The Best American Essays 2013 (41 page)

People said he made clowns of the peasants—there are still writers who complain that his dialogue wasn’t always true to real Irish folk speech, a criticism that manages to be correct while driving past his achievement, which was to go beneath them, into something even older and deeper, the Greeks. Possessing the mercenary instinct of the artist, he sought not to “capture” the Irish language but to mine it for his English sentences. He had in him something of Gabriel, from “The Dead,” who when chastised for not wanting to visit the Aran Islands and learn his own native tongue answers sourly, “Irish is not my language.” In his room here at the inn, they say, Synge lay on the floor with his ear to the boards, listening to the talk of the people below, making notes. Out of that stuff, the table talk of the islanders, he made plays that caused riots in multiple countries.

Whatever comes next, after the crash and the austerity measures and who-knows-what that follows, Ireland will have to make itself anew. If it’s smart, that is—if it doesn’t insist, like us, on desperately trying to crawl back to the conditions that made the bubble. Synge’s character knew what it meant to wake up hopeless and get back to it, back to the incomprehensible business of being alive, and not listlessly but with defiant panache. A century after his last works were published, he is again the writer Ireland needs.

MEGAN STIELSTRA

FROM
The Rumpus

F
OR THE FIRST
few months after my son was born, I called him The Baby, or sometimes just Him with a capital
H
, huge proper nouns to illustrate how completely he took over my life. Is he eating, not eating? Pooping, not pooping? What color is the poop, how long ago was the poop, did I mark the poop on the spreadsheet? I had spreadsheets. I had
stuff
—white noise CDs and magnetic blocks and this super-high-tech video monitor with a remote wireless screen and night vision, which made The Baby glow electric green in the dark as if he were a CIA target. It was a little unnerving, actually. It had two frequencies, an A channel and a B channel, in case you had two kids in separate rooms, and what’s interesting about this is that one of my neighbors must have owned this same monitor, because on channel A I saw my baby, and on channel B I saw someone else’s.

And if I could see someone else’s, then someone else could see mine.

We live in a third-floor walkup in Uptown surrounded by other third-floor walkups. Jumping onto a neighbor’s Wi-Fi signal isn’t much of a stretch, so perhaps the fact that I could toggle between babies shouldn’t have been a surprise. But it was. It was huge. I was
obsessed
. On one hand, it was totally creepy—stalking, even—but on the other? It was sort of magical, like walkie-talkies and CB radios when you’re a kid: connecting with someone across the void, adding your voice to the collective unconscious, feeling less alone in this crazy world, and who knows who might be listening?

Who knows who’s in that Uptown condo on channel B?

A baby, to be sure, but it wasn’t the baby I was obsessed with.

It was the mother.

My imagination went wild when I thought of the mother. Did she sit there watching my kid in the dark? Did she question his bedtime? Wonder where I got his pajamas? How might she react if I left a sign in his crib that read
STOP LOOKING AT MY BABY, YOU DIRTY VOYEUR!

Or this one:
YAY NEW FRIENDS! DO YOU WANT TO MEET UP AT THE PARK
? Or the truth:
I AM TERRIFIED. I AM SO TERRIFIED THAT SOMETIMES I CAN’T EVEN BREATHE
.

Any winter in Chicago is a force to be reckoned with, but 2008 was particularly awful. The Baby was born three weeks early, middle of the night, middle of a snowstorm. My poor husband had to dig out our buried car, shovel the alley, and navigate Lakeshore Drive through a whiteout blizzard, and that relentless, pounding snow stayed through January, February, March, and into April. I’d taken those months off from work, and my husband, a web designer, had picked up extra projects to cover the difference, so for the most part, The Baby and I were alone in our tiny Uptown condo, beyond which, in my mind, was the ice planet of Hoth. Remember Planet Hoth? From
The Empire Strikes Back
? Luke almost freezes to death, but Han Solo pushes him inside a dead tauntaun for body warmth?
That
Hoth.

I joke about it now, but here’s the truth: I was scared to go outside. The Baby might freeze. I was scared to fall asleep. He might suffocate. I was scared he wasn’t eating, wasn’t latching, wasn’t gaining, wasn’t doing what the books had said he would do, and every morning when I looked in the mirror, I wondered who that girl was looking back. We all have things about ourselves that we know to be true, and suddenly I couldn’t remember any of them. I was unbrushed, unwashed, wearing the same yoga pants and empire-waist shirt every day. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t laugh. I couldn’t feed my kid. At the time my understanding of postpartum depression was primarily shaped by Brooke Shields’s memoir
Down Came the Rain:
crippling depression, suicidal thoughts. But since what I was experiencing seemed heavy but not
that
heavy, dark but not really
that
dark, scary but not, you know, like
that
, it didn’t occur to me to ask for help. I mean, I wasn’t going to hurt my kid. I wasn’t going to hurt myself. Right?

Now, four years later, I know that the symptoms and intensity of PPD are as varied as the flowers in a greenhouse. I wish I’d told someone. I didn’t need to feel that alone: just me in the frozen Chicago winter with my tiny, fragile baby. And channel B. Whenever The Baby would fall asleep, I’d stare at his Day-Glo body on the monitor, making sure he wasn’t choking—or levitating or exploding or whatever horrible thing I’d imagine—and then, assured of his safety, I’d flip the channel to see how that other mother was doing. I bet
her
kid was eating. I bet
she
changed clothes occasionally. I bet for her snow wasn’t a terrifying apocalypse but rather a Hallmark-like sprinkling of picturesque flakes—“Walking in a Winter Wonderland,” if you will. And yes, I know, it was completely intrusive and unethical and, above all,
ridiculous
. Why was I comparing myself to this woman? I never even
saw
her! Mostly there was just an empty crib. Sometimes there was a baby, wiggling and doing baby things, but the mother was a total nonentity. Until one night I flipped over to channel B and heard crying. Not from the baby—he was fast asleep, an angel—but somewhere in his room, a woman was sobbing: heavy, gaspy, gulpy sobs.

They went on. They went on and on. I shouldn’t have listened. But it was the first time since my son was born that I didn’t feel alone.

What finally changed things was this:
spring
. Birds! Green things! Grilling on the porch! Frozen blender drinks! Short skirts! Outdoor seating! SPF! Lemonade! Which you can get any time of year, but it tastes better in the sunshine! Sunshine! My God, how desperately I’d needed it! I’d wager most Chicagoans feel this way in spring, but for me, May 2008 was a godsend, a great, mammoth hand reaching down out of the clouds and pulling me to my feet.

That May, The Baby became Caleb, smiling, laughing, responding, four months old and learning about the world outside my lap. I’d strap him in a backpack and walk through Uptown—Broadway to Argyle, down to the beach and back up Montrose—finding magic in everyday things. Plastic grocery bags? Amazing. Tapping a glass with a spoon? Kick-ass! Water in a dish? Fun for hours! One morning he reached for a yellow street-cleaning sign stapled to a tree, and all at once I saw yellow as if I’d been blind to it for years:
Brake lights! Parking lanes! Flowers in the neighbors’ yard! Taxis! More taxis!

And in that moment we passed a woman with a stroller. She was pretty, early thirties, wearing yoga pants and a yellow empire-waist shirt. She looked nice. And tired. And interesting, like there were all sorts of secret things about her that were set on pause for the time being. She looked like how I saw myself. We nodded at each other in solidarity. This, I had newly discovered, is the way moms do it: acknowledging the fact that even though you don’t know each other, you’re still a part of this great cosmic team. And then you check out each other’s kids. Hers was grabbing his toes in the stroller—so sweet. So adorable. So . . .
familiar
, and not in that All Babies Are Alike sort of way. I looked closer: yes, I knew this kid, and suddenly I saw him not face to face on Lawrence Avenue but electric green on a tiny handheld screen.

I looked back at the mother. “You know—” I started, then stopped, ’cause, really, what would I have said?
Stop looking at my baby? You want to meet up at the park?
How’s about the truth:
You helped save me
.

“Your baby is beautiful,” she said.

“So’s yours,” I said.

We stood there.

We stood there long past what is appropriate for strangers. I like to think it’s because she was thinking the same thing I was. That maybe she too had flipped channels in the middle of the night, trying to connect with someone across the void or feel less alone in this crazy world. Maybe she’d overheard me crying in Caleb’s bedroom, months ago when everything still seemed so cold, so impossible.

“How are you?” I asked her. I wasn’t just saying it. I really, really wanted to know.

She smiled. “I’m getting better.”

“Me too,” I said. “I’m getting better.”

It was something about myself that I knew was true.

DAGOBERTO GILB

FROM
ZYZZYVA

O
NLY WEEKS BEFORE
, I’d been across the street at the University of Texas at El Paso Museum, working a three-story add-on as a carpenter—the second-highest-paid worker on the job site at $5 an hour. It was because I could also tie steel, an ironworker’s trade, that I got this big-time wage. No, it was not good money even then, in 1979, except in El Paso. Yes, I was proud of myself to have backdoored my way into an English department teaching job that included a well-air-conditioned, downstairs office. It really belonged to a full-timer who never used it, and because he liked me, he wanted to help a young writer out. A sweaty carpenter banging nails those weeks ago, now I was banging an electric typewriter, finishing my first novel. I would learn that lots of my new colleagues there didn’t really like my having an office. I was only a part-timer—a couple of remedial composition classes I had to learn to teach under the false assumption, theirs, that I had a graduate degree in English. But there I was, a luxurious office completely to myself, with a sweet, picturesque view of the very poorest lean-to shacks of Juárez across the border. Typing. I was not unhappy with the change in my personnel status.

Next door was one of the many and mostly shared offices. I did not socialize much with campus people, so initially I was not very responsive when Bill Ripley, half of my next-door neighbor, interrupted the precious artist-at-work concentration I kept on my first opus. He was bigger than those numbers, six-two. His belly was prominent even then, and that’s what I and many called him too, Belly Ripley. He showed much personal abuse all over his body already, beginning with the acne scars from his youth. I don’t remember what his exact first words to me were, how he charmed me, but I am sure it had to do with his country-boy grin, and I’m sure it had something to do with him suggesting how both of us surely needed an afternoon toddy. I had never heard the word
toddy
before, and so I certainly had never had one. So I stepped out with him, persuaded, sold, actually smiling about cutting my afternoon schedule short.

I think the word
toddy
didn’t only make me want to laugh in itself. It was the way Ripley made the word’s fussiness sound even funnier, especially as it echoed in an air-conditioned hall at the Texas-Mexico border. It was so, like, Eastern—at once both sophisticated and classy, yet mocking that pretension. Like drinking hot tea in teacups and saucers with those rings in the middle to secure the cup there and teaspoons (as in, spoons for tea) for, I guess, a lump of sugar. Or honey. Or maybe to stir milk? I hadn’t been taught any of this in my youth. El Paso was the most East I’d ever lived. Whereas Ripley, with his Texas drawl, he’d gone to Harvard. I knew what Harvard was like; I knew what the White House was. President Kennedy went to Harvard. Ripley was the first person I ever met and talked to—had a toddy with, which he taught me was just a shot of whiskey at a bar—who’d gone to Harvard.

Not only that, Ripley’d published his first short story in the
Harvard Crimson
, the campus paper. Which was all the more impressive to me, as he thereby became the first person I hung out with who’d ever published anything. He’d turned down a scholarship offer, he told me, to play football at Texas. After Harvard, he got into a law school—I think in Colorado—but he hated law school and loved drugs and therefore lasted only a week, give or take. He moved to Austin. He had title, he would say, to some iddy-biddy acres there in Central Texas, which, like anyone else who’d never been east of El Paso, I assumed was lots of dirt, not what I know now to be Dripping Springs, which is twenty miles west of Austin, in what is the idyllic Texas Hill Country. He began to sell marijuana on a larger scale than many, moving it out of West Texas to the north and east. He had three women drivers who, he claimed, listened to him attentively and loved his cocaine. Women, he explained, were the best drivers because the cops never suspected them. When one of them got pulled over with a few hundred pounds of weed, his theory was proven to be mistaken. Except his stepdaddy was a congressman in Colorado, and he knew a lawmaker in El Paso. His conviction was adjudicated into a sentence of him never leaving the city limits of El Paso without permission while enrolling himself in a master’s degree program in creative writing at
UTEP
.

I knew nothing about creative writing. Until that point, despite evidence everywhere that apparently didn’t register in my brain, I thought all writers were dead—not their literature, only them—and therefore I had a good shot at some openings. For years I was the only living person I was conscious of who wrote. What I knew of the contemporary writing business came out of a used copy of
Writer’s Market
. In El Paso, with my new job, my outlook was transmogrifying. I had even befriended a much-praised, published poet and teacher who introduced me to Gary Snyder when he visited. We had dinner together at a small table! I watched and heard a spectacular Robert Bly reading—way before his men’s movement fetish and probably before that drum-beating-in-a-circle thing. And the faculty at
UTEP
, my “colleagues,” included Raymond Carver. Now there was Ripley: my first fiction-writer role model.