by Natalia Singer
One of my students recently said that the very thing that makes a nonfiction account unreliable in a court of law is what makes us trust it in an essay: the art of conjecture, those moments in which the author interrogates her own version of events, and also tries to write her way, through a sympathetic imagining, into the lives of the other characters in her story.
“America was a shooting star,” the Welsh software guru said. Eyes pale blue and compassionate, hair the white-yellow of young corn, the faint ghost of Guinness-gut on an otherwise sleek torso; he’d been logging time at the gym. He was smart, funny, kind, animated. I could see why our son was so fond of him. My husband and younger son and I were in England visiting the firstborn and his wife for the holidays. The older son, who is a research scientist, had wanted us to meet some of his friends, and seven of us were huddled together in a Cambridge pub three months before the original Brexit deadline: Christmas décor still on the walls, roast dinners offered in partially erased chalk.
When he was growing up, the Welshman continued, New York was the center of everything. “American hip hop. The Nineties. New York was the coolest place on earth.” Like many bright kids of that era, he went into tech. Worked at a startup in Manhattan beside the heir to one of those fortunes art museums get named for. “I was kind of his babysitter,” he shrugged. “The guy was so hapless his dad had to buy him a company to give him something to do. For my part, I never worked so hard in my life.” Twenty-hour workdays, seven days a week. Having to take calls from anywhere at any hour. “I was only in my twenties, but after a few months I needed medication for my blood pressure.”
One day, he said, his heart was beating so fast he thought it was going to blow up.
Still, he said, he admired America—even now. The music and art and innovation and, until recently, celebration of diversity and progressive values. “You’d walk down the streets of New York and hear dozens of languages,” he said. He even liked all the daring and hubris. “Straight up America went, so fast, so far, like a rocket, a shooting star,” he repeated. “Leaving the rest of the world dazzled and perplexed.”
“And then we fell straight down,” I said, ready for his take on the hideous now. He and Scientist Son and their two friends at the table were convinced the decline began with 9/11, but I argued that the dot-com boom of their youth notwithstanding, we’d been in free fall their entire lives. “You’re too young to remember, but I think it goes back to Reagan,” I said. “The unions lose power, the solar panels are taken down at the White House, there’s a backlash against women that lingers to this day, and lobbyists get unlimited access until corporations own the politicians.”
What ensued was a game of speculative history. What if Jimmy Carter had won a second term? What if—and here I lingered—the Senate had believed Anita Hill? We wouldn’t have Clarence Thomas, who couldn’t have “appointed” Bush Junior as president. President Gore would have listened to the intelligence and prevented 9/11, but if it had happened anyway he would have tried Bin Laden in a court of law instead of starting the wars we’re still fighting two decades on. Without those wars there would be no ISIS, or refugee crisis. The climate catastrophe could have been averted. Tony Blair would be remembered as the man who helped broker the Good Friday Agreement with Northern Ireland and gave a moving eulogy to Princess Diana, not as Bush Junior’s fellow war criminal. Labour might still be in power, the global economic meltdown of 2008 could have been averted, Brexit would not be a word, and on and on we went, thinking of alternative beginnings and endings to the dystopia we’re living now.
Then again, for Anita Hill to be believed, we would have needed a world in which misogyny did not prevail. Which brings me back to a sign I saw that night in the women’s toilet: If a man in this pub makes you feel unsafe, go to the bar and ask for Linda. When I asked the barkeep about this, he said that “Linda” was code for call me a cab and lead me out through the kitchen door so I can get away from this scary asshole.
Maybe we all need to call Linda.
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When Scientist Son had invited us to the pub, I’d braced myself for a lot of lab talk and data sets. No matter how patiently he explains his research, his work as a synthetic biologist always flies over my head. My husband and I had agreed to stay an hour, tops, then leave them to their day-after Boxing Day lads’ night out. My daughter-in-law had already excused herself and I had Sally Rooney’s Normal People waiting on the nightstand. Hence my surprise and delight to find the seven of us absorbed in my favorite subjects, history and politics and apocalypse, sweetened by the hard cider I was sipping and occasional references to foreign travel and family pets. The prospect of Brexit was holding one of the software guys’ future in limbo because his girlfriend, who is Dutch, doesn’t know if she’ll be able to use the prestigious EU grant she snagged for her research if she stays in Cambridge. The third man, who is married to a British physician, will likely have to relinquish his Danish passport, thus limiting potential markets for his startup’s software. Through all their years of hard work and attainment they never expected their world to shrink in this dramatic way, but of course “remain” advocates like these men are seen now in Britain as the elite, much like the Ivy League-educated branch of the Democratic Party.
Our what ifs kept spinning—back to the collapse of the Soviet Union; back to Nixon; back to a youth revolution that still kept women subservient, mimicking the flawed old order; back to the birth of oil-fueled economies; back to postwar alliances and peace, flashing forward to the imperiled EU where I’d long nursed the secret hope that my husband’s British passport would allow us to retire someday in the South of France—a series of speculations and missed chances that kept my husband and me out well past our bedtime. The pub was near closing and the men deep in hard Brexit and the what ifs of Britain’s economy shrinking by ten percent when Kerry and I began our long walk to the flat under a waning moon, wreaths still hanging from blue doors, stars hidden under a scrim of cloud. We’d been energized by the conversation, but were saddened, naturally, by the narrowing of opportunities dangling before these bright still-young men, the irony being that the lies disseminated in the disinformation campaigns that hastened the closing of borders in the U.K. and U.S. were spawned inside the very machine they’d given their life blood to building. Fellow architects of this brave new world, they’re as baffled and bruised as the rest of us who can’t compute the algorithms that took us down this dark path. And then there’s our younger son, the artist, who, over the course of the evening, kept insisting on paying for rounds he couldn’t afford while trying to explain to his brother’s friends the current mess in Wisconsin, where he is a poster child for the provisional academic economy, making perilous long drives through winter blizzards to earn below-the-poverty-line pay on three different campuses as an art instructor. Artist Son makes gorgeous, bold, joyous geometric abstract paintings that make my heart sing, he lives on less than $15,000 a year, and on this particular night as he approached the prospect of his thirty-ninth birthday, he had reason to think one of his classes wouldn’t fill, which would also mean losing his health insurance. Have I mentioned that his mother (I’m the stepmom) died of cancer at forty?
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Tall, gaunt, wavy-haired, and handsome with paint-spattered T-shirts and Clark Kent glasses, Artist Son has an uncompromising ethical compass. It kills him that he needs to schmooze rich people to sell his work, although he does it with grace when he’s put in the path of potential patrons. He’s also nerdy-hilarious, balancing references to semiotics and Noam Chomsky and Charles Peirce’s metaphysics with obscure punk bands from my youth that I never knew about and Internet videos about hoarders, Amish kids going wild, and cats. All the men in our group that night were drinking with gusto, but it was alarming to watch him setting the pace; we were used to hearing him complain that even a glass of wine at dinner made him fuzzy when he woke up, less able to summon the stamina he needs to work in the studio for twelve-hour days. Perhaps because his brother is a fabulous cook and has the ruddiness and girth of a bon vivant, Artist Son carved out his sibling niche early on as the starving artist who survives on two modest meals a day, black coffee, and water. His friends sometimes bring him food, worried that if left to his own devices he’ll waste away like Bartleby the scrivener (which is, incidentally, the name he gave his cat.) Doing the work of late capitalism requires intense self-sacrifice from all of us, but I worry that Artist Son takes it too far. And then I worry—when I see him abandon his regimens—that he’s giving up. What’s the point of trying so hard, one might ask, if the stars are clearly not aligned in our favor?
It also occurred to me as the conversation spun round and round through twisting corridors of time and history that the last time all four of us had spent Christmas in England as a family, I was the same age Artist Son was now. Scientist Son was in his first year of college and the younger boy was starting at the boarding school with the enriched art curriculum we sent him to when he told us he wanted to become a painter. The decision to send this forthright, social justice-minded kid to a rich kids’ school was not something we made lightly. We worried about how it would affect his confidence and identity to be surrounded by so much privilege, but we wanted him to at least have a shot at realizing his dream, and the art teacher in our rural public school had just been put in prison for sleeping with his students and the school board was scrambling to find a qualified sub. For my part, I was just glad the boys were in good hands while their father and I escaped, if only for a year, from the America that had broken my heart.
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If New York in the nineties was the center of the Welsh software designer’s everything, London in the nineties, when I was thirty-nine, was the center for me. As a child I had escaped river-on-fire industrial Ohio by reading novels set in the Yorkshire countryside. None of my friends was surprised that the older man I fell in love with when I began my teaching career happened to be a Brit who looked like Graham Nash. When he was tapped to direct our university’s abroad program in London, I was ecstatic. That year also happened to be my first sabbatical as an English professor. We found a flat in St. John’s Wood around the block from the zebra crossing made famous in The Beatles album, Abbey Road (which proved to be a nuisance, actually—trying to cross the road without interrupting someone’s photo op). I felt so lucky to be in London as the U.K. geared up for the election in May when Labour would win by a landslide, the Party headed by its youngest leader in history, who, incidentally, Kerry knew personally because their fathers, both Scotsmen, had taught together at Durham University, and Kerry’s mother had once sewn a button on Tony’s shirt when he was canvassing.
London was hip and fun and I fit right in with my Rachel-from-Friends layered shag haircut, flair trousers, and black loafers with heels—until I opened my mouth. Bridget Jones’s Diary was a column in The Independent; The Full Monty came out, giving us a new expression; and although no one approved of monarchies the people’s princess was still alive until the end of that summer, hugging babies with AIDS. London was pricey, but you could eat noodles at Wagamama’s in Leicester Square for five pounds a plate, then take in a free exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery: Duane Hanson, Fiona Rae. An all-female crew made the short list for the Turner.
During the day, I wrote. Or, to be more precise, I wrote and cried, cried and wrote. I was hammering out the first draft of a memoir about growing up in poverty as the daughter of a mentally ill mother—write for an hour, cry for two was my motto as I mined the unraveling of the safety net that had kept my sister and me housed and fed and educated. Some days under darkening skies I would cry so much I wondered if I needed medication. It turned out that yoga would help, and acupuncture, and changing my diet to include meat. And on the surface, there was much to celebrate. At home we re-elected a Democrat, the economy was booming, and I was getting paid for a whole year not to go to my job. But even while I accompanied the students and my future husband and father-in-law to the theater and we strolled along the Thames and my cheeks pinked up with protein-enhanced meals and I eased my body into full lotus and someone somewhere coined the expression “it’s all good,” I could not tune out the rising threat of nationalism and tribalism (as in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo), or ignore the fact that Clinton was putting more people of color in prison than were ever enslaved while also “ending welfare as we know it,” the safety net that kept me alive as a child. There weren’t enough “it’s all goods” to shut down a lifelong habit of worry. Most of all, I dreaded going home again to the Gingrich Congress that vowed to end public funding for the arts and to ban abortions and would eventually impeach Clinton for lying about a certain dalliance.
Maybe I should have felt on top of the world to be thirty-nine and newly tenured in an era when the capitalist engines kept the beat to a hip hop soundtrack and the new dot-com millionaires promised everything would be all right, but I, a Johnson-era Great Society Democrat still waiting for a truly participatory democracy would think to myself, late empire, late empire. Widening inequality. Burning planet. Ruin.
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London was also the first time in my life when I had the leisure to look back on my past, and on the America of my childhood. Inevitably I thought of my mother.
I would picture her at the age I was now. Beautiful, hopeful, but so ill. And yet she tried and tried to be a good mother. She taught my sister and me French. And how to swim. And play piano: I could read music before I read words. Classical music, foreign languages, physical fitness: she wanted her girls to rise. On Sundays she took us to the Cleveland Art Museum, pausing always to admire the expansive gardens surrounding the lagoon outside where nature’s siren song competed with the screech of cop cars and ambulances. “This is your garden too,” she would say, instilling in us a belief in the commons and assuring us that we had the right to go where we pleased, even if we couldn’t afford to eat lunch in the museum’s cafeteria. Her childhood neighborhood on the East Side had once held the city’s highest concentration of Jews, mostly immigrants from Eastern Europe like her mother (who was born in the East London slums of Spitalfields en route to America from Belarus), and was now mostly African-American. This district had always been poor, yet throughout the twentieth century her old school, Glenville High, graduated an impressive roster of NFL athletes, politicians, artists (including Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the duo who created the DC Comics character, Superman), and musicians like my mother, who won a scholarship to a music conservatory where she trained to become a concert pianist.
The year my mother turned thirty-nine, I was placed in Major Work, an advanced curriculum launched in the twenties for kids who scored high on cognitive tests. As a third grader, getting put in Major Work was like winning the lottery (almost akin to being placed in an arts-enriched private school like the one to which we sent our second son). In Major Work you got to study a foreign language. For art class we had sketching trips around town, including the West Side Public Market. In music class we worked with a Hungarian composer, and twice a year we went to hear the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra perform at Severance Hall. It was the Cold War, the Space Race, the War on Poverty, and all our pep slogans then, every word of encouragement featured metaphors of space and of flight. Reach for the stars. Fly high.
Sometimes as a kid I would look through my mother’s old yearbook to wonder how we’d ended up here, in this crappy apartment in a rundown neighborhood on the West Side of Cleveland, struggling to get by. Honor Roll student, winner of statewide musical competitions, fluent in French, a raven-haired beauty like Lois Lane: our mom was one of the kids her peers believed was destined for great success.
At thirty-nine, my mother was still hanging onto the dream that our father, whom we hadn’t seen since I turned six, would publish another novel (his first had been well reviewed but didn’t sell) and bring an end to our financial woes. “When my ship comes in,” she often began her sentences. When my ship comes in, we’ll be able to eat shrimp or steak more often than once a month. We’ll go on vacations to the seaside. I’ll be able to buy you girls beautiful clothes. When her ship came in, we wouldn’t have to rely on her parents’ handouts anymore, or government subsidies like food stamps and Medicaid and Aid to Dependent Children. But by the time John Glenn made it to the moon, our father had decamped to Mexico and stopped paying alimony. We never heard from him again. My sister and I watched helplessly when the bill collectors came to take away the baby grand our mother had bought on credit, and when she sent our puppy to live with her parents because we couldn’t afford to feed her. On and on it went in a merciless downward spiral, until our mother tried to take her own life. This had happened before—right after the divorce. My first memories of Cleveland, where we moved from Indiana when I was six, are of bending down to help my grandfather wipe off the blood spattered on our apartment building’s steps after she’d stabbed herself.
What saved my sister and me were those government “entitlements” and the gospel of Space Age optimism: that if you worked hard you could reach the stars. We did get into good colleges, and luck brought us the rest. But I have come to see that what we think of as “luck” is often just good timing—that is, when someone is born, and where. It was my good fortune to be born in an era when it was widely understood that government is obliged to make all people’s lives better, not just those of the donor class. My sons, who came in with Reagan, haven’t had the same good luck.
I try to tell Artist Son that it’s not his fault that Governor Walker, a college dropout, gutted his state’s higher education system, and that neoliberalism has wreaked havoc on every aspect of American society, including higher education, making tenure-track jobs increasingly rare. To compound his feelings of shame and worthlessness, Artist Son feels guilty for feeling bad about his predicament; he is, after all, a white man at the top of the food chain in Trump’s white supremacist patriarchal America. It breaks my heart that my brilliant, gifted son, while fully cognizant that we are living through a second gilded age, believes that it’s mostly his fault that he’s not a superstar.
When Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the graduating class at my mother’s alma mater during that year she turned thirty-nine and I started in Major Work, he said, “If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl if you have to, but keep moving forward.” This was King’s more muted version of the era’s Fly High mantra, and as an educator and parent, I can’t help but pass it on, even though I know that slogans like this ring hollow in the face of today’s downward mobility and rising inequality.
As we pilot our way through ordinary days, when do we sense the beginning of a time of promise and freedom and renewed flourishing, and when do we feel in our gut the beginning of the end?
//
Chekhov once wrote in a letter, “You’ll get a picture of a moonlit night if you write that on the dam of the mill a piece of broken bottle flashed like a bright star.” I wish I could tell you more about how dark the sky was as my husband and I walked back from the pub on that unseasonably warm night in late December, mulling it all over, or how communicative (or not) the stars, but we were focused more on whether it was too late to get takeout—we had skipped dinner—and how our sons would wake up with monster hangovers. Of course we were concerned that the company of these prosperous men would make Artist Son feel even worse about his precarious situation. But we weren’t in bad spirits. Over time, we’ve developed the capacity to carry the full load of heartache in the face of our children's suffering while permitting ourselves the luxury of savoring a night walk in each other’s company. As parents, as citizens, as witnesses to our global unraveling, hope lives aside dread, a constant companion. I notice beauty more these days, laugh harder at certain jokes. Perhaps just as, collectively, we’ve grown accustomed to hearing terrible news, we almost have to insist, as a form of resistance, in finding solace, however fleeting, wherever it presents itself. Or, in the words of Hanif Abdurraqib, “surviving on small joys.”
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When the Welsh software guru returned to Britain and a much more humane work life, where even as the CEO for the company he started he suddenly had more down time, he was able to go off his blood pressure medication. “I make time to exercise every day now,” he told me. “And I can sleep. Finally, I can sleep.” He talked about how he’d learned not to use his electronic devices at night, or even bring them into his bedroom, and that it helped. “Maybe you just need to limit your access to the news,” he said to me kindly, perhaps reading something in my face or tone of voice I didn’t know was there. “Maybe just make it a rule in your house. No news after dinner. No Trump.”
Good advice, I thought that night, and still do. Even though I’ve yet to follow it.
One of my students recently said that the very thing that makes a nonfiction account unreliable in a court of law is what makes us trust it in an essay: the art of conjecture, those moments in which the author interrogates her own version of events, and also tries to write her way, through a sympathetic imagining, into the lives of the other characters in her story. When the subject is history, at how we went from there to here, we are, of course, examining and juggling multiple storylines and possibilities, a speculative dance if there ever was one, but in this essay I also wanted to explore some what ifs that might have landed us elsewhere. When I wrote this essay about a spirited conversation I had about the rise of xenophobic right-wing nationalism and closing of borders in the U.K. and the U.S., I was mining the past for a trail of breadcrumbs, but I was also exploring how we can find hope and solace going forward.
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Natalia Rachel Singer is the author of a memoir, Scraping by in the Big Eighties. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Harper’s, Ms., O: The Oprah Magazine, The Nation, The Iowa Review, Redbook, The American Scholar, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and many others. Her work has been short-listed for The Best American Travel Essays and the Pushcart, and anthologized widely. She is completing a new essay collection, Stubborn Roots. A professor of creative writing and environmental literature at St. Lawrence University, Singer has led study-abroad programs in France and India.