I’d displeased him. Whatever he’d done to me had left my emotional barriers in tatters. “Why did you come after me anyway? What did I ever do to get on your radar? I’ve lived in New Orleans for years and am hardly the scariest thing around. For one thing, the town is lousy with fucking Vampires.” Without warning, I swung out of depression and into intense, manic good humor. “Deviants, class one, Hemovores,” I cheerily corrected him. He sighed in frustration and touched my face. The euphoria drained out of me, leaving me feeling tired, cold, empty, and unemotional. “So, why did you come after me?” he asked, but I could see in his eyes that he already knew. “Sally Marie Clemmons. I found her in an asylum. Her mind had been tampered with to the point where she didn’t have any 44 | Harvard Summer Review Michael McLawhorn clear ego boundaries anymore. I did what I could to help her, but she was too damaged. My only lead was that she had been married to a man who’d gone into faith healing a year ago. When I started to investigate, I realized you were the real deal…and therefore, very dangerous.” Raymond looked like I’d punched him. “Sally...” I was feeling more myself again. The aftereffect of my earlier emotional roller coaster had wearied me, but my mind was clearing. “Let me tell you what I think happened. After you got your powers, you decided that God meant for you and her to be together. So you found her. But maybe she was living with someone else, and you made her desire you again, made her feel like she loved you. You took her away with you. At first, you both seemed happy, but something was off about her. Her behavior became erratic, then self-destructive, the side effect of too much mental alteration. Your anger and resentment at her for leaving you became part of your control over her. Consciously, you wanted her to love you again. Subconsciously, you wanted to humble her, to punish her for her faithlessness. And with your power, everything you wanted became reality.” Raymond was shaking now. I could see my words had torn a hole in his self-image. “You wanted me to catch you, Raymond. You wanted me to find you, so you could be punished. It wasn’t your fault, really. You were never trained, never learned properly how to control your powers. We can help you. We can teach you how to be someone who doesn’t hurt the people he loves without meaning to.” He slapped me, hard. “I’ve prayed for forgiveness for my sins. What happened to Sally Marie was a damn shame, but don’t you dare go using that as an excuse for what you intend to do to me. I’ve seen the wreckage left when you people ‘cure’ someone, and it’s sometimes worse than what happened to Sally.” He stood and started to pace, my gun in his hand. “Now, listen to me Jubilation West. I could have fled while you were unconscious. I could have killed you. It’s possible I could have even made you forget yourself for a time.” He shook his head, resigned. “But those things wouldn’t have been practical. Fleeing, I’d have lost contact with everyone I love. Your organization is very well organized. Spy satellites, computer traces, government records, police APBs. Yes, I do know a lot about you. Those of us who have slipped your net may not be very good at working together, but we do help each other against you and your so-called Utopian Order. Harvard Summer Review | 45 Black Hat Falling No, running would have been bad. And killing you wouldn’t have helped either. For every one of you that falls, another comes in his place. Truly, your kind are legion.” The aches and pains the earlier euphoria had kept at bay were now returning. The bruise from the cell phone on my right thigh was hurting again. Surprisingly, my hands, tied behind my back, still didn’t hurt. And that worried me. With my wits were returning, I tried hard to think how to turn this situation to my advantage. “No, killing you would have been as dangerous as leaving you alive. And the sin would have weighed heavily on my soul. So while you slept, I prayed for guidance and finally saw what I had to do. I have to save your soul, Jubilation West. I have to bring you out of darkness and into light.” His face seemed to glow with a golden aurora in the holy excitement of his discovered purpose. His hands reached toward my face, and as they touched it, I felt a surge of uncontrolled emotions. Oh, shit. “There is a shadow on your soul, a shadow of forgetfulness. It has twisted the good in you to a dark purpose. Now, remember, and the truth shall set ye free.” Frances Conner married James West in the early seventies. Together they joined a commune in Oregon, far from her dirty, industrial Indiana hometown. She lived among them, growing crops, singing songs of celebration. Soon enough her son would be seen swimming naked with the other children in the small pond, behind the farmhouse, on hot summer days. She believed that the simple life, shared with others of good hearts, could cure ills of society. In time, she lost faith in her new family there, but not in its ideals, and took her son back with her to live in the suburbs of Gary, Indiana. Under the dubious clouds cast up by the skeletal fingers of factory smokestacks, Jubilation entered his first public school. In that first year, he received a first class education in self-defense. He fought over his name and his mother’s strange behavior and dress; he fought because he didn’t know about the right sports teams, or the style of clothing, or how to pass as a normal kid. After a few years, the strangeness of his new life faded. Everyone knew him as West, and he did well but not too well in both classes and sports. Then, one day in his teens, the visitors started coming. Strangely dressed and strangely behaved men and women started visiting his mother secretly and at odd times. One afternoon, after school, a 46 | Harvard Summer Review Michael McLawhorn dark-skinned, bony man in a wide-brimmed hat came to the door. He wore a necklace of bone and bore a scent of ashes. His mother seemed both pleased and upset to see him, met with him privately for an hour, and was very sad after he left. Her son asked her who the man was, and she said it was someone she knew from another life. She swore him to secrecy. One midnight, in July, the night of a lunar eclipse that young West had stayed up to see, the woman with stars in her hair came. After watching the eclipse from his window, he’d been secretly reading the latest Amazing Stories, a towel jammed against the edge of his bedroom door to hide the light from his reading lamp. Outside he heard a tinkling of bells and climbed onto his fire escape. Below, in the yard, he saw his mother and the strange woman. Moonlight seemed to glisten on her pale skin, and small lights drifted in and out of her pink hair. He heard his mother’s voice in hushed angry tones. She told the woman to leave, that she didn’t have time for their games anymore, that she had to look out for her family. Young West felt excited, thinking that his mother had some secret other life that she’d kept hidden from him. His hope was confirmed when the woman left not by the back gate, but by fading in a shimmer of starry light. That night he slept, dreaming of a life of magic and adventure. The next day, the dark men came. They wore black hats, dark glasses, and stern faces with an air of authority and dread. His mother sent him to his room, her face full of resignation and fear when she admitted them. An hour later they left. She came up to his bedroom, pale and tense. She hugged him like she was afraid she’d never see him again. She told him that he’d be going to a special school for children with special gifts, and that he’d have to be a good boy and write to her every week. Then she burst into tears. Young West was scared for her, and for himself. He didn’t understand. The next day the men came again, and mother and son left their home for the last time. My anguished scream tore through the cave. I wailed in shock and despair at the memories Raymond’s touch had released. Part of my mind tried to negotiate, rationalize. It pointed out these memories might be false, constructed, tricks or illusions, lies. But most of me howled with animal despair. Rage and hopelessness rose in equal parts, lending me strength. Suddenly, I found I’d torn my way free of the bonds, a broken piece of chair leg still lashed to my Harvard Summer Review | 47 Black Hat Falling left hand. Berserk, I swung it like a club in front of me. I felt the thud and heard the crack as it connected with someone. Something metal clattered to the ground. Raymond’s cry of pain cut through my rage for a moment, leaving enough awareness for me to pause, breathing raggedly. I lifted Raymond by his starched collar with my right hand while my left pressed his throat. Raymond’s hands grasped for me. He tried to touch me again with his power. This time I was ready for him. I brought up my fury in a shield before me, denying the seductive power of his euphoric touch. The pain he’d released by burrowing into my forgotten past became a knife, which I plunged toward his heart. Reflexively, I threw him backward. He crashed, back first, onto the stone floor with groan. Choking and gasping for air, he scrambled away from me toward the wall. In a smooth, practiced motion, I swept up my fallen gun and leveled it at his face. Without decision, without thought, I disabled the safety on the gun and my forefinger applied the gentlest pressure to the trigger. The tiniest contraction would release a deadly projectile into Raymond’s face, which was frozen with fear at his imminent death. I didn’t fire. For some reason, I didn’t fire. Gradually, my breathing grew steady. His eyes went from mute terror to a kind of hopeful fear. “Why did you heal my wrist?” I demanded. “What?” “I asked why you healed my wrist? You had me, you didn’t need to do that. Obviously, you put yourself in danger. So, why?” “I wanted to help you. I was afraid that if I tied you up with the wrist the way it was, it would have been damaged beyond my ability to heal.” “Was that real?” I didn’t know what I wanted him to tell me. I didn’t really doubt the memory, even if I hadn’t remembered my mother in years. I should have remembered her. The memory made a kind of necessary sense, even if I didn’t have it all figured out yet. And I knew it was not prudent to trust anything a Deviant said. “There was a shadow in your soul, bending your heart away from its true nature. I could see the shadow, and I tried to lift it away. But there’s still more there.” I shook my head in denial. “No.” “It’s true, West.” I shook my head harder, my finger on the trigger tensed slightly. It didn’t matter what was true. My survival was as doubt48 | Harvard Summer Review Michael McLawhorn ful now as his. When they debriefed me they’d not only see the well-suppressed doubts I’d been harboring these last few months, they’d also find the memory that perhaps my mother had been a Deviant and that I knew they’d taken it—and her—away from me. My loyalty would be in doubt, and they’d take stern measures to protect the secrets I knew. Suddenly the logic of going rogue was clear to me. Yes, I would be hunted, but at least out there on the run, I’d have hope and freedom, a chance to live as myself for a little while. I searched for other choices. I could confess, go to the Chaplains, deny the memory, and have them put me back the way I was, ignorant and content. I weighed the cost of losing my mother’s memory all over again. Could I give it up? Finally, there was the middle path, try to hide the memory, keep it secret and safe. Go rogue a little on the inside only. “Please,” he begged, “don’t kill me. We can both get out of here alive. You can just let me go.” I was angry. He’d put me in danger by ripping away my forgetfulness. It was one thing to wonder whether or not I really believed we were really doing good. Now I wondered whether I ever should have been an Agent at all. I wondered what desperate bargain my mother might have struck that brought me into the Agency and took her...My head surged with static for a moment. I had known. I could feel the ghost of memory scratching at the door of my mind. That was the only explanation. I’d known what had really happened to her, and they made me forget that, too. I holstered my gun and knelt down in front of Raymond. “Alright,” I whispered. “You started this, now finish it. Don’t try to put me in thrall again, or I will kill you.” Whatever zealous urges had bolstered his confidence before had collapsed. “Will you let me go, after?” I nodded. “I’ll have to. Unless no one ever finds out about this, I’m in as much danger as you are.” He gulped. “Alright.” He touched my face. Frances Conner knelt in the corner of the small room, scratching her face bloody. Outside, looking in through a viewing window, were Dr. Kavanaugh and a young man, looking to be in his midteens and wearing a Trainee’s badge emblazoned with the name West. “She has responded poorly to the treatments as you see. We Harvard Summer Review | 49 Black Hat Falling successfully removed her p-wave sensitivity surgically, but she’s suffering badly from the side effects.” Dr. Kavanaugh tried to express concern, but his cold nature robbed his words of any compassion. West looked at her with anguish. “Can’t you just let her out of there?” “She’s already tried to take her life twice. We’re running out of therapeutic options.” Young West turned away from the window, squeezing his eyes. “As next of kin, Trainee, we’d like your permission to establish a power of attorney for after her care is discontinued.” West wheeled about, flashing with anger. “You mean when she’s dead!” Dr. Kavanaugh blinked calmly at the outburst. Behind his glasses, he seemed to be studying West as if looking for some trace in him of the pathology of his mother. “I’m going to have to ask you to take a sedative, Trainee. You’re clearly not thinking rationally.” “No, Doctor, I’m fine.” West felt a cold rush of anxiety and forced a calm he didn’t feel into his voice. Did the good doctor think he’d crack the way his mother had? He returned the man’s gaze, trying to look self-assured, tough. A woman’s voice, shockingly lucid, interrupted their face off. “Jubie. Don’t forget to wear your socks.” Boy and man turned to see Frances looking out at them through the observation window. “Jubie, it’s cold in here. Tell your godmother to bring the pumpkin around. I need to get to the ball.” Her voice was plaintive now. Young West looked at his mother with a mix of pity and helplessness. “Jubilation West,” her stern tone cracked like a familiar whip. “What have I told you about taking candy from strangers!” Now, wistful: “I’ll always love you, Jubie. Don’t forget me.” The boy fled from her, wracked with guilt and confusion. The next morning, he woke in his dormitory bed. He knew his mother had died years before of cancer, and was surprised to feel the loss of her so keenly after so many years. But life in the Academy was busy, and he had a lot of work to do. I sat next to Raymond. Unashamed, I cried for myself, for her, and for mistakes that couldn’t be undone. After a long time, we wordlessly helped each other up and made our way to the aging 50 | Harvard Summer Review Michael McLawhorn elevator. I didn’t know where we were going next, but we’d spent too long hiding in the darkness. Harvard Summer Review | 51 The Weight of Divinity The Weight of Divinity Dawn Kotapish For nine years of her childhood, my mother had lived as a goddess. She’d been chosen at the age of three to serve as Kathmandu’s Kumari Devi—the Living Goddess, special protector of the King of Nepal and inhabited by the bloodthirsty goddess Kali, slayer of demons. But when she began menstruating at the age of twelve years and three months, my mother was dethroned, and a search was begun for a new Kumari Devi. In the predominant religion, which was essentially an amalgamation of Hindu and Buddhist beliefs, bloodletting and the potential loss of virginity belonged to the realm of humans, not goddesses. My mother never really recovered from those years of living under the weight of divinity. Her worries over me bordered on the pathological. It was as if she took the normal worries a mother has for her children and doubled them, assuming the kind of allencompassing responsibility that only a deity can claim. When she couldn’t afford to send me to private school, she blamed herself. When I didn’t pass my college entrance exam in a system notorious for nepotism and fraud, she refused food for a week. And when I married an American man and left Nepal for California—in her eyes the most egregious betrayal of my country possible—she stopped talking to me altogether. Every two weeks I sent her a letter, even though she couldn’t read, along with photographs of her growing grandchildren, Raj and Maile. When Raj was ten and Maile thirteen, I was sitting at my desk writing my mother another never-to-be-answered letter when Maile announced that she was going out. I stopped her to ask my usual battery of questions—who are you going with, where are you going, how late will you be out—when I looked at my daughter for the first time as I imagined my mother would see her. It was 1984, and, like all her friends, Maile’s latest idol was Madonna, who had just released her infamous album, Like a Virgin. Although we had to drag her to church on Sundays, Maile was dripping in crosses—around her neck, in her ears, on her wrists—and decked out in the requisite lace and heavy makeup—her lips hot red, her brows artificially darkened against a foundation too porcelain for her honey complexion. I thought of the photos I had seen of my mother during her goddess years: her eyes so heavily lined with 52 | Harvard Summer Review Dawn Kotapish kohl she looked like an Egyptian princess, her lips the color of fire, the mystical black and gold “third eye” painted in the center of her forehead. My mother’s spin with divinity had ended at puberty, while my daughter, at the threshold of adolescence, was just beginning hers. I decided that I would accept my mother’s silence no longer and that I would book two tickets to Kathmandu in the summer so my daughter could finally meet her grandmother. Yes, there would be an enormous cultural (never mind generational) divide to navigate. But I would begin by showing them that they weren’t as different as they might think, just as I had begun to realize, by my growing fears for my newly teenaged daughter, that perhaps my mother’s worries over me had not been so foreign from my own, and that we were all, in our own ways, caught between the limitations of our humanity and our longing to transcend it. Harvard Summer Review | 53 Henry Parker and the Summer of Love Henry Parker and the Summer of Love Jessica Rogers I was supposed to be in San Francisco with flowers in my hair, but I was stuck in Duluth with a father who drank too much, a mother who expected too much, and a radio that didn’t work. I guess if I had been in the City by the Bay, then I never would have met Henry Parker and had my own summer of love six years ago, in 1967. Henry wasn’t a particularly tall boy, but, as my father said, he wasn’t particularly a boy. He was nineteen going on thirty. I was a very young thirteen. He worked with his hands, fixing radios in the shop behind the gas station. That’s all I knew about him when he came to fix the old RCA, on June 14. I stood behind my father as he pushed open the screen door and looked Henry over. There wasn’t much to look at: broad shoulders, ruddy complexion, uncombed sandy hair that hung down over his left eye, a chipped front tooth. But those eyes! They were the clearest, most brilliant blue I’d ever seen; not even the boys in the movie magazines had those. They were like two robin’s eggs that someone had put under the Buffo-Matic at Jim’s Garage. He walked past me and my breath caught. He smelled bad, like a man, like sawdust and cigarette smoke. My father led him over to the radio, and he knelt down in front of it, real silent, just nodding while my father talked. When he was finished, he left Henry and me there, and I heard the familiar clink of ice cubes in a glass. Henry pretended not to hear and began to pull the radio apart. He looked to me like he was just tinkering, kind of like what my father tried to do the night the RCA stopped working. But after a while of watching him, I figured he really knew what he was doing. His hands are so dirty, I thought as he removed each part, placing them methodically in front of him. “What’s your name?” he said gruffly. His accent surprised me. He sounded more Southern than Midwestern, the way his tongue took its time on name. “Deborah.” I peered over his shoulder at the metal radio parts, feigning interest. “You know what you’re doing?” “I think I can manage.” He gave me a funny half smile. “How old are you, Deborah?” 54 | Harvard Summer Review Jessica Rogers “Thirteen… fourteen in September. How old are you, Henry Parker?” “Nineteen. Still nineteen in September.” He was funny. I liked funny. “Where are you from? You got parents?” I inquired. “Yeah, I got ‘em. Everybody’s got parents, don’t they?” I shrugged my shoulders and sat down next to him on the floor, cross-legged. My mother would tell me to sit like a lady, but she was at the grocery store. “I’m from North Carolina,” he answered finally. He looked at me with those aquamarine eyes, and I suddenly wished I had worn something better than blue jeans and an old, gray sweater. “What are you doing all the way out here then?” I only managed when he looked away from my face. He was silent for a while, then he glanced up at me intently. “Can I trust you?” he asked. I nodded earnestly. He leaned in real close and his fair hair fell in front of his eyes again. My heart was about to explode into my gut. “I ran away from home ten years ago. I just up and left one day. The circus was in town. The carnies, you know, they were looking for technicians. I don’t know. I guess I’ve just always been good with my hands.” “But… you were only nine?” I questioned. He nodded, continuing. “You grow up fast on the road. My folks—they were good folks as far as parents go—but they didn’t really get me, not like my new crowd.” “The carnies?” I couldn’t tell if he was pulling my leg or not. I wanted to believe him, but boys with robin’s eggs for eyes only meant trouble. “Yeah,” he said, a smile playing at the corner of his lips. “I like the freaks. They’re real to me, you know? More real to me than half the people in this town anyways.” “Liar,” I grinned broadly, duped. He looked away, hiding his own grin. “Do you read, Deborah?” I shrugged. “What do you read? Movie magazines?” My cheeks were so hot. I swear they were going to burn right off my face. “Sometimes… but I like other stuff too. Intellectual stuff, you know.” If he could pull my leg, I could pull his. Harvard Summer Review | 55 Henry Parker and the Summer of Love “Intellectual stuff. Is that right?” He whistled low and soft, pretending to be impressed. “What kind of stuff are we talking about here?” I wriggled my bare toes, trying to think of something my mother had hidden under her mattress. “The Bell Jar. I’ve read that.” He raised an eyebrow at me. I did the same to him. A challenge. He thought I was fibbing. “Oh, yeah? What’d you think of it?” “It was pretty good, you know. I mean, I’ve read better, but it gave me something to do.” “Who wrote that again?” “I forget.” “Wasn’t it that guy who lived in Spain for awhile? That exsoldier?” “Yeah, I think that’s the one.” “Oh, okay. Hemingway.” He nodded as a shadow of a smirk flitted across his face and disappeared. “You must like music. You’ve got a radio.” “Yeah, I like it alright… just as much as anybody else, I guess.” Why does some stupid old boy with dirty hands and a broken tooth make me so nervous? My heart was pounding so loudly. He could hear it clanging against my ribcage; I just knew it. “Who do you like? The Beatles?” he asked, shaking the hair out of his eyes. “Yeah, I like them. Everybody likes The Beatles, don’t they?” I was being a mockingbird and he knew it. He laughed anyway. “How’d you chip your tooth?” I asked before being able to stop myself. My mother would say it wasn’t polite to draw attention to flaws, that I didn’t deserve to know, but she wasn’t here anyhow. “I fell out of a tree,” he answered quickly. Didn’t look at me, just focused on the radio, fiddling with this and that. “How come?” I knew I was prodding, but I couldn’t help it. “What kind of dumb question is that? ‘How come’!” Henry shook his head and rubbed his palms along the front of his Levis, leaving a sooty streak along each thigh. “Well, it’s not like it’s hard to climb a tree. I mean, you go up, you come down.” “Yeah, well some people don’t come down so easy.” He said, slamming the cover back on the radio. “Go get your Pa. I’m done here.” 56 | Harvard Summer Review Jessica Rogers I stalked into the back part of the house, sullen and humiliated. My father stood at the kitchen window nursing vodka on the rocks. “The radio’s fixed,” I whispered. He nodded, not listening. “Your mother’s not home yet.” “The radio’s fixed,” I said again, louder this time. His eyes were shiny, like the glazed doughnuts we used to get on Sunday mornings before church. That was ages ago, when we actually went to St. Peter’s. We’d even get up early to get the sugar-glazed, raspberry jelly donuts from DeMaccio’s on our way to Mass. I’d sit in the car, legs kicking idly against the bottom of the bench seat while my father purchased them inside. Mom would sit up front and fiddle with her rosary, reciting Bible stories to me. Come to think of it, Mom was the only one who felt Sunday morning wasn’t really about the jelly doughnuts. My father turned at last and followed me into the living room, swirling the chips of ice around in his glass. “The radio’s fixed?” he asked Henry, who flicked it on. The Beatles’ new album—something about peppers. “Yes, sir.” Henry shoved his hair out of his eyes, looking less sure of himself in front of my father, a middle-aged foreigner in a coat and tie. “Good work, son,” my father said, extending his hand, a crumpled bill—too large—nestled in the palm. Everything was strange in that moment: Henry taking money from a suit, my father slurring “son,” the song about Mr. Pepper-Something, Henry’s eyes like turquoise charms, my reflection in them. It was almost two weeks after that night when I saw Henry again. I rode my bike down to the gas station, by the radio repair shop, just roaming around. I wore a cobalt blue sundress this time. The bell above the door clanged as I went in. Old Mr. Jensen looked up at me with a pleasant expression. It fell off when I asked where a certain Henry Parker was. “He lives upstairs. The stairwell is in the back, next to the supply closet.” He cocked his head to the side. “Did he do something?” I shook my head. The stairs were slanted badly to one side and the door at the top was painted a fading emerald. The edges of the doorway were worn and there were little ding marks where it looked as if someone had run a suitcase into it. I imagined Henry having a girl over. She’d wait as he got out his key. Maybe her hand would be tucked into his coat pocket, just wanting to touch something because it’s Harvard Summer Review | 57 Henry Parker and the Summer of Love touching him. And then we’d go inside… “Deborah?” Henry Parker asked as he swung the door open. Keys in hand, ready to leave, I observed. My mother would tell me to politely excuse myself. Tell him I don’t want to impose… I shook my mother out of my head. “Oh! Hi, Henry.” I said, suddenly wanting to turn emerald so I’d blend right into the door. He was wearing jeans again. I felt foolish and prissy; he probably thought I was a square. I looked down at his other hand and noticed a battered old guitar case. “You play?” I asked stupidly. I flushed crimson and looked at my hem. “Yeah, a little. Do you like the blues?” I nodded, half lying. He pushed the door open wider, inviting me in, and I ducked under his arm. It was a lousy one-room apartment, but I didn’t mind. He set the guitar case down and moved to clear off a dusty brown couch. “If you’re going somewhere…” I started politely. My mother would be proud. “No, it’s okay.” I looked up at him skeptically. “Not anymore,” he said. Not anymore! My brain chanted in private glee. “You’ve got a lot of books,” I deadpanned. They littered the shelves, the tabletop, the floor, and the couch—even the small bed in the corner. My pulse quickened at the realization that I was in Henry Parker’s bedroom. “I read a lot.” He walked over to the bed and picked up a book, handing it to me at my place on the couch. “The Bell Jar.” I nodded. “Great book.” “Sylvia Plath. Great woman. My favorite author.” I dropped the book on the table; it burned my hands. I stood up, wanting to leave, wanting to run away and not come back, wanting to hate Sylvia Plath and her awful jar. His eyes burned through the back of my skull, those chilling, aquamarine orbs. No. A pair of eggshells would not conquer me. I turned around, braver this time. “Play me a song,” I demanded. He smirked at me meanly, patronizing, and lit a cigarette. I crossed the room to where he was standing by the bed and took the cigarette from his fingers. The orbs flashed, intrigued. “You don’t know any Robert Johnson?” I posed another challenge. 58 | Harvard Summer Review Jessica Rogers I took a drag off the cigarette, trying to look like the movie stars. I should have just licked an ashtray. My brain was praying this wasn’t so bad if you just got used to it, while my lungs wanted to blow up like the A-bomb in vengeful retaliation. Henry stared at me for a long, hard while as I kept puffing away miserably. My throat silently exalted when he finally reached for his guitar case. He grabbed the cigarette from me and began to strum away at “Ramblin’ On My Mind.” His smoke-stained voice rumbled across the Delta, low and hoarse, right into this tiny apartment in Duluth, right into my very bones. “Little girl, little girl. I got mean things all on my mind,” he sang, cigarette dangling precariously out of the corner of his mouth, straw hair obscuring the turquoise gems, clothes rumpled like he’d slept in them for days. “I hate to leave you here, babe. But you treat me so unkind.” I stared down at my nervous hands, tangled up in the blue of my sundress, and let my eyes fall closed. I tilted the back of my head on the couch cushion and smiled softly. His voice flowed over me like molasses: smooth, slow, with a certain thickness to it, from smoke and from something else. I couldn’t quite figure it out. He had finished the song and I could feel him staring at me, but I wouldn’t open my eyes. “Do you read all of these?” I whispered and raised my eyebrows in the direction of the bookshelves, not wanting to look for fear of finding out it was all a dream. “Most of them. Some of them I just haven’t gotten to yet. Do you like Rimbaud?” I nodded in affirmation (Who cares if I’m a fraud?) and he sighed. “Me, too.” We stayed like that for over an hour, me sitting there with my eyes closed, while he read to me. He read lovely odes about kings and empires, sensual works about lovers—I opened my eyes for those parts—and dark poems about society and materialism. I had never seen anyone so filled with passion, as Henry was that night, reading poetry. I didn’t think words could do that to anyone, especially not to a radio repairman. After a while, he closed the book he was reading from and I lifted my head, disappointed. “You should get back. Your folks will be worried about you.” I couldn’t help but laugh. His head snapped up in surprise. “What?” Harvard Summer Review | 59 Henry Parker and the Summer of Love “My father’s a drunk, Henry.” “And your mother?” “She left, went to the grocery store, didn’t come back.” He didn’t say anything. I didn’t ask him to. He lit another cigarette, but didn’t offer me any. “I’m an orphan,” he said carefully. This one was not a lie; I just knew. “How old were you?” “Thirteen. Your age.” I inhaled sharply. “They both died at the same time?” He just nodded, looking at the bookshelves. “How did it happen?” His head snapped down and his eyes clouded over. Too far. “Fell out of a tree.” The cigarette sizzled sharply as he stubbed it out on the coffee table. He walked to the door, guitar still in hand, and pulled it open without another word. As I made my way down Henry Parker’s steps, my face burned in shame. It was not supposed to end like that. Yes, he was supposed to walk me to the door but he was also supposed to say goodnight and maybe, just maybe, I’d even get a goodnight kiss. But my mother was right. I failed. I stuck my nose in everybody’s business. Making my dramatic exit, Mr. Jensen’s disapproving glare only added to my mortification. He looked at me the only way a responsible businessman and father of four could look at me. I was, in Mr. Jensen’s eyes after all, a thirteen-year-old leaving a nineteen-yearold’s apartment after spending two hours with said chain-smoking, blues-playing nineteen-year-old doing God-knows-what in the middle of the night. Somehow, God-knows-what was always more exciting and less humiliating than real life. Henry came by again at the end of July when my father broke the television. My father had gone out for a drink at lunchtime and still wasn’t back. He probably wouldn’t remember what a television was. I sat on the floor in front of the turntable while Henry worked. We didn’t talk much, just listened to Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. After a half hour, headlight beams curved around the driveway and flashed through the plate glass window. My father was home. Henry shot me a sideways glance that I ignored. I pushed open the screen door and waited, back straight. “Sara!” my father bellowed, swinging his arms wildly as he climbed up the steps. “It’s Deborah. Mom’s not here.” I looked him straight in the eyes. They were dark and glassy; they were a drunk’s eyes. 60 | Harvard Summer Review Jessica Rogers “Where’s your mother?” he grasped me by the shoulders and I stiffened. Henry stood up uncomfortably. He took a step forward and paused; he waited while my father spoke. “Where is she? Jesus Christ, she’s your mother! How do you not know where your own mother is?” “She went to the store.” My voice came out strangled and foreign. I sounded raspy, old, tired. Dylan still sang on in the background, unhurried and mesmerizing: With your silhouette when the sunlight dims, into your eyes where the moonlight swims, and your match-book songs and your gypsy hymns, who among them would try to impress you? “What did you do, huh? What did you do, Deborah? You’ve got to do something pretty awful to make a mother leave her own child.” I shut my eyes, but I could still feel his breath on my face, hot and sour with drink. He turned away as Henry shuffled with his tools in the corner. “What? You’ve got a boy here? Is that it? You’re a little slut now, are you?” Tears prickled at the backs of my eyelids, but I would not cry. “Are you?” he asked, shaking me by the shoulders again. My eyes flew open. I shook my head and looked over at Henry seething in the corner. “No.” I tried to wriggle out of his grip, but he was too strong. “He’s fixing the television that you broke.” “That I broke?” he laughed cynically. “You broke it and you know you broke it because you’re a liar! You lie about everything! You’re just like you’re mother—a goddamned liar. ‘Oh, I’m just going to the grocery store. I’ll be back soon.’ Just like her—a liar and a slut! Get out of my house!” He hit me hard, bone against bone, his knuckles to my cheek. I tumbled backward and saw the familiar black spots in front of my eyes, smelled the iron scent of my own blood. Everything went hazy. “I said get out of my damn house, Sara!” Somehow Henry managed to walk me out to his beat-up Chevrolet and place me in the passenger seat without any of my knowledge. He put the key in the ignition and just drove. Neither of us had anywhere to go, simply anywhere but here. We ended up on a bridge, looking out over a sluggish blue-gray river and listening to the radio. Bob Dylan came on and our hands collided as we Harvard Summer Review | 61 Henry Parker and the Summer of Love both reached to switch it off. “Your cheek okay?” he ventured. I pressed my fingertips to it lightly to see. “It’ll be better in the morning.” Henry nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said, and he meant it. “Don’t be.” I looked up at him, his face half-hidden by the night, half-hidden by that gold hair of his. The moonlight caught the teal of his eyes and I saw myself reflected in them, just like the night he fixed the radio. His eyes were so bright and clear and he was so close; it was intoxicating. He looked at me and smiled a full, beaming grin. “I really like you, Deborah.” And that was it. I, Deborah Jean Simons, was officially in love with Henry Parker on July 28, 1967. And so I kissed him. I just leaned forward across the bench seat, swollen face and all, and had my first kiss on the best and worst night of my life. We carried on for a few more weeks, reading poetry and listening to records and finding out how good he really was with his hands. But I guess I should have listened to old Mr. Jensen when he asked if Henry did anything wrong the first night I visited his apartment because, unfortunately, “I really like you, Deborah” doesn’t translate into marriage and six kids. She was an English major at the College of St. Scholastica. A Catholic schoolgirl—I never stood a chance. I first saw her outside of the gas station, filling up her brand new ‘67 Chevy Camaro, a lot nicer than Henry’s old beat-up Bel Air. I waited on my bicycle around the corner of the repair shop as Henry came outside to look at her car. He said he was in the market. She said that was just fine by her. They talked for a long time, first about cars, and then school and English, and finally something about Verlaine and Rimbaud and love without limits. I tried to understand, but I couldn’t focus on anything but Henry Parker’s hands. And how close they were to hers. And how every time she moved her arms, her skirt rode up a little bit. And how he noticed and didn’t even try and pretend not to. And how she smiled and didn’t even need to toss her hair. After a while, Henry went up to his apartment and came back with a book. The Bell Jar. Suddenly my heart was in my throat and I couldn’t push it back down again. He was giving it to her and I was riding away at a million miles an hour, as fast as my legs could 62 | Harvard Summer Review Jessica Rogers carry me as my rusty bike clattered over the dirt road. He called after me, but I pretended not to hear. We both knew how noisy those dirt roads could get. Mr. Jensen said he married her a few years after that. Last I heard, they’d moved out to Chicago. Henry was playing in some local blues bars and putting himself through school while she taught poetry. Rimbaud, I think. I made out okay, too. I’m nineteen now, twenty in September. I stayed at home to take care of my father because, like Henry said, some people don’t come down so easy. He’s all I’ve got and he’s my family. That’s got to count for something. The next chance I got, I pulled all the books out from under my mom’s mattress and devoured them. For Whom The Bell Tolls. Lolita. The Bell Jar. I read them all. As silly as it is, even though she’s not here, I feel like she left a part of herself behind for me. And that part is plenty. I didn’t need flowers in my hair, or a nineteen-year-old blues player, or a fancy English degree to be happy; all I needed was the moonlight in my eyes and faith in myself. Because chances are, if you need any of those other things to be happy with yourself, you weren’t really that happy to begin with. Harvard Summer Review | 63 Charted Waters Charted Waters Sallie Sharp My daughter Caroline was born in Washington, D.C., in 1979, six months after Jim Jones and 913 members of the People’s Temple religious sect committed mass suicide in the jungles of Guyana. Jones and his followers used grape Kool-Aid spiked with a mixture of Valium and cyanide. “Bring the babies first,” Jones reportedly told his followers, who abetted the murders of their own children. Two-and-a-half years later, an Air Florida 737 attempting to take off from Washington National Airport in a blizzard hit the 14th Street Bridge and broke into pieces, taking seventy-four passengers, still strapped in their seats, to a horrifying icy death by drowning. The deaths in Jonestown and Washington had no connection with each other or with me, but the horror of so much death made me want to go home to my parents and siblings in Texas. My husband and I had moved to Washington five years earlier to escape the provincialism of Texas. Over the winter holidays, after the airline crash, we flew home and interviewed for jobs. Dallas law firms telephoned both of us with offers in mid-February. At the time, Washington was obscured by twenty-four inches of snow (even the Washington Post was not delivered for several days during the Blizzard of 1982), and the temperature in Dallas was seventyfive degrees. We moved in May, three weeks after our second child was born. On some level, I believed that I was moving my children away from knowledge of mass suicides and the apparition of a green and blue painted tail of a jetliner protruding from the icy Potomac River. Life in Dallas would be simpler, farther from mass tragedies. I would explain tragedy and death to them in a safer place. As things turned out, however, we did not move Caroline away from the spectre of frightening death. When death came into her life, it came relentlessly, steadily, repeatedly, and I had no explanation or understanding and could offer no solace. When Caroline lost her first friend to suicide, we and other parents drew from our lives and experiences to guide our children through the horror and loss. As the numbers mounted, the balance shifted. My child’s intimate knowledge of loss outstripped my experience with bereavement and grief. Caroline became an expert in death and dying. I had not moved her to safety. 64 | Harvard Summer Review Sallie Sharp During the years leading up to her junior year in high school, Caroline seemed to navigate childhood with ease. She was a sturdy child and a lanky teenager, with reddish brown hair and dark brown eyes. Caroline had been a parent’s dream child: easy, companionable, and comfortable with her family and friends, never a self-anointed family princess. What’s so hard about this? I asked myself as she moved smoothly from late-childhood into early adolescence. Like her childhood, her adolescence seemed relatively pain free, from a parent’s perspective. She studied, played sports, had a group of close friends—some of whom carried over from preschool days— and was reasonably patient with her parents. Caroline’s junior year in high school probably was much like that of her peers in college prep programs across the country. She studied hard, partied less hard, learned to drive, took the SAT and several SAT II’s, and started thinking about colleges. When I look back on the patterns of her life during her high school years leading up to the first of many deaths of close friends, her life was arranged like a pie sliced for a dinner party. The slices were about the same size, reflecting the time and energy she spent on various activities: schoolwork, college entrance exams, sports, hanging out with friends, hanging out with family, recreational reading to give her a break from the other structured activities in her life. These traits no doubt helped guide her through the loss that battered her and her friends. Eighteen and graduated from high school, she had already lost two close friends to suicide. A third committed suicide a week before Christmas in her first year of college. Three weeks after Christmas, a fourth friend, also a college freshman, died in a rollover accident in an SUV, two weeks before the friend’s nineteenth birthday. In May, four months later, Caroline lost a college friend when she failed to look before stepping into the path of a car on her way home, at dusk, from a late afternoon class. The class that began high school with 112, graduated from college with 105. Nothing in parenting literature prepares a parent for comforting a grieving child year after year. The death of a child is like an earthquake in a community. Caroline was sixteen when she lost her first close friend. The telephone rang at 6 a.m. on a Wednesday in January. Although autumn usually comes to central Texas late, if it comes at all, that year brought us the colors and scents of a real autumn. My husband picked up the telephone before I could get to it, and I could tell by his voice that Harvard Summer Review | 65 Charted Waters the news was not good. “Andrew Barton is missing from his dorm at St. Matthew’s. His car has been found near Lake Dallas, and classes are cancelled until Monday.” Andrew was a boarding student at Caroline’s high school. That Wednesday, my daughter’s reaction to her friend’s disappearance was to be impatient with the response of Andrew’s parents and the school. The students reported Andrew had argued with his mother over his grades. He was not the first student at the school to walk off the campus and resurface somewhere else weeks or months later. In fact, the headmaster’s son had done exactly the same thing a decade or so earlier. For parents of St. Matthew’s students, e-mail was in its infancy in 1998, but for high school students, it was the preferred mode of communication in the days after Andrew’s disappearance. The students could talk silently via e-mail, and they talked continually for the next four days. Andrew “sightings” flew back and forth among his friends, occasionally surfacing among concerned parents. Police impounded his car, found less than a mile from the school, near a cliff overlooking Lake Dallas. School resumed the following week with counselors available to talk to students who wanted to talk. Caroline brushed off my efforts to talk to her about the disappearance. “Why is everyone so negative and upset and certain that something really bad has happened to him?” she asked my husband and me. Apparently, believing that their son was angry and needed coaxing and forgiveness to return to them, Andrew’s distraught parents purchased airtime on Andrew’s favorite teen radio stations and local television stations. Andrew did not get in touch with them. Then they purchased a billboard advertisement on the interstate highway leading into Dallas from the south. On the billboard was Andrew’s high school yearbook photograph, larger than life, hair and shirt neatly arranged. “Come home, Andrew. We are not mad at you. We miss you. We love you. Mom and Dad.” The billboard, huge and ludicrous, greeted students returning from weekends home. Over the months that followed his disappearance, the photograph on the billboard faded and deteriorated, ultimately to be replaced with a fast food advertisement. Caroline still was not talking about Andrew, and I was outmatched by her assurance that all would turn out fine. She had not talked to the counselor at school, but I had. The counselor had described steps in grieving, suggested ways to open up lines of com66 | Harvard Summer Review Sallie Sharp munication, ways to “be there” for children who “most certainly were confused and frightened and worried.” Four months later, in late April, the telephone rang again in the early morning before school began. Searchers had located a body at the bottom of a ravine near Lake Dallas. Authorities had notified the school and Andrew’s parents that the clothing on the remains matched the description of what Andrew had been wearing the day he walked off campus. St. Matthew’s sent students home for the week. Once again, grief counselors came to campus. The school scheduled a memorial service. Andrew’s friends moved as one through the next few days and weeks. April led into summer, and Caroline seemed to be healing. My husband and I insisted that she talk to a grief counselor who had a good reputation for working with teens; but in July, she declared that she had said all she intended to say to the counselor. She and I talked about Andrew and the factors that might make someone decide to commit suicide. During the weeks and months after her friend’s death, Caroline expressed her anger and her lack of comprehension about his decision not to live, not to grow old, to stop then, at age sixteen. From this point onward, Caroline was spun around by loss. I paced, talked to several therapists specializing in adolescents, talked to the grief counselors provided by the school, tried to comprehend what she had lost, what she had experienced. Losing one friend to suicide is a collision with the abstract notion that, against all instincts, life is not a viable option for some we feel we know and love. The experts say preventing teen suicide starts with “straight talk and looking for symptoms.” What sort of help does that give? Very little, these same experts say. A U.S. News and World Report article, from 2004, said that barely a third of high school counselors thought they could recognize the warning signs of a suicidal student. Since the discovery of Andrew’s body, I had read extensively on the topic of teen suicide and how to talk to one’s child about it. A Brown University article listed warning signs to alert family and friends that someone is thinking about suicide: suicide threats, obsession with death, writing that refers to death, irrational behavior, overwhelming sense of guilt, changes in eating or sleeping patterns. The same Brown study cautions parents and friends to trust their instincts and to seek expert advice from a mental health professional. Harvard Summer Review | 67 Charted Waters Each year almost 5,000 young people, ages fifteen to twentyfour, kill themselves. The rate of suicide among this age group has nearly tripled since 1960, making it the third leading cause of death in adolescents and the second leading cause of death among college age youth. Studies show that suicide attempts among young people may be based on long-standing problems triggered by specific events, possibly because suicidal adolescents may view a temporary situation as a permanent condition. As I read about teen suicide, my alarm grew. I wondered what could be more of a suicide-inducing specific event than the loss of a close friend. I tried to talk to Caroline about what I had been reading, but she was not responsive to my efforts. Compared to me, she was an expert. I was well read, but she was living through it. We moved quietly through the summer, giving her time to rest, read, sleep, and heal. When school started in late August, Caroline, her list of colleges in mind, filled out applications and settled in to her final year of high school. The school had a brief memorial for Andrew on the first anniversary of his disappearance. I hoped the marking of the date would signal an ending. Then, on a dreary day in late January during Caroline’s senior year, Jack Barnett killed himself. This time, the telephone call came for Caroline before it reached down the telephone chain to parents. She hurried out the door and waved me away as I followed her. I knew this boy well. Jack had spent time at our home. We had included him in several family gatherings, plus Thanksgiving the year before. I thought of him as a child who had been discarded by his parents. The Barnetts, divorced, both remarried, both with young second families, had agreed years earlier that boarding school was the best place for their son. They sent him to St. Matthew’s as one of the few eighth-grade boarding students, a small group comprised primarily of children whose parents worked in South America and who routinely sent their children back to the U.S. for high school. Most boarders arrived in ninth grade; Jack arrived as soon as the school would admit him. His parents were not living abroad. They each lived within a few miles of the school. Jack had come to our house to watch a movie the prior weekend with a group of seniors who were excited about college admissions decisions and ready to graduate from high school and move on. Caroline had been admitted to college in New York, but she was not sure if she wanted to live in a cold climate. She and her 68 | Harvard Summer Review Sallie Sharp group of closest friends had posed for a candid photograph after the first round of college admissions. Some of the friends, those who had been admitted early, wore sweatshirts and T-shirts of the colleges where they thought they would be going. Several friends had been deferred and wore T-shirts they had decorated with slogans like “Will work for college admission” and “College: the best six to eight years of your life” and “College, please?” Jack had not been admitted to college; he had not applied to any. His parents’ disappointment was complete. In the group photograph, he wore a rock band T-shirt. Late in the morning, after Caroline had learned that Jack was in intensive care, she called me from the hospital to tell us that Jack might not survive. From her I learned that he had hung himself, had been discovered by his stepfather, resuscitated by EMS workers, and rushed by EMS helicopter to the children’s hospital. She did not want me to come to the hospital. She was with her friends, she said, and nothing was to be done but wait and hope. Distraught teens slept in the intensive care waiting room for the next three days. On the morning of the fourth day, Jack’s doctors removed him from life support while Caroline and other close friends of Jack waited outside of his room. Caroline expressed more anger than sorrow at Jack’s death. Jack had gotten a ride to his mother’s house with one of their group, had let himself in, and then had hung himself from the front stair rail. Caroline said she was angry about their grief, angry about their hospital vigil, angry that he had known how they had grieved over Andrew’s death, angry that he had not trusted his friends enough “to stay alive for them.” Caroline and her friends closed ranks. As she moved through the horror of Jack’s suicide, she rarely turned to my husband or me for help. As I weaved through the aftermath of these suicides, my anguish was for Caroline and the others who had been close friends of these two boys. I did not know the boys’ parents, so I had nothing more than a note and a contribution to scholarships in each boy’s memory to offer them. The death of my parents, the death of my closest friend in an auto accident—none of this prepared me for the sort of loss my daughter was experiencing. I was terrified. The experts describe signals and precursors for suicide, but no one really knows. I had never lost a close friend to suicide; Caroline had lost two. My helpfulness as a source of understanding was fading. Harvard Summer Review | 69 Charted Waters The events surrounding Jack’s death mirrored those that had followed Andrew’s death: grief counselors, school closure, tests and papers postponed or cancelled, memorial service, healing. Eventually, the school year ground to a close. Caroline and her classmates graduated from high school, packed, and left for college. I encouraged Caroline to consider taking a year off between high school and college. It was not negotiable, she said. She was leaving Texas and as soon as possible. I remembered feeling the need to escape Texas. I extracted a promise from her that if she felt she wanted to talk to a therapist when she got to New York she would go to the student health center. “Your dad and I don’t need to be part of the decision or even know about it,” I said. I was scared. What if she were profoundly unhappy? Would she see suicide as an antidote? Death was not an abstraction for Caroline, and she was 1500 miles away. A close family friend’s daughter was a year ahead of Caroline in college. The friend’s daughter checked on Caroline frequently, inviting her to movies, to study at the library, to meet at coffee shops. Caroline had friends in her dorm, was hanging out with new acquaintances, seemed happy, was adjusting to the weather and to living away from home. She was having a normal first year of college with the annoyances of roommates, stresses about schoolwork, and occasional rough patches about other things, such as library closing hours on weekends. My husband and I relaxed. We had been careful not to hover. We wrote letters, e-mailed, telephoned at least once weekly. We hoped we were covering our bases. When Caroline was a young child, I was the “in-house physician” in the family, a role no doubt filled by most parents. Caroline had survived chicken pox, numerous bouts of strep throat, several stitches in her right knee, wisdom tooth extractions, a number of nonspecific stomach and flu viruses, a broken arm, and at least one bad cold per season. Throughout all of these incidents, my roles had been varied: trips to the pediatrician, filling prescriptions, making sure prescribed medications were taken on schedule, renting movies, reading books, serving hot soup or ice cream (as required). My healing skills had not extended to repeated grief at the death of friends, but I was assembling a file of self-help articles for parents helping children through grief. Most of the popular literature on death and dying is geared to young children. I had a storehouse on how to explain why the dead bird in the park was not going to fly away. 70 | Harvard Summer Review Sallie Sharp I found only two books that targeted teens adjusting to loss, but the focus was not on suicide. Periodical articles about teen and youth suicide carried the message to look for signs, to be aware, to intervene, and to seek professional help. These recommendations were difficult to apply. When Caroline was nine weeks into her first year in college, she lost her third friend to suicide. From the sidelines, we parents saw violent loss winnow away this small group, at a pace that suggested an annual event, but, in fact, it occurred even more frequently. It never felt like it was over. Caroline’s friend Will Newton did not go away to college. He stayed in town and attended the local university. The telephone rang at 6:05 a.m. on the Wednesday after Halloween. “The telephone chain has been activated. Please call the next parent on the school directory list to tell them that classes are cancelled until the end of the week.” Why? “Will Newton has died.” How? “Suicide.” Shit. Where to begin? I waited an hour and telephoned my daughter, knowing that as soon as she logged on to her e-mail, she would hear about Will’s death, if someone did not telephone her first. It was 7 a.m. in New York. I waited until 8 a.m. her time to call her. I could not let her learn about this via e-mail or cell telephone. What had happened was unfathomable to me as a parent. Self-help books and online searches do not give guidance on multiple suicides among a child’s closest friends. The losses in November were not over. Two weeks later, Caroline’s friend Jenny Anderson died in a rollover SUV accident. She and her date died instantly. Jenny’s accidental death was almost a footnote to the three suicides. Another friend died in an intersection, several months later, when she was crossing the street in the half-light of late evening. The grief at the accidental deaths of friends was simple in comparison to the anguish that resulted from raking through the threads of suicide. Missteps, carelessness, alcohol, and cars were tragedies our children and we were taught to expect. After Will’s suicide, the issue of suicide moved to the forefront of the school community. St. Matthew’s hired national suicide experts. The experts who studied Caroline’s small high school class Harvard Summer Review | 71 Charted Waters were looking for a “suicide cluster.” Caroline’s three friends who had killed themselves had different profiles. The experts could not explain Andrew’s decision to kill himself. He seemed happy, had friends, was doing well in school. Jack, however, had sent out all the cries for help, but apparently felt he had no safety net. His young friends did not recognize that he was suicidal. Will was on prescription anti-depressants and had decided he did not need them. Will had spent the prior Saturday night with other friends who had attended St. Matthew’s. Over beer, purchased by one boy’s older sister, the group that had stayed in town for college talked about Jack and Andrew. Into the night, they explored how one would “off oneself” if suicide were an option. One of the boys later said Will had told the group that Jack had “fucked up by not doing a thorough job.” Will had made no mistakes. He took a massive number of pills on Sunday night when his parents were at a movie. They would be gone for hours. The suicide expert team that came to the high school stayed in town for a week, and interviewed dozens of students, teachers, parents, school psychologists, coaches, faculty, and school nurses. The experts concluded that the school did not have a suicide cluster, but that the school needed to have better communication with parents of students and needed to require that all students on medication have their medications administered through the school nurse, day in and day out. No cluster, just lots of death and loss. The Center for Disease Control has response guidelines for schools and communities to prevent and contain suicide clusters. Minimizing sensationalism and avoiding glorification of the victims are part of the response. The experts acknowledge that suicide is intrinsically sensational, and memorials are events of glorification. Caroline flew home for the funeral, went back to college, and completed the semester. She then took the spring semester off, got a job, regrouped, and then retreated from my husband and me. Her emotional withdrawal was not abrupt or unkind; it seemed, and probably was, normal. But we had no definition of “normal” under the circumstances. She appeared calm and focused. I, however, could never push suicide away, but did not confront Caroline about it. She said she did not want to talk about the friends who had died. I watched and waited. She did not return to the East Coast, but instead went to college in Santa Fe. She read the classics and studied ancient Greek, so she could read Aristotle and Aristophanes in the language in which they wrote. 72 | Harvard Summer Review Sallie Sharp She drifted away from my husband and me during these three years in New Mexico. She always came home for holidays and breaks, but she progressively separated her life in Texas from her life away at college. My husband quipped that she acted like a prisoner of war around us. All we needed to know was her name, rank, and serial number. I did not think humor worked, but it was all we had. She was almost twenty-one, and we respected her decision to keep her own counsel. She came home less frequently as she settled into life in New Mexico. I visited her occasionally while she was there. Caroline learned German and French along the way, improved her ancient Greek, took a semester of Hittite, a useful language if marauders descended on Santa Fe, she said. The loss of three friends seemed to be receding from her life. Two years after Will died, in early July, Aaron Hansen killed himself. Caroline was working at a law firm and was living at home for the summer. She got the call on her cell telephone and came downstairs. “Do you have a St. Matthew’s directory? I need to talk to the headmaster,” she said. I took the directory from the kitchen drawer, where I kept various school directories, and handed it to her, curiosity in my gestures. “Aaron Hansen killed himself. Do not even react, Mom. I know what to do.” She wrote a telephone number in blue ink on her hand and took the portable telephone into the family room. “Dr. Sanders? This is Caroline Sharp. I just learned that Aaron Hansen killed himself late yesterday and wanted to be sure you knew about it so the school can get a notice up on its website and decide about having a memorial service.” I could do nothing. Caroline knew what needed to be done. At twenty-one, her experience with suicide was deep and wide. She had lost four friends to suicide. I had lost none. I had nothing to give her. No advice. No wisdom. The days following Aaron’s death were much like the days after the deaths of Andrew, Jack, and Will: questions, details trickling in, a funeral or memorial service, stricken parents, friends who were competent and composed around suicide. Again, unfathomable. Later in the summer, I asked Caroline to talk to me, told her that I was the person who needed understanding, comforting, reassurance. “Don’t worry about me. I’ve thought about this. All of us Harvard Summer Review | 73 Charted Waters have. I’ve decided in favor of life. Trust me, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to think about suicide as a solution to problems and have decided against it.” Her tone was impatient. I had not thought about suicide as a solution, but then, I had not faced it repeatedly. In March 2006, our Labrador retriever, Carl, died unexpectedly. He was the beloved family pet for more than fourteen years, a dog with enormous dignity and gentleness. On the day he died, an asymptomatic tumor in his spleen began bleeding, and he quickly went into shock. I rushed him to his veterinarian and telephoned Caroline and my husband, asking them to meet me immediately at the vet clinic. Carl was in trouble. Caroline was the first to arrive at the veterinary clinic, and she took charge. The veterinarian told us that Carl could not be saved. I blamed myself for not knowing that he was ill. He had been throwing himself joyfully into our backyard pool the day before. His life was long and happy, including the final days. Caroline was the epicenter of healing when Carl died. “No guilt,” she said. “You did not do this. Carl was old; he had a wonderful life.” Caroline was the person who arranged for his cremation, comforted all of us, telephoned her sisters and brother to let them know that he was dying. The death of our family pet had paralyzed me. Caroline knew what to do. Caroline drove me home; we would go back for my car the next day. The absence of a dog is felt in a home. Carl’s place at the window was deserted. Caroline took charge, gathering the family in the den, opening a bottle of red wine, “hosting” a wake for Carl. We shared Carl stories, his tail wagging glasses off the coffee table onto the slate floor, his innate respect for other’s space, his total lack of homing instinct on the few occasions he escaped into the neighborhood. We talked about his life, his impact on ours, how we would miss him. Caroline told us that years before, her cousin Rob had said, “You are the luckiest children in the world. You get to live with Carl!” It was Caroline who ushered us through our grief and loss. 74 | Harvard Summer Review Rebekah Wilson Dear Mr. Gold Rebekah Wilson I’m writing because we read your story Afternoon in class today. I’m in Honors English, which is different from regular old ninth-grade English in that my teacher, Ms. Volker, makes us read one short story a day for class, and then we have what’s called a Discussion Circle about it the next day. At the end of the week, we have to write a really long essay regarding what we read that week. I’ve learned that I can usually get an A if I use vocab words from class like “protagonist,” which is a different way of saying the main character, or typically the person who all the bad things keep happening to in the book or story (but I think you know this already, being a published author and all). It also works well to relate all the themes to what Ms. Volker calls the Human Plight. I’ve never quite figured out what exactly she means by that, but I think a lot of people must write about it, because I keep mentioning it and I keep getting As. I wonder if you were an A student when you were in the ninth grade. I had all As except for one A-minus last quarter. I feel a little embarrassed to tell you that it was in Honors English. See, I didn’t know about the Human Plight rule at the beginning of the year; I thought we were supposed to write what we really thought about the stories, so I did. I don’t think Ms. Volker was very happy that I said I didn’t really like the excerpt from Walden we read, because about the third week of school she asked my parents and me to come in for a conference to discuss my progress. Ms. Volker talked a lot about what we were covering in class and my “abilities,” and my mom glanced at her watch a lot and tapped her cell phone on the table. My mom and dad are both very busy with their jobs. My mom sells real estate and my dad “sells ideas,” meaning he’s in advertising. In a way, they both sell ideas, because my mom tries to sell people homes. I think some people, though, will always only have houses, no matter how current the plumbing is in the threeand-a-half baths, or how “charming” the neighborhood is. I felt very guilty because of my mom’s bad manners and because Ms. Volker’s face was screwed up in what I can only call a “concerned frown.” Ms. Volker has a very pretty face, and I’d hate to think she was wrinkling it on account of me not quite agreeing with Thoreau, who happens to be her favorite author. Harvard Summer Review | 75 Dear Mr. Gold “David,” she’d said, “I don’t think you are quite analyzing the material using the methods we learned in class. Your middle school teachers were all very complimentary of your work in their classes, and I think you could do much better.” She suggested that I review the notes we took on the first day of class to get some ideas on how to “form my thematic theories” that would help “enhance my idea development.” I promised her I would, my mom shook her hand, and the meeting was over. So now I just write about what I suppose makes the stories good, because I assume Ms. Volker probably likes them too, which is why we read them, and I’ve been a straight A student ever since. To tell the truth, I think your story is the first we’ve read all semester that both Ms. Volker and I agree on, even though our reasons for liking it aren’t the same at all. She was really excited on Friday when she handed out our homework packets. A lot of the kids complained, because it was fifteen pages. I hope this doesn’t make you feel bad. I didn’t mind, though, because I didn’t have any plans for the weekend. My dad and mom were going to Colorado Springs to visit my great-grandmother in a nursing home. My sister was supposed to stay at home with me, I guess to make sure that I didn’t microwave tin foil or something, so I knew I would have lots of time to read. My sister is very popular and has unlimited weekend minutes on her new cell phone so she mostly leaves me alone. Plus, the house would be quiet because my parents would be arguing in the car on the way to Colorado instead of in the kitchen. Our house isn’t always the best to read in. When I want some quiet to read, I usually go outside on our front porch where no one else in our family ever goes, even though my mom spent a lot of money on new cushions for the wicker chairs she bought last summer. She doesn’t even really like me to sit out there: She worries that I will spill something, even though I am very careful. I don’t really like to sit on her cushions; they really aren’t that comfortable anyway. They look just as new as when she bought them a couple months ago. Having things look good is very important to my mom, even if no one ever sees it. When I have my own house, I will be sure that every inch of it is used by someone. And if I ever have any kids, I will buy only cheap furniture so they will not feel bad if they happen to spill red juice on it or forget that they are wearing muddy soccer shoes when they use the footrest. I like sitting on the porch because I can see the street. It’s an excellent place to read. I like to watch people walk and drive by, and 76 | Harvard Summer Review Rebekah Wilson wonder if they’ve ever read the story I’m reading. I wonder if they had an English teacher like Ms. Volker and wonder if any of them disliked Thoreau as much as I did. Sometimes I wonder if anyone really, genuinely likes it, or if they like the idea of it. The idea of liking Thoreau, I mean. Maybe Ms. Volker doesn’t really like it; maybe it’s just something she had to write her thesis on for college; maybe one day someone she wanted to impress asked her who her favorite author was and Henry David Thoreau seemed like a good answer. Then, maybe she slowly convinced herself she really did like the stuff. I think that’s how it is with a lot of people and a lot of things. I think my sister once said the same thing about beer. This is why it takes me a very long time to finish a book when I read on the porch, although I am a very fast reader, mechanically speaking. Ms. Volker told my mother that she thinks I might be “over-thinking the material,” and it could be because of my “relative immaturity to the other students.” I was a little offended, because even though I skipped ahead two grades and I’m a year younger than most of the class, I thought I was at least a little bit more mature than Kenneth, who chose to do his first quarter book report on Slaughterhouse Five so he could show a picture of boobs on the overhead as his visual. (Apparently, it’s in the book. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never read it, but I bet you have.) And I at least was not asked to leave the room, like Christine and Angela who could not stop giggling when we read a story that just happened to have a love scene. So when I read your story I tried my hardest to read at a normal pace and just pay attention to the plot, but things in the story kept reminding me of other things, and those things reminded me of ideas, and sometimes I just can’t help myself, because I get a really good feeling when I get these ideas, especially when it all seems to fit together. For example, in your story, when Barney is watching all those people at the bus stop and he wonders what all those different people have been through that day—if any of them got fired, lost someone they loved, got engaged, or fell in love. And Barney wonders how many of these people he has cut off on the freeway, cut in front of in line, and been impatient with in line at the supermarket. That reminded me of my cat, Wrexie. Ever since we were little, my sister and I have teased her by tugging on the back of her tail. Wrexie’s never scratched or bitten any of us, and we’ve had her since she was a kitten, so we all assumed she liked it. Then one day, I read this article in the vet’s Harvard Summer Review | 77 Dear Mr. Gold office that said that cats generally don’t like their tails played with. Now, I don’t know if that’s true about Wrexie, but it did start me thinking that she can’t ever tell me for sure what she does like or what she’s feeling. We can use clues, like if she’s purring or if she hides (which is what she does when my grandpa comes because he kicks her if she gets in his way), but how are we supposed to know if she’s feeling just a little under the weather or if she likes it better when I pet her under her chin than by her ears? I know scientists say cats don’t feel these types of things, but I don’t know. I promised myself right there in the vet’s office that I would never play with her tail again, because there was just no way of knowing. I guess that’s how we should treat people, too. I’m not sure if there is a word for that, it’s not quite the Golden Rule, because with that you’re assuming that others feel what you do. And there are some emotions I’ve never experienced, so I don’t know how a lovesick person would want to be treated. I asked my mom if there was a word for this idea, and she told me I was talking about “sensitivity.” I don’t think that’s quite what I was going for, so I looked some stuff up, and think what she really means is empathy. I was pretty excited to get to class today to read and discuss your story, we were all supposed to read it over the weekend, but Ms. Volker always reads the important parts, or parts she likes, aloud to us, and then we have Discussion Circle. We are all supposed to find at least one point we would like to share with the class, and I always have trouble coming up with something good enough that I think Ms. Volker would like to hear, except today I had plenty. We started off discussing what we thought of the main character, and Jennifer, who is very concerned about sexism, said that she thought he was sexist because he opened the door for that woman in the last paragraph. Stefan, who is a Southern Baptist, thought that the woman was a metaphor for the modern-day church as the “bride of Christ” or something like that, I’m not sure because I never really went to Sunday School. We went around the circle and everyone said what they thought, and Ms. Volker marked down daily points in her purple pen. When it was my turn, I started to tell the story about Wrexie, but I’m not a very good storyteller, I guess, because Ms. Volker was sitting there looking only a little bit patient. I start and stop a lot when I talk, and sometimes I give too many details when I tell a story, but I can’t help it. I want people to get the whole picture, to see the story just how I do in my mind. 78 | Harvard Summer Review Rebekah Wilson About halfway through my story the bell rang, and Ms. Volker asked me to stay after class for a little bit. At first I thought she wanted to hear the rest of my story, but then I looked at her face, and it was the face that my mom makes when she talks to my grandma, who has dementia and writes long letters on toilet paper to my uncle, who died, in 1976. “David,” she began, looking at me very carefully, “have you been reading in the way we talked about?” I thought about what I should say. I could try finishing my story, or try to explain how the leaves in my front yard remind me of the author’s description of the tree next to the bus stop, or how tight and sore my throat felt after I read the last lines of Afternoon. But I just shook my head, no. I don’t want you to think that I am a disrespectful person, because I really try not to be; in fact, the biggest thing I felt right then was sorry for Ms. Volker. I didn’t feel like finishing the story about my cat, because even if I did manage to tell it right, and even if she understood what I meant, understood in even the smallest way the connection between Wrexie and the people at the bus stop, I don’t think she would ever quite get it. I wonder if she’s ever felt that feeling in her throat during the last few lines of really good book. I hope that’s what Thoreau does to her. Honestly, I do. Ms. Volker’s face changed, something that was a cross between what looked like pity and frustration, and said in a very calm way, like she was very concentrated on controlling the volume and speed of her voice, “Look, David. Maybe this class is just a little too mature for you…” But I didn’t let her finish. As polite as I possibly could I said, “Ms. Volker, I liked the story very much. Thank you for making us read it.” And I turned and walked right out of the classroom and to my next class, which was biology. And I sat in biology for the next hour feeling very good. Because what I said was true. I did like it. Maybe Kenneth, Jennifer, and Angela really are more mature than me. Maybe those kids who said that the third paragraph “represented a surprisingly Marxist point of view that contradicted the second half of the story entirely” got it right. Maybe. I’m not saying they’re wrong, and since you wrote the story you know exactly what you meant and maybe it was that. But for me, I know that I like the story. And that is enough. I guess that’s why I’m writing you this letter now. I don’t know if you’ll ever read it, but I hope you do. You seem like the Harvard Summer Review | 79 Dear Mr. Gold sort of person who’d understand a letter from a complete stranger. I read on the Author Info handout Ms. Volker gave us that you teach at a college in California. I hope you are the type of teacher who would listen to a student’s story about his cat, and that your students don’t have to mention the Human Plight to get an A on a paper, although I think I’m starting to form some of my own ideas about what that means. The Human Plight, that is. Thank you, David 80 | Harvard Summer Review Contributors Contributors Amy Dennis is thrilled to have her poems “For Hikaru, Who Works at the Crowded Five and Dime” and “Walking With Zoya, 3 A.M.” included in this year’s Harvard Summer Review. She wishes to thank Suzanne Lane for inspiring and encouraging her in Beginning Poetry. Ms. Dennis’s writing has been presented on CBC Radio and in the anthology Mainstreet. Her poetry has been published in several Canadian literary magazines, and her first children’s book was released in the summer of 2004. She is currently finishing a book of poetry. Amanda Fish wrote “Mountains” about her beloved Rocky Mountain backcountry, but she found equal inspiration in Cambridge, from her classmates in Christina Thompson’s Advanced Narrative Nonfiction. Ms. Fish is an English major at Yale University. Spencer Gaffney wrote “George” in Ellie Schaffzin’s Beginning Fiction. The story, which involves the death of a guinea pig, proved oddly prophetic when the Gaffney family’s own loveable rodent died two days after Mr. Gaffney completed the story. His family members have since requested that he not use them as characters. Mr. Gaffney is very much hoping to graduate from high school this June. Melanie Graham wrote both “Variations on Lucille Clifton’s ‘libation’” and “Danish Herb Garden” in Suzanne Lane’s Beginning Poetry. “Variations. . . ” is a tribute to Jessica Lunsford, a child murdered near Ms. Graham’s home in Florida, and “Danish Herb Garden” was inspired by a visit to Martha’s very un-Danish, yet beautiful, Vineyard. Ms. Graham holds an MA in poetry and teaches writing at the University of South Florida. Harvard Summer Review | 81 Contributors Steven L. Herman is the South Asia bureau chief for the Voice of America. Before moving to India he spent nearly two decades based in Japan reporting for VOA and other broadcasters. He has also worked for the Associated Press in the United States as a reporter and editor. A native of Cincinnati, Ohio, Mr. Herman holds a BA in communications from New Jersey’s Thomas Edison State College. Terming himself a “life-long learner,” he has also pursued graduate studies at the American Military University, The School of International Service of The American University, Bath Spa College in England, the New School for Social Research, and the Harvard Extension School. Mr. Herman wrote “Ghosts of Partition Haunt Modern-Day India, Pakistan” in June Erlick’s Graduate Journalism Proseminar. When Stratis Haviaras asked the students in his Advanced Fiction: The Novel to write a one-page syllogism, Dawn Kotapish turned to her memories of growing up in Kathmandu, Nepal. “The Weight of Divinity” evolved from her interest in how the fabled city’s ancient and colorful traditions converge with the people’s struggle to find a voice in the modern world despite generations of poverty and oppression. Ms. Kotapish has authored two books for young adults on the history of Baghdad and Athens—two other ancient cities that have captured her imagination. Jillian Kushner interviewed Executive Chef for Residential Dining, Larry Kessel, for an assignment for Elizabeth Soutter’s Beginning Journalism. Dining at Annenberg daily during her stay, Ms. Kushner was fascinated to find out that her meals were being prepared by a former acclaimed Boston chef and restaurateur. In her interview with Kessel she explores his plans to improve Harvard dining, why he left the private industry, and what he can tell about diners from what they choose to eat. Ms. Kushner is a high school senior. Rudy A. Martinez wrote “Hablas Espanol” for Kelsey McNiff’s The Essay. He considers this piece to be an exploration of what culture and race really mean to him, and he is currently adapting it into a short play. Mr. Martinez is a junior at the University of California Santa Barbara, from which he will graduate with a BFA in acting. 82 | Harvard Summer Review Contributors Michael McLawhorn is a Chicago native who now calls the Boston area home. He wrote “Black Hat Falling” in Deborah Drnec Wilkes’s Beginning Fiction. He’s had a love affair with storytelling since his second grade dream of donning a fedora and swinging from a bullwhip like Indiana Jones. Mr. McLawhorn is deeply grateful to author Michael Chabon for relegitimizing pulp and the action-driven story. Jessica Rogers wrote “Henry Parker and the Summer of Love” in Ellie Schaffzin’s Beginning Fiction. The piece was inspired by the fortieth anniversary of the Summer of Love and Bob Dylan’s landmark album Blonde on Blonde. While at Harvard Summer School, Ms. Rogers took an English class on Bob Dylan’s lyrics; the course also influenced the story. She plans to graduate from Great Bridge High School in June and to pursue a career in writing. Sallie Sharp wrote “Charted Waters” for Christina Thompson’s Advanced Narrative Nonfiction. Ms. Sharp has a JD from Georgetown University and is a candidate in the ALM in Journalism program at the Harvard Extension School. She is currently writing her thesis and plans to graduate from Extension in the autumn of 2008. Rebekah Wilson was inspired to write “Dear Mr. Gold” in Ellie Schaffzin’s Beginning Fiction after a particularly draining junior year of high school that included many literature criticism essays. She is notoriously disorganized and somewhat shy but would love to someday be a journalist despite these faults. Ms. Wilson has lived in Boone, Iowa, for the past nine years, which has provided her with at least nine additional years of interesting writing material. She will graduate from high school this May and plans to attend a university on the east coast. Harvard Summer Review | 83