Eliya Smith

My roommate has some sort of condition where she gets freaked out by small holes. Trypophobia is what she calls it. It is hard not to make immature jokes about the fact that she is scared of holes, obviously, but for her this fear is very real.



 



I’ve never understood it. There is nothing frightening about holes. Holes are empty. If you dig a hole in the ground you can hide inside it, you can cozy up and feel the edges pressing in, nice and safe. A small hole in a sweater is something you can poke a pencil through, drag your fingernail around when you are nervous. Comfortable and secure. Nothing to fear.



 



What *I* do not like is the idea of small particles; miniature bits of a thing. Amathophobia, my friend Frank explained once. Fear of dust.



 



The thing about tiny particles is that they used to be part of something bigger but broke off, seceded from the mass, or maybe the mass disintegrated. I do not like these particles because it is not clear to me at what point they stopped being a part of the larger mass and started existing as their own small things, and this ambiguity makes me nervous. It is impossible to sort out when the particles lost the essential nature of the thing they used to be and became a flake, or a kernel, or a tiny morsel that is absolutely nothing at all besides the flake kernel morsel; that stands for nothing bigger than its atomic unit; that has no higher meaning than its small, miserable self.



 



We shed 1.6 pounds of skin every year. Live skin cells become microscopic dust. When my skin peels away from my body can I stare at the tiny skin flakes on the ground and say, *there is Eliya*? Of course not. So what does that mean about the skin flakes that are attached to me right now? Are they any more Eliya than the skin flakes on the ground? Structures of identity begin to crumble very quickly when particles get involved. I do not like it at all.



 



***



 



I know that I do not want to be here as soon as we step out of the van. I can feel it all over, my whole body sinking into itself, sending my brain a firm *no, thank you*. The sky is a bumpy sort of grey, like there are a lot of tiny particles floating around, like pointillism without any of the colors. But I am here, so. My brain with apologies sends my feet trudging forward.



 



My classmates and I sip coffee while we wait in the security line. We arrived in Poland the night before, and none of us have slept. We’re all in that kind of dull sleep-deprived stupor that feels a little bit nice as long as you’re with other people. But every time I look past the line of people and see the hazy sky in front of me, I have to fold my hands together to keep my thumb from twitching. *I would like to leave*, it is telling me, stretching of its own accord to point in the direction where our van is parked.



 



A group of girls glides to the front of line and hovers at the entrance. When there is a gap, they slither forward, approaching the security counter.



 



“Cutting the line at Auschwitz?” my friend Mitch whispers, eyeing the girls. “Jeez. Not a good look.” We all giggle quietly.



 



After security, a mittened man hands us headphones. The tour is thoughtfully orchestrated so the guides do not have to yell; because even on a day as windy as this one, the information we are about to hear is not meant to be screeched. The guide murmurs a greeting into her speakerphone; it lands directly in our ears. *Thank you for being here*. Crisp and clear. So we will not miss a word.



 



We follow her to our first stop: the metal ARBEIT MACHT FREI sign that hangs over the entrance to the camp, and this moment feels like plunging my head into ice-cold water, because suddenly there it is, here I am, that sign, this place, really really.



 



I am thinking back to the young adult Holocaust novels I pored through as a child, many written autobiographically by survivors of Auschwitz, most of whom, on their way to a hell they cannot yet contemplate, pause underneath the lettering, which seems to loom incredibly, monstrously large, to have a think. Arbeit macht frei. Work will set me free? Hmm. These soon-to-be-heroes never seem to believe the sign’s promise. Clever Jews.



 



I know it concerned my parents, the ferocity with which I flew through these concentration-camp memoirs. *Are you sure you feel okay reading this? my mother would ask me gently. Can we talk about what you learned from your book? Are you upset about that? *It was an oddly maudlin habit for such a cheerful child, but I couldn’t help myself. I was doing research.



 



Mostly, my interest was theoretical. I was curious in a clinical, distant way: what is it, exactly, about me and mine that made a whole lot of people want to make us go away forever?



 



But every once in a while, I heard about how someone painted a swastika on a highway barrier nearby, or a kid in my Sunday school class who went to an elementary school in rural Ohio told me they made fun of his yarmulke, and I thought about how Granny was born in 1938 and Hitler did his thing in the forties and Granny wasn’t all that old, really, and if one person (Granny) could live long enough to watch the world swing from scary to safe, it was not out of the question that another person (me, maybe) could watch the world swing all the way back.



 



And in those moments of paranoia, the YA Holocaust books became how-to guides. This boy, how did he escape? This girl, she lied about her age. That is a good trick. I will lie about my age, too, when the time comes.



 



I used to ask my friends: If there is a second Holocaust, can my family live with yours? Are you sure? My dad eats a lot, can you promise to feed him? You’ll need extra groceries, you know. And a sliding wall, do you have one of those? One girl I read about lived behind a sliding wall. Well, maybe you should build one. Just in case.



 



So when the guide starts talking about how someone stole the ARBEIT MACHT FREI sign recently, a tiny little part of me is thinking: I should practice how to cry quieter. If the people who ever stole the sign come to steal me, I will hide in the attic and they will never hear me. One of the girls in one of my books did that and they never found her.



 



But the mature, rational part of me knows this is silly, knows I am safe, is focused on staring ahead, like the rest of the group, calmly taking in the sign. It’s smaller than I expected, I decide. Like when you see a macho celebrity in the airport and discover he’s actually only 5’7”. Not so intimidating, actually.



 



Often in my books around the time the narrators encounter the sign, they have some sort epiphany about the sky. They stare up, as high as their necks can crane, wondering if anyone is up there thinking about the people on the ground, but all they see are flecks of ash dotting the sky, spreading out infinitely in every direction. And then they realize that these small dots comprised, until very recently, a person who was actively producing thoughts and feelings and sweat and excrement and is now a tiny piece of white flake drifting dully through the sky.



 



And sometimes these books have an additional horrific moment wherein a character has been assigned the task of cremating the dead bodies, and comes across his own father, inert in a pile of similarly cold naked emaciated Jewish men. Or watches her sister march into the gas chambers and hours later smells the scent of burning flesh. Smelling is just inhaling tiny particles of a thing into your nose.



 



***



 



Our arrival in Poland comes just a few months after 60,000 white supremacists march in Warsaw; a month or so after the government announces a ban on the labelling of death camps as “Polish” in an attempt to remove implication from the Polish people for the massacre of Jews, to refocus the conversation on the non-Jews who suffered and died during the Holocaust; and just weeks after backlash against this law spurred increasingly virulent anti-Semitic epithets, sentiments, and demonstrations, like the march where Polish nationalists carried signs that read “Take off the Yarmulke - sign the law” and “stop Jewish aggression against Poland.”



 



It is also a month or so before a survey emerges concluding that people are forgetting about the Holocaust: 66% of millenials cannot say what Auschwitz was. I do not know this particular statistic when I am there, but I know the trends. Rising white nationalism, Holocaust denial, xenophobia, anti-Semitism.



 



A few days after we tour Auschwitz, we visit the Schindler Museum.



 



I like historical museums–these places of quiet communion with the past. Sometimes in museums I stare at an antique uniform or a cluster of words on the wall and I feel like it’s just me and history, alone together. And then I look around and there are so many people inside our little museum cosmos; there is a pleasant hum of empathy because we are all here, we are all absorbing these narratives of times long ago, forming silky threads of connection, soaking up the past and thereby affirming our faith in the future.



 



I assumed this museum would be about Oskar Schindler, but I find very little of the information on him. Most of the museum’s focus is on World War II in Poland. There is also a lot of preliminary information on the history of Poland. I learn things like how Poland was sort of tossed around by a lot of Big Kahuna colonizers that kept trying to inhale it, like Russia, and how World War I was a good thing for Poland because it finally became an independent nation. And how when World War II came, the government told the citizens not to worry, that this war would be quick and neat and they would all go back to celebrating their newfound countryhood lickety split.



 



I also learn a lot about how much the people of Poland were not in charge of their fates, and how such loss of agency therefore disqualified Poles from being in charge of the fates of other people, like Polish Jews. How the Nazis pinned posters everywhere with lists of Jews and intellectuals and other unacceptable people for whom they were searching; how they threatened to murder entire families belonging to adults who knew but did not disclose the whereabouts of these listed people. How they cut the Polish people off from credible news sources and distributed newspapers that justified the Nazi cause and played propaganda films in public squares.



 



I am thinking about today’s Poland, the way many people are sick of the interminable guilt. It makes some amount of sense, I conclude, that they are fed up with the rhetoric of blame. Maybe there is a difference between atrocities committed out of malice toward others and those committed out of fear for the self, and maybe the people in this country have felt seventy years of guilt for the things their great-grandparents did because they were confused and afraid. And maybe the recent push for new laws came from this place of frustration.



 



“Polish people are people,” our guide tells us. “They need art and entertainment to live on just like everyone else. Of course they were going to…” she trails off. “To watch the films.” And turn in Jews, I think she means to add.



 



***



 



In Auschwitz, I am not thinking at all about the Polish land we are standing on or the Polish people who may or may not have condoned the atrocities here. I am thinking about the Jews and the others and myself and death and the Banality of Evil and mostly trying to cry quieter because people are starting to look at me and I feel like an idiot. Plus I only brought one tissue and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find dry real estate for nose-blowing.



 



We pass through dark rooms, empty except for the glass display cases. Each has a different theme. A pile of silver pilfered from prisoners. A mountain of shoes. One display case is full of baby’s clothes–tiny dresses, period onesies. A whole room of hair. So much hair, heaping piles of it. I don’t understand how it is in such pristine condition. Doesn’t hair decay? Perhaps seventy years is not so much time after all; not enough for decomposition to set in.



 



Our guide explains that the Germans wanted to use every part of the people they captured. Redistribute the precious items. Turn Jewish bones into hairpins, skin into couch cushions. Waste not.



 



In one barrack, we pass through a long hallway. On its walls are photographs of people who died in Auschwitz.



There is a Polish theater artist named Tadeusz Kantor who made a lot of avant-garde art about both world wars and he has this thing about how photography complicates the idea of death. According to Kantor, if you can look into someone’s eyes in a picture and see life inside, this person can never truly die. This makes sense to me intellectually, but in reality, I think it just makes the pain of death more acute.



 



Like the picture of Anne Frank on the cover of her diary, my favorite of all the YA Holocaust memoirs I ever read. I thought Anne was hilarious and cool and self-aware and brilliant and everything I wanted to be; I felt that she understood my angst and I—so far as I could empathize—hers. Plus everyone told me I looked like her, which I loved. In this picture, she stared up from her desk, caught mid-sentence, a huge grin, bright eyes. I used stare at her face for hours and think how easily, with a simple cosmic switch of birth years and locations, this girl could have been me, how horrible it was that this person had to stop living.



 



In Auschwitz the people on the walls feel the same. The hallway is so long and the pictures do not end, it feels like, there is just face after face, staring me down, eyes that believed they would keep blinking until the new millennium and on but that instead went cold just years, months, days after this image froze them in time.



 



Eventually the hallway of faces ends and we go down a tiny staircase that is dusty gray–like everything at Auschwitz, except the lower we go the dustier and grayer it gets until it is very difficult to see anything. It begins to smell a little bit, and I try very hard not to think about the tiny particles flying up my nose.



 



We go lower and the guide is murmuring about how down here is where they kept disobedient prisoners. They implemented all different kinds of torture regimens, she says, take your pick, empty dungeons everywhere. On your left is the cell where insubordinate prisoners had to stand up without a break for days and weeks and sometimes months, too narrow to sit so they just stood until they died. Or look to your right, this one’s a bit roomier, that’s where they starved people to death. Shuffle forward please and here if you peer into this peephole you can see the tiny room for suffocating which is exactly what it sounds like, just a lot of Jews in a small room and not enough air to go around. Voila.



 



My tissue by this point is so saturated with liquid it has no more capacity to absorb anything and as I am futilely wiping my nose, my thumb begins to twitch again, like it did at the beginning of the tour before I knew quite how much I did not want to be here, and I drop the tissue on the ground. The tissue is so wet and the ground is so dusty; I cannot pick up the tissue because in its wetness it has attracted specks of brown and if I use it I will be wiping tiny parts of dead Jew, little molecules that once were faces on the wall, onto my sticky lip. I stare at the tissue where it sits collecting pieces of jew and my snot, untissued, begins to plunk itself in droplets in the dirt. Does snot contain DNA? I decide it does. * **I am leaving a piece of myself here*, I think, and I can’t tell if I like this.



 



Our group is leaving so I grab the tissue, carry it between my nails so my fingertips don’t have to make contact with the powdery brown specks. We are shuffling so slowly and now there is another tour group blocking the stairs but we go up them anyway, pushing past limbs and torsos and feet. Over our headphones the guide is saying how we are passing by the place where they tested the first gas chambers and ssssss–the feed cuts out and I cannot hear what she is saying–the first time they tested the gas chambers they didn’t put enough sssssss and when the guards went to check after a full day the people inside were still alive so ssssssss coughing wheezing prisoners trapped inside forced their way toward clean air but the guards ssssss slammed the door, locked the Jews back in the sssssss put another dosage of poison so ssssss the next day ssssss some dead some alive sss and sss two full days sss slowly dying until ssssssssssssss—By this point I am shoving people out of my way, which I have not done in my life ever, but all I am thinking is that I have to get out of the underground place so the static in my ear will turn clean again because now I’m taking shallow breaths so I can stop inhaling dead people particles up my nose, because I’m getting a little bit dizzy, because it is hot and crowded and the air is goopy and I’m getting droopy and—



 



But I am being silly. There is no Zyklon B seeping through my skin, no one slamming a deadbolted door in my face. The only thing between me and clean air is a few tourists walking a little too slowly.  I shove my way toward the top of the staircase and emerge into the gray sunshine.



 



***



 



Apparently Hitler wanted to make a museum about Jewish people once they were all gone. That’s why we have most of the stuff that the Nazis didn’t burn or redistribute—the piles of hair, of baby clothes.



 



I can’t stop thinking about this as we explore Krakow. Because in this city, I am coming to understand, Judaism has become not much more than a relic, something fragmentary from another time. A poorly curated museum.



 



A tiny mural on the corner of a building, handpainted: “IN MEMORY OF THE BOSAK FAMILY, RESIDENTS OF KAZIMIERZ 1633-1941.” The occasional Jewish star paved at the foot of what might have been a synagogue. A Jewish museum where the man tells me there are no Jewish employees, “but we had a Jew intern here a few summers ago. Josh. From California. Maybe you know him?”



 



At the Schindler museum, the guide mumbles something about “One hundred fifty left” in the middle of a vague sentence about demographics, so when she is done speaking I pull her aside and ask her to clarify.



 



“Were you saying there are 150,000 Jews left in Poland?” There were 3.5 million Jewish people in Poland before the Holocaust, so I suppose this number makes sense.



 



“Sorry,” she says. “We have to keep moving.” I cannot tell if she is being odd or if she does not understand me. After the next stop, I ask her again, loudly. What does this number mean?



 



She stares at the ground. “One hundred fifty, yes. In Krakow today.”



 



“One hundred fifty thousand?” I ask.



 



“One hundred fifty. Jews. Living in Krakow.” She does not look at me once during this conversation.



 



After we leave the Schindler museum, I call my parents and tell them about what I learned—the way the Nazis coerced, threatened, propagandized the Poles. Maybe it isn’t fair to be so angry about the Polish bystanders, I say.



 



Maybe none of us are very good anyway and maybe these people were scared and misinformed and knew not what they did and who are we, really, to say that these people were so evil.



 



“Yes,” my mom says. “Fair. But Polish people turned in Jews at far higher rates than practically any other country. A lot of people there really hated Jews.”



 



“Did and do,” my dad chimes in. “Poland is like, massively anti-Semitic. Probably the most anti-Semitic nation in Europe. Sorry, sweetie.”



 



I hang up the phone, feeling silly. I knew this, of course. But in the warm, cobwebby narrative I began to tell myself of this pretty city, I switched out hatred for apathy, and the whole thing felt a lot easier to swallow. An easy mistake, I suppose.



 



***



 



Halfway through the Auschwitz tour my leaky face dries up, because the human body can only store so much water, and I drank a lot of coffee waiting in line.



 



We have landed in the center of Auschwitz I, facing the camp’s wide gallows. The guide points in the distance to a picturesque yellow house. This is where the head guard lived with his family, she says. In front of me, another man on the tour has reached his hand over to cup his girlfriend’s ass, and watching this interaction makes my stomach churn, so I turn away from the group and stare at the house for a while.



 



It really is very pretty. In a tasteful way. Pretty yellow house for a pretty yellow-haired family. Pretty pretty, and suddenly everything is pretty, and I am watching this pretty Aryan family, so happy, blonde and coiffed, bouncy pink cheeks; cozying up in quilts when it gets cold, driving to the beach when it is warm. It is nice, I see this; nice to have so much space, to be able to stretch their strong arms and legs wide, yawning into the *lebensraum *nice Herr Hitler made good on: throwing open the curtains to let sun beam down on the manicured carpets, peeling the windows open to breathe fresh air on calm days. And then, on days when the breeze picks up, discreetly shutting the windows, so the ashy particles floating by don’t contaminate the tiny lungs tucked safe inside the tiny blonde children tucked safe inside this pretty cottage tucked safe inside this horrifying death factory; lungs that will stretch and grow and inhale for years and years, even as tiny lungs this very same size wheeze and expire elsewhere in the camp.



 



The guide has turned her attention to the gallows. These ones were for group hangings, she explains, but the nooses are gone and everything still looks pretty, so all I can think is that the structure looks like a big swingset frame. You could probably fit six or seven swings on it. Six happy children, swinging, shrieking; fourteen little legs, Jewish legs, pumping higher and higher; stretching to reach heaven, I imagine, like babel.



 



And then the man in front of me who was fondling his girlfriend has now pulled out his phone and is scrolling through Facebook, and it is not pretty and nothing here is, but before I can decide whether I should punch this boy, the guide is saying “here is a crematorium” and my Mortal Enemies have chosen this time for a photo-op. They crouch next to the smokestack, this couple, and pose for a selfie. In my head their smiles stretch so wide their gums are shining and the smiles turn to grimaces and blood oozes out of their mouths, staining the ground.



 



I want to sit down, I want to call my mother, I want to scream. Why did you come here? Why the hell did you come here? Because if here in *this place* we are not all feeling the same pain then dear god how can there possibly be any potential for shared empathy anywhere else?



 



The guide is saying that one of the big-name Hitler cronies was killed here after the war, that his war crimes judge sentenced him to hang from the same noose he had forced thousands upon thousands of Jewish necks into. I know this man was probably not born evil, was likely just one of those strong-jawed sheeple who wanted to feel special, who fell under the spell of a system that told him he was born superior. He was just following orders, following rules, I know. I know that a life is a precious thing to lose. In this moment I do not care.



 



When I imagine the man’s stiff body swaying languidly in the breeze, tiny flecks of skin drifting off cell by cell, until he is no longer one body but a million pieces of indistinguishable dust, it is my turn to smile real big. Cheeeese. It is pleasing to me. Molecules of Nazi, signifying nothing. This death is sweet.



 



***



 



In a gift store on the streets of Krakow, I find rows of tiny porcelain figures sitting on a shelf. They have cute bug-eyes and cartoonishly large noses and payot—traditional Hasidic hair curls—and yarmulkes and prayer shawls. And they are all clutching a real one-cent Polish coin the size of their tiny porcelain faces.



 



I show the figurine to Mitch, who is with me in the store, who is also Jewish; I hold it in the air with my eyebrows high and he stares at it for a moment and then says—



 



“Aw! So cute!” and returns to the chess board he is inspecting as a gift for his grandfather, the one who escaped Krakow with his family when he was a little boy and the Nazis were just about to close in and never not one time came back.



 



“No,” I say, and point at the money my figurine is clutching. “It’s a Jew begging for money.”



 



“Oh,” he says, and we stare at it for a little while. “Or is he showing off how much money he has?”



 



The version of me that I would like to be in this story pockets the little Jew and glides out of the shop and then throws it on the cobblestones outside, smashes it to tiny pieces, bashes its head in so that no one can have this perfect little Jew, so that no one can take it home and put it on the window sill to laugh at. And then this ideal-me picks up the little Polish penny that the Jew used to be clutching from where it has landed on the sidewalk and adds it to her wallet alongside the abundant America coins that my plush paint-bearing ancestors earned in a place that was not Europe while people less fortunate than Mitch’s grandparents choked on poison. Because waste not a single part of the Jew.



But in the version of this story that actually happens, I just return the figurine to the glass shelf from whence it came and nod shyly at the stoic lady manning the counter. Sorry, I try to say, except I don’t speak a word of Polish.



The thought of stealing the figurine doesn't occur to me even until much later. I follow the rules. I am a rule-follower extraordinaire.



 



***



 



The town we pass on the ride home from Auschwitz is dilapidated and feels very empty. There are rundown gas stations and graffitied signs advertising something via photos of sexy, windswept women. Presumably people live here, because there are all the requisite signs of civilization, although we don’t see any of them.



 



I wonder what it is like for the people who live within walking distance of this place where millions of people took their last breath. Does it feel haunted? Probably it feels like nothing at all. In America we live in a country that has taken land from people and killed other people and subjugated even more and I think that if aliens learned our history and then came to visit they would wonder how we could possibly live with the knowledge that our ancestors did this thing and we’d be like “idk I don’t think my actual ancestors did the actual thing so it’s not really my emotional burden” and they’d be like “yeah but you inherited all the benefits of the thing they did” and we’d be like “yes” and then we’d go back to our knitting. Probably life in this rundown Polish town is unremarkable.



 



I don’t feel much like chatting on this bus ride, and I have seen enough of this town, so I pick up my phone. There isn’t any service, not much to do; I flip halfheartedly through my photos.



 



I took two pictures in Auschwitz, both of them in the final segment of the tour, Auschwitz II Birkenau.







While Auschwitz I was created for torturing and punishing and killing enemies of the reich of all sorts, Auschwitz II had a much simpler mission: it was constructed after the head honcho Nazis decided on the Final Solution for the express purpose of killing as many Jews as possible. Complete extermination of the Jewish race. Auschwitz II Birkenau is where the massive gas chambers once stood, before the Nazis burned them down to cover their tracks.



 



This section of the tour is less directed, so we’re all sort of wandering around, staring at the rubble. I expected to be able to feel the evil rising up from this place where so many hundreds of thousands of human beings lost their lives. But there is no sense of anything powerful buried in the charred wreckage. It’s just vast structures crumbling into increasingly smaller pieces. Someday there will only be piles of soft ash left, someday even this will be gone entirely.



 



I wander around until I come upon a series of rectangular stones with words inscribed into them. I find the one written in English. Its message is bleak—“For ever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity,” it begins. But what I like about the inscription is that lower down I see the word JEWS, and that next to the English stone is another stone and another and another, maybe twenty stones that all say the same thing, each in a different language, each language’s word for JEWS. JEWS JEWS JEWS.



 



And here amidst the ruined gas chambers, surrounded as I am by charred lumps devoid of meaning, suddenly the plenitude of JEWS is something I would like to quantify. Because they tried to make us go away but here we are, everywhere; the massive diaspora endures. So I take a picture.



 



I am still trying to fit all the stones into one frame when our guide wanders past. She doesn’t appear to be doing anything, so I make my way over to her. I ask her awkwardly because I do not know how to phrase it, why does she do this thing that she is doing. She is very nice and does not seem offended. She tells me in a voice much softer than the tinny one I had been hearing over the microphone that her grandmother was forced to do manual labor for the Nazis and her grandfather was part of the Polish resistance and tried to save Jews. She says that she gives tours at Auschwitz because of them.



 



I ask her, because she seems amenable, what she thinks of the recent laws restricting the way people talk about concentration camps. “I do not support my government,” she says, looking steely.



 



She tells me that she has been doing this for twelve years, Monday through Friday most weeks. I ask her how she does this every day, because I cannot imagine that I would be able to return here ever again, least of all make this place into a habit.



 



She shrugs and shakes her head, like she doesn’t know how to answer this. Does it help to not think about what she is saying? I ask. To make herself a little bit numb?



 



“No. Never,” she says. “I will never be indifferent to what I am saying. Not ever.”



 



As for the second photo: this one happened on our way out of the last barracks we visited, the very last stop on the tour. I noticed an etching here scratched into the wall. So high in the sky I almost missed it, all caps, no punctuation, scratched so faintly into the light brick I could only just make it out.



 



WERE



SORRY



 

*Sarah Ruhl’s plays — dramatic worlds equal parts lyrical, sprightly, surreal, and strange — include* The Clean House, Eurydice, Melancholy Play, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play). *Ruhl has also published essays, letters, and, most recently, a collection of poetry, 44 poems for you. Among other accolades, she is a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award nominee, and has won a MacArthur Fellowship, a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and a Whiting Award. She teaches playwriting at the Yale School of Drama.*



Ruhl spoke with Advocate Publisher Eliya Smith ’20 in January at a pastry shop in Brooklyn. This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.



**EOS: The issue is called *Feast*, so I thought that I would start with a question about consumption. In one of your essays, you basically argue that theater is the anti-consumptive art, because it's so tangible. But I feel like when you leave a play, you feel like you *have* consumed it, because it's all gone. Whereas if you put on a movie or if you're scrolling through Instagram, those things are still there after you've finished looking at them.**



Do you think there are certain kinds of plays that resist consumption better than others? Also, what's wrong with consumable theater?



SR: I think the question to ask is, is there merch in the lobby? If there's merch, it's a consumable play. If there's no merch, less likely.



It's a really interesting point you make about, you feel full after you leave the theater. In my mind, what's amazing is you feel full, but you haven't eaten. You know? It's like, you have communion, say, at church, and you feel full even though it's a little wafer. It's metaphorical eating, as opposed to real eating.



**EOS: I'm Jewish, but I believe you.**



SR: Well, I'm trying to think about Shabbat, then.



**EOS: We eat regular food.**



SR: Right, it's not a metaphorical challah.



Louisa May Alcott's father had that utopia, Fruitlands. If you believe in a step beyond fruitarians, you have people who just sit there all day, Yogi's who eat air. So I think theater is like air-eating. It's like sipping the ether.



**EOS: You write in a lot of non-theatrical mediums. I know some plays don’t ever really feel finished, even in performance, but all plays are decidedly *unfinished* on the page, especially as compared to poetry or prose. Do you think about leaving interpretive space in your plays in a way that you don't with writing that reaches its final form on the page?**



SR: Definitely. I think plays have a lot of white space for your collaborators to collaborate with you. Whereas poems have a lot of white space for the imagination of the reader.



In both ways, there's a kind of erasure, so that you're not taking up all the space. Whereas in prose, you're taking up a lot of space. And then a film script you're directing the eye in the moment. I think theater and poems have more in common than theater and film.



**EOS: Why is that?**



SR: Because of this interpretive space, this white space.



**EOS: But in a film script, isn’t there also interpretive space?**



SR: There is some white space on screenplays, but it doesn't gleam. It just sits there and waits for a director.



**EOS: Can you tell me about your relationship with actors? You’ve said you like people who have a certain intuitive understanding of text. How would you define that? Is it emotional intuition, or is it something else?**



SR: I think it has to do with simplicity and intelligence and irony and open-heartedness. And also not confusing the need for pretend with the need to become someone else, the need for backstory — not to over-dramatize those needs at the expense of just saying your line, and hearing the music of the language.



**EOS: So do you not like method acting, I assume?**



SR: My impulse would be to say, that's right. I don't. But then again, I know some actors are brilliant method actors who I would be like, “oh my god, I'd be so I would be so lucky to work with you.” But I do find with the method actors, they overwork the language, and then with the way TV and film has carried method through, actors kind of add “um's” and “err's” at the ends, to kind of make the language more shaggy, more realistic. And I hate that.



**EOS: I wanted to ask about this dialectic that you’ve identified between Miller and Williams, which becomes, basically, mystery plays versus morality plays. My guess is that your work falls on the mystery side of that?**



SR: Yeah.



**EOS: Have you ever tried to write a morality play?**



SR: I'm working on this play called *Becky Nurse of Salem*. In a way it feels like a morality play as mystery play, or as an answer to Miller's moral that he extracts from *The Crucible*.



**EOS: So you're answering Miller’s morality play with a mystery play?**



SR: Well… maybe it's more of a morality play. Maybe it's a hybrid. I don't know. But it definitely feels like the moral that Miller extracts from *The Crucible* deeply troubles me. So I've been trying to write the answer to that.



**EOS: What do you think that that moral is?**



SR: Well, so okay, whatever he wants to say about McCarthyism, etc., that's fine. I don't mind. But what he says about women? Not fun. Abigail Williams was 11, historically. John Proctor was 60. And they never met, except maybe in the courtroom. They never had an affair. So what I find really morally mischievous in that play is that Miller acts like it's a big history play, and he puts copious footnotes, so you think you're seeing the stage version of history. But the emotional center of it is a lie, a total fabrication. He blames this terrible tragedy on the lust of a young woman for an old man. Never happened.



**EOS: Yeah, totally. In his epilogue, he's like, “Abigail later turned up as a prostitute.” There’s no evidence that happened.**



SR: It's so crazy! He's like, “some say.” It's like, who said? He's just making women into witches all over again some other way. Seductress whores. Meanwhile he wants to have sex with Marilyn Monroe, and he feels guilty. So he puts that libidinal energy into the play. There is a whole monologue in my play that this docent at the Salem Witch museum is telling, where she's like, our country's whole understanding of the Salem Witch Trials is based on Arthur Miller's lust for Marilyn Monroe.



**EOS: Every single kid in this country reads that play in high school —**



SR: Yup. You have to.



**EOS: And I feel like it’s become the only understanding of the Salem witch trials that we have.**



SR: That's right. It's done every day. In some part of the world.



**EOS: Right. Okay, this is a question I try to ask every successful artist I meet: Personally, I find that the more I write, the more I begin to worry that I'm starting to develop a complex, where anything I experience could potentially be fodder for art. It's a really terrifying prospect; I don't want to turn into Andy Warhol, where I can't experience my life! So I was wondering how you navigate that — especially when you start with pain, but even when you experience joy or happy moments, and you feel the urge to turn them into art. Are there things that you feel like should never be turned into a product?**



SR: I think it's about not seeing art as a product. Which goes back to the consumption thing. If it isn't a product, then it's a very spiritual practice to turn your pain into art. It's not commodification. It's catharsis.



I have my students at Yale every year read [Louis Hyde's] *The Gift*. At least the first chapter. He talks about, how do you live as, say, a poet, in the capitalist economy. And he says, poetry really exists in a gift economy — and I think most not-for-profit theater does, too. So, you're in a capitalist structure, but you're trying to move around as a maker of a gift. So what do you do with that? It's a mental trick. It's a trick of how to live one's life, because those two things don't exactly match. The culture in which you're living and what you're trying to make.



I would say you, yeah, don't turn your pain into a commodity. Don't. That's horrible. But do turn it into art. That's fine.



And I feel like unfortunately, writers, most of us, were born with a predisposition to observe while in the midst of. It's a peculiarity that I have had since childhood. Maybe I'll grow out of it and become a sage, or something. Or an extrovert. But until then, that's the predicament.



**EOS: I have occasionally wondered if I will look back on college and feel like I was the most sincere about my art during this time, because in college you do everything for free. You make art just because you want to.**



SR: It's quite possible. I mean, I think it's important to check in with yourself in the course of your life and think, would I be doing this if I were doing it for free? And for most great works of art, the artists would make it regardless of whether they were being paid.



**EOS: Back to commodification: *Eurydice* [Ruhl’s 2003 play] came up in my playwriting class the other day, and my professor was like, “oh, I used to assign *Eurydice*, but then everyone started coming in saying they'd already read it in high school.”**



SR: Oh my god, that's crazy.



**EOS: I thought that that was really interesting, because, you know… we were just talking about how everyone reads Arthur Miller in high school; I don’t think of you as having that kind of ubiquity. And [the professor] was saying how, because theater co-opts new devices really quickly, plays that looked like *Eurydice* started cropping up everywhere. I'm wondering if you feel like — I don't know if mainstream is quite the right word — but as your work has a different relationship with audiences, if you feel like your relationship to your writing has changed.**



SR: It's always an unknown sea voyage, whenever you start writing a new play. It doesn't matter what your body of work is, you're always facing a blank page, whether you're 12 or 17, or however old. I do think it's hard when one feels like your work is now being compared to earlier work. But I hope more girls read *Eurydice* than *The Crucible*. Ha ha.



**EOS: Do you feel excited when you think about the future of theater?**



SR: Yes! I think it's thrilling. I think there's a renaissance of women writing, a renaissance of people of color writing. And I think because we're in this weird digital age, I think there is an appreciation of the way theatre mainlines presence.



I will say that in the last couple rehearsal rooms I've been in, sadly, I can feel the difference, now that the phone is sort of almost an extension of the self. Stage managers are typing while the actors are working; the designers or whoever's checking their phone in the middle of a scene. It's not as concentrated and focused. And I wonder if that comes out in the work on stage.



**EOS: But on the flip side… I mean, I’m always excited to see plays, but I sometimes think specifically about the fact that I'm going to turn off my phone for two hours, and I especially look forward to being forced to do that.**



SR: Yeah! It's like a meditation. At this point.



**EOS: I’ve been thinking about how theater might be the most painful kind of art to make — if you write a book, you don't have to watch people reading the book, and then get bored and check their phones. How do you maintain that generosity such that you still want to give them presents?**



SR: You have to always get an aisle seat.



So you can be aware of their boredom, but not so aware that it makes you want to die. You have to have an aisle seat. And you put someone you love between you and the next audience member. Pay attention to the bodily signals audiences send you. Like, notice when they laugh. Notice when they're bored. Notice when they get up to pee. Often they have to pee, but if they were really focused, maybe they wouldn't. Notice when the coughing epidemics happen. So you have a porous sensitivity to those things, but you also have to develop a thick skin and follow your internal compass and not be completely beholden to trying to please your audience.



**EOS: But you're still giving them a gift?**



SR: Yeah, you are giving them a gift. I think that's important, because I think otherwise, artists feel like the world's parasites, or like, succubi — useless, functionless people who are like, please, take my catharsis. But if you imagine a world without art, it's a very dreary, horrible, leaden world.

*Talia Lavin '12 is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn. She has worked at the New Yorker, the Huffington Post and Media Matters, and written for the New Republic, the Nation, and the New York Times Review of Books, among other publications. Though Lavin first encountered the world of the far-right while fact-checking stories for the New Yorker, it was not until the the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, in 2017, that she began to publish her own coverage of the movement. "It was sort of a seismic national moment," she recalls, "and my experience of it was as a Jew, watching these anti-Semitic chants, and the horror of that." She published her first feature on the far-right shortly thereafter; her subsequent work has focused mostly on investigating and unraveling the mechanics of reactionary forces in the United States. She will publish a book on the subject, Culture Warlords, with Hachette Books in October. Lavin spoke with Advocate Publisher Eliya Smith '20 by phone in early January. This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.*



**EOS: In "[Age of Anxiety](https://newrepublic.com/article/153153/age-anxiety)," which you wrote almost a year ago, you had this great quote: "the state of the union, it seems, is scared as hell." Is fear still the predominating emotion in the United States, or do you feel like it's morphed into something else?**



TL: I think we are still definitely a nation led by fear. I think the predominant emotion that nationalists like Trump prey on is fear. And propaganda outlets like Fox quite actively stoke it. People on the other side of the spectrum are also feeling a great deal of fear. Fear towards the environment, fear of war ---  just a whole lot of terror in this world. And fear, as I am learning from my own experiences with panic disorder, can be really powerful. The answer isn't necessarily to tell people to calm down; I don't think the rational response to the world right now is to be calm. I do think there is a way of sort of cooling your fear, acknowledging that things are valid and you're right, but you need to be part of the world, and to fix things as best you can.



**EOS: You spend so much time researching and steeping yourself in these things that I assume are really hard to encounter. On a personal level, how do you deal with that? What kind of steps you take to insulate yourself emotionally, if that's even possible?**



TL: I make sure that I'm in community with people. I have a pretty robust group of people who are either reporters or activists who deal with this stuff on a regular basis. And that really helps, just in terms of talking to people who understand. If I say, "ugh, this particular hate meme that I've seen crop up on Telegram is bothering me today," they won't be like, "well, why are you exposing yourself to that stuff?" They get it.



Everyone who covers the far right --- men and women, although for sure women have it worse --- has experienced harassment, and stress, and the horror of being exposed to that kind of propaganda day in and day out. Especially as a Jew, it becomes pretty weird. Like when I was researching my book this past year, just to spend every day really immersed in anti-Semitic propaganda, it was disturbing and sometimes surreal. And then you wind up sounding like an absolute crazy person as parties, because the stuff that's on the top of your head is like, absolutely so far from ---  even in the Trump era --- the stuff that people talk about on the regular. But it's just the stuff that's in your head.



**EOS: Do you find it fulfilling? I'm wondering how you motivate yourself to keep working on these projects, which I'm sure can be really painful.**



TL: I think that it's a very tumultuous time in history to be living through. And sometimes I think about what I would like to tell my children, should I have any, what I was doing during this time, and to be able to say that I was recording and sometimes just actively fighting the growing fascist movement in my country. It sounds cheesy, but that's something that gets me through the day. And the other thing is, again, being in community, having these comrades, and knowing that I'm working with other people who are facing the same pains, and even far worse situations in terms of threats, and who are continuing undaunted, is a motivator.



For anyone who is considering doing this kind of work, I think the most important thing to say is: don't be a lone cowboy. I think there can be kind of a machismo in the world of journalism. Practically, it's super helpful to have comrades who I can talk to. But then also just to have people who get it when you say, "hey, today's hard, I need a pep talk," or whatever. Being a lone cowboy is just not the way to do this work, 'cause you're gonna burn out really quickly.



**EOS: Do you find hopeful takeaways the more you dig? Are there reasons to feel like the escalation of the far-right might be turned around?**



TL: I have to say that I don't have an easy-pat answer to that. I think if you look at the landscape of the world, the reactionary forces are ascendant. And winning. If you look at just the absolute smoldering tire-fire that is the world right now, it's really hard to come to other conclusions. So I do think that we have to face that we're in sort of a long, dark night of the forces of reaction.



I will say that the people that give me hope, and the people that I talked to for my book that gave me a sense that there were people in the trenches fighting, were anti-fascists. And I, over the course of the past year or two, I have become someone who identifies as an anti-fascist. I know that term can be loaded, largely because of a really sort of dumb, inaccurate, reactionary media, and also because of the sort of instinctual desire of a lot of people in the center left have to see themselves as sort of virtuous, clean. But this is a dirty fight. The people who give me hope, or the people that I look to emulate or that I think are doing effective work in countering the rise of hate are people who are going through and looking at these chats, people who are infiltrating these groups.



I think we're at a point where the current administration is actively complicit in white supremacy and white nationalism, so you can't hope for top-down social censure. I think that whatever hope comes in countering hate groups is making sure that hate has a social cost, and that's on all of us. As someone with panic disorder, I'm not a frontline kinda gal. I don't do crowds. But I can do a lot of things at my keyboard. So can you.



**EOS: So in terms of... angle? I guess that would be the topic of this question. I feel like we're all sort of fed up with the 'this article is going to nuance the far-right' type of profile that we keep seeing. How do you write about, or how do you even approach thinking about the far-right in a way that yields insight but doesn't fall into that trap?**



TL: I do think it's important to look at the causes and mechanisms of radicalization. So I think, for example, Kevin Roose at the New York Times has done some good work on that, looking at people's YouTube histories, for example. I think that's important.



For me, the tug is not so much between how do I not write lush, flattering profiles of these gaping assholes but rather, how do I balance the fact that I feel a great deal of academic interest in this, versus always keeping the human toll of hate in the foreground. I think it's sort of inherently easier for me, because I'm the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, and so the consequences of, say, violent anti-Semitism are never super far from my mind. I think that I have some inherent advantages on that front --- my maternal family was really marinated in PTSD from what the Holocaust had done, and so my instinct has never been to valorize --- or even treat as cagey or funny --- any figures, no matter how ridiculous they can be.



The challenge [is] making sure your coverage reflects the real potential human toll of radicalization. And I think the way that I do that is just by keeping it in close communication with my own anger; making sure that my anger never gets dialed down or muted. You have to stay angry if you're going to write well about the far-right.



**EOS: I was going to ask you a question about how you feel like your Jewishness informs the work that you do, the stakes of reporting on people who so explicitly direct their hatred toward you, but I feel like you maybe just answered it.**



TL: I think it's really easy if you are not a target of hate --- whether that comes in the form of violent misogyny or anti-Semitism, anti-blackness --- it's easy to start treating this as an intellectual exercise. Or, you know, even foregrounding the humanity of these young men, rather than always keeping your eye on the prize, which is that they are merchants of hate.



The truth is, it's so easy to try to otherise people who are in hate groups and say, they're poor, they're dumb, they must be toothless and living in a trailer. No. The truth is, some of them are just as well-educated as you or me. It's much more about trying to find a sense of belonging and purpose and meaning --- that's often the galvanizing force for why people join hate groups. And any human being can fall prey to the desire for belonging and the desire to feel like they mean something.



I mean, no one wants to hear about the Nazi next door, but I think that it is important not to otherize, to say, "that could never be me, that could never be anyone I know, because I'm smarter, because I'm better." The truth is that hate groups prey on really universal thoughts. It's just like, "I'm lonely, and what does my life mean?" And then people come in with really easy, ready-made answers, like "it's the Jews," "it's the immigrants," "Jews bringing in the immigrants." "Here's this book, read some history. Have you checked out *Protocols of the Elders of Zion*?"



It is a weird thing to argue, to be like, 'don't otherize them.' But don't assume that no one you know could fall prey to this stuff, or that it's just a totally alien thing, when really, the things that drive people to hate are the same things that can drive people to do really laudable stuff: wanting to belong, wanting to change the world, wanting to make a difference. And hate groups can and do prey on those sentiments. Quite effectively.

 



I used to wonder what it was like to be my mother, breathless and confused in a maternity ward, three times in a row. To push three defective children out from inside of her; to spend nine months dreaming in intricate detail of the pristine bundle of joy that awaited her, and each time, to wake up to a wriggling pink mass dangling out of a nurse’s arms and think oh no.



 



My granny likes to tell me that when she came to greet me in the hospital, she peered down into the mess of blankets perched on my mom’s chest and a great big pair of eyes stared back at her. Like Harry Potter’s first impression of Dobby, when he sees those two eyes and nothing else blinking at him through a bush, mine sort of hung there, round and earnest, eclipsing the rest of the infant body she knew must be attached.



 



This is what she says.



 



I was an Ohio baby, the first of her grandchildren to be born in the state where her grandparents plopped their Old Country trunks down and never left. So it’s fitting that when she stared down at me and cooed hello, Miss Big Eyes, her subtle midwestern dialect smushed the Miss so it sounded more like Ms., and the g didn’t come out all the way; and thus, I became Ms. Bigeyes.



 



The Ms. was important to me, because it matched my mom. Well before defects 1, 2, and 3 came along, just as second-wave feminism was coming to a close, my mom made my dad read A Room of One’s Own before he could marry her and kept her last name once he did.



 



A name that means Ohio like my granny, Ms. like my mama.



 



And Bigeyes like my dad. My father is a man who disposes of mouse carcasses with studied cool and pats his substantial belly like a good boy puppy and writes all his words in capital letters and compliments other men’s vehicles, but he is also a man who meticulously stitched the head back onto my teddy bear every time her fluffy pink torso went rogue, who gets dizzy after one glass of wine, who stores his toothbrush in a gold lamé dopp kit. And when he took me to see Marley and Me, I turned to look at him during the part where they put Marley down, and his eyes were so clear and shiny and full. And I understood that my eyes are his eyes, just a tiny bit greener, like my mom’s. But that mostly it didn’t matter that he was good at sweating and watching sports; we were Bigeyes and Bigeyes, Jr., and the world looked pretty much the same to us both.







But in the world of this maternity ward hospital room, where cinematic first impressions are the name of the game, I find Granny’s origin story hard to believe. She says the eyes were all she saw, but I’ve seen pictures of baby me. I know what I looked like.



 



Number One



 



Number one was my brother, who came out mostly fine, except that his left thigh was covered in a dark, swirly patch of skin. Shaped like an upsidedown Ohio, I used to think, as he massaged gallons of sunscreen into the area, which the doctors said was dangerous if it burnt. What happened was that God pressed too hard with the marker he was using to shade in my brother and colored that leg darker than the rest of my brother’s pale, Ashkenazi skin and was like whoops! My b. But it was chill. This defect wasn’t so bad. The nurse probably didn’t even notice right away; only my mom did.



 



People didn’t seem to notice it much, either, as he grew up. A leg is just an extremity, after all. I thought he looked fine, was in the clear, until he hit high school.



 



Meredith tells me that her sister, Lauren, who is in my older brother’s grade, has a crush on his friend, Bobby, and that another one of her sister’s friends is interested in another one of my brother’s friends, but that neither her sister nor her sister’s friends are much interested in my brother himself. According to Lauren, his nose is the dealbreaker. “It’s too big,” she says. “Lauren says that you guys have the same nose, actually, but you carry it better. She thinks he might grow into his, though.”



It’s a lot to process, because she talks fast and I think I am supposed to thank her and there are so many names and degrees of separation, but also because this nose stuff is all new to me. I understand that some noses look different than others, because when I stare in the mirror and push my nostrils up I look a lot like my first grade teacher, which is fun. But the “carrying it well” and “growing into it” thing; the idea of the bad nose/good nose dichotomy–this was not on my radar. I had no idea! Lucky for me that I have friends like Meredith to set me straight.



Further inquiry leads me to the phenomenon of the Jewish nose, which, Meredith again clarifies, I have but not as bad as my brother. Phew. I thought Jewish was just a religion, but it’s kind of cool that we have this genetic thing that we all share. I wish the Jewish nose looked more like Meredith’s, though, so that her sister wouldn’t think my brother was ugly.



I learn later that there are other genetic things about being Jewish, like owning all the money in the world and controlling the entertainment industry. Fascinating. What about people who convert? Do they get a new nose and money when they agree to wear a yarmulke? Meredith does not know the answer to this question.





I never met my grandpa, but based on pictures, I think that this nose that my brother and I share came from him. Apparently, he was obsessed with the Holocaust. In a freakish way. I wonder how he felt about the face-measurement tool the Nazis used. If your nose is too big you’re a dirty dirty Jew and it doesn’t matter that your family converted to Christianity in 1298. His Hitler books fill up four entire rows in our study, but not one bears any trace of underlining, notes, or highlights. When he flipped through these pages half a century ago, was he angry? Resigned? Did he wish his features were just a little less prominent, so that just this once, he could blend in? Or did he feel blazing pride, marked by God himself as a boy with a big fat nose?







 



Number Two



 



After my brother, there was me, Bigeyed and 80s-feminist-independent, but the defect crept north north north and plopped down smack in the center of my face. A giant red balloon growing on top of my mouth, puffed full of air but made out of lip, big enough to be a third eye. God was putting the finishing touches on my face when an angel or like wandering soul came by and bumped God’s elbow and God was like NIGEL dude we talked about this you really need to get control of yourself but there I was and there God was and there Nigel was and there my mom was with defective child number two. I’m sure the nurse noticed right away, this time. It is not a thing you can easily miss. I wonder if she gasped when she inspected my face. I wonder if my mom had to nudge my dad to smile weakly instead of the confused sort of grimace he had accidentally adopted. I wonder if my granny did her usual cough and politely said hello, Ms. Bigeyes so that everyone would stop feeling so weird about my face.



 



I know my lip was disgusting, objectively, because children tell the truth, and before my preschool peers learned that it is bad to point at someone’s face and say “what’s wrong with your lip?” they did exactly that, and after I explained it to the best of my primitive communication skills, they usually stared blankly for a while and then said “well, it’s disgusting,” and wandered off.







The interesting thing about this response is that physical and moral disgust are a two-way street. You see something immoral and you feel disgusted, but also sometimes you see something disgusting and then your brain interprets that as immorality. This is a real psychological thing that I do not know the official name of but is definitely a thing. Let’s call it Sins of the Ew.



 



Armed with the empirical evidence of my youth, then, I have concluded that had I been born four hundred years earlier, The Puritans would have thought I was a witch. They would see my face and consider it a Sin of the Ew and say TO THE COURT! and then I would get to give a long and dramatic woe is me monologue from the witness stand in my cute Puritan bonnet and everyone would be emotional and the whole town would be torn into pro- and anti-Eliya factions and riots would break out, but due to the fact that I am also left-handed and Jewish and do theatre, three historically wicked characteristics, the consensus would eventually be that I am in the Definitely Satanic camp, and I might end up burning at the stake but gosh darnit if they wouldn’t write my name in their diaries and court records and then hundreds of years later all the historians would be like wow who is this Eliya person she seems like a Big Fucking Deal.



 



I wonder what would have happened if granny had been honest with all of us when she took a gander at her first ohio grandchild. If she had said something like hello, Ms. Biglip. Maybe we all would have been cool with how my face looked, and I wouldn’t have minded in kindergarten when Rose said I was a dumb girl with a big fat lip and one person giggled and the name stuck. Maybe when she called hey, Big Fat Lip Girl across the playground, I wouldn’t have wanted to keep digging in the sandbox until the bottom fell out. Maybe when Mrs. Hiller heard what Rose was calling me, she wouldn’t have made Rose apologize in front of everyone, and I wouldn’t have stared around with my eyes bursting out of my head, petrified that this public proceeding would only make the name more popular.



 



In another world, I would’ve smiled and thought that my big fat lip was just like my grandpa’s big fat nose, and that would have been that.



 



The year I turn fifteen, a Buzzfeed quiz tells me that when a boy stares at your lips, it means he wants to kiss them. I am distrustful of this advice. Clearly whoever wrote this has a symmetrical face. And no witchy inclinations whatsoever. But a few weeks later, a boy is indeed staring at my lips. It makes me uncomfortable, at first, because I am used to people staring at my mouth and I know what it means. But he looks sort of happy when he stares. So I am thinking maybe Buzzfeed was right.



 



And then a year after that, I am standing in my living room with a lot of adults who have run out of things to say, and a very nice lady tries to make small talk by pointing to a picture on the mantel. What an adorable baby you must have been! she says. And I realize I am no longer Big Fat Lip Girl at all, because all of my baby pictures feature a prominent lip pillow, and I suppose that if the baby in this picture does not have a lip pillow and this lady still thinks it is a picture of me, it must mean that my big fat lip has shrunk beyond obvious notice.



 



But then I realize that this also means I must respond to her comment, I must correct her in front of everyone, and I feel angry. I wish I had my lip pillow back, I wish for burning at the stake or even Mrs. Hiller in front of the kindergarten class; I wish for anything that would prevent this moment. Can’t she tell that that baby is so obviously not me? Its mouth is medium and its nose is medium and its eyes are medium. I do not want to tell her who is in the picture. I do not want to tell her what happened.











Number Three



 



Number three was my sister. God was hungover and trying to catch the Sunday game but the remote wouldn’t work and he was also in a big fight with Moses and really he was just so distracted and stressed he would later tell someone, really wasn’t paying attention and he messed my sister up, he messed her up from the inside out in a horrible way. God didn’t say anything this time when he realized what he’d done. He felt bad. Really really bad.



 



She was born with perfect medium mouth and medium nose. Her name means beautiful in Hebrew and in English. She was picture perfect. Except that her eyes were medium, too. They did not focus, they did not fill with much of anything.



 



The nurse, this time, did not notice anything was wrong when she inspected my sister. I know this for a fact. My mom tells the story of Bella’s birth delicately, like she is dangling a piece of lint near her mouth and if she talks too loud or too fast it will blow away. But there is a flash of pride when she comes to the part about the nurse, a triumphant maternal flare of the nostrils. Like when Miss Clavelle turned on the light, my mom said something is not right! with my child and the nurse said no ma’am, it’s a beautiful baby girl and my mom said said SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH MY CHILD, MY CHILD IS NOT BREATHING, GET THE DOCTOR. And she was right, of course. Because my mom always knows everything.



 



I do not know what my granny said when she saw Bella for the first time. Probably a gentle cough and then nothing at all. Silent like God.



 

My mother raised me on spoonfuls of musical theater soundtracks.



 



Long before I had the motor control to make my stubby fingers press *play* or *rewind*, she began to curate a collection of CDs for my auditory consumption. We’d pop them into the stereo, and feeding time would begin: soaring voices and charging trumpet crescendos like bites of quiche, baked to eggy perfection.



 



Open wide, she would say, and I’d swallow a steaming mouthful of harmonic thirds.



 



She stored each disc in a neon green CD binder. The case was made out of a shiny material I can only describe as kind of like those optical illusions where you see a rabbit when you look at it from the left but a pony from the right. The kind of material that, once you develop control over your fingers, you can scratch with your nails to make a piercing *skrt skrt skrt* noise. A material you can keep *skrt skrting* until the day your dad explodes that he will confiscate every last CD in the case if you make that noise one more time. (Whereupon you tell him it doesn’t seem to bother anyone else. He tells you he has sensitive ears. You did not know this was a condition an ear could be in, and you say an extra prayer for weak-eared people of the world the next time you’re not mad at God for making you go to Sunday School, which is not for a while.)



 



Before they lived in my binder, these albums were my mother’s. Not in CD form–those gleaming tokens never belonged to anyone besides me–but as their primordial ancestors. She likes to tell me how she’d put them on her record player and lie on the ground for hours listening. I imagine her melting into her shag carpet while humming along to angsty *Chorus Line* tunes. *Hello twelve, hello thirteen, hello love...* she’d sing, as the rest of the children lit up blunts, paged through *Go Ask Alice.*



 



“You’ll love this one,” my mother would tell me, tapping a disk with her fingernail. “It used to be one of my favorites.” Musicals were a love we shared, just the two of us. Sometimes, when we were alone in the house, my mom would let me pick a soundtrack. I’d scurry upstairs to the closet where my neon green binder hid. I’d flip through the plastic pages and pick out a CD, which I would carry slowly back down the stairs. Both hands, edges-only. When my fingers slipped and left a print, I’d frantically scour it with my sleeve until the little cloud of residue had mostly disappeared. Then I’d resume my dirge. Eventually, I’d reach the family room, where our stereo lived inside the left cabinet. I’d stand on my tiptoes to load the CD into the mysterious abyss, and then I’d press “play.”



 



And during that brief silent *click click click* as the CD spun unproductively, trying to figure out who it was and what kind of sounds it was supposed to be making, I’d leap from one side of the room to the other, landing next to my mother, where she awaited me on our squishy red couch. We’d curl up together, ready to embark on whichever odyssey we had chosen for the next hour.



 



And then the CD, having gotten its shit together, would burst into that first glorious tone.



 



It was via this ritual that I drank in the swaggering waltzes of *South Pacific*, the stumbling chromatics of *Evita*, the raunchy vamps of *Cabaret*. I sat on that couch and absorbed *Cats*’ psychedelic pulsing, let *West Side Story*’s gleaming sincerity wash over me. I chomped through the bouncing pitter-patter of *My Fair Lady*, slurped down the 70s New-Yorkisms of *A Chorus Line*, chewed up the ominous reverberation of *The Secret Garden*, swallowed whole the gentle warbles of *Godspell*.



 



Listening to a classic musical felt like shucking corn while the sun sets. Steady concentration unravels toward an uncomplicated relief. Gauzy contentment that swaddles in a delicious glow. A chewy golden feast, uncomplicated and hearty.



 



The CD case still sits by my dresser at home, quite pristine. The material has not dulled from so many years of *skrt skrt skrting*. These days, I dare myself to press my fingertips into the reflective rainbow of discs’ shiny metal. I don’t listen to them anymore; who cares? I like the oily fingerprint it leaves, marking them like dog pee. *Mine.*



 



***



 



This cabinet of which I speak, the stereo cabinet, of is one of two that sit against the southern wall of my family room flanking a fireplace. This fireplace, once electric, underwent a serious renovation during one of my father’s bouts of homesickness for the Maine winters of his childhood wherein he insisted we needed a wood burning fire. The upgraded fireplace functions fairly well nowadays, but used to send a thick layer of smoke snaking through the house and my father sprinting up and down staircases huffily muttering “Must close all the doors, I’ve made a terrible mistake… there’s smoke everywhere and the children will suffocate in their sleep if it gets in their rooms… why did I ever come to this godforsaken landlocked part of the country anyway… even fire doesn’t want anything to do with this state…”



 



The cabinets have not changed one iota in the seventeen years we have lived in the house. It’s as if they are cloaked in some kind of halo, a luminescent field that keeps them safe even as time (and my father) renovates their surroundings.



 



Like the fireplace, the family room cabinet to the right of the fireplace belongs to my dad. His tiny man-cave, or the closest he’ll ever get to having one. It contains our mammoth television, a television which remains to this day the oldest functioning television I have ever seen. This thing has never not felt old, not even twenty years ago when my dad loaded it out of the moving truck. When you turn the power on, which requires physically approaching the television and pressing the rectangular plastic button on its front since the remote no longer works, it makes a loud popping sound, and if you don’t remove your hand fast enough, the hairs on your fingers stand up as the glass becomes momentarily fuzzy to the touch, like the static is leaping out of the screen.



 



The left cabinet is my mother’s domain. We are a Family of the Future––my father does our laundry and both parents share cooking duties, so the usual Woman Spaces do not exist in my house. Instead, my mother, despite having objectively worse taste in music than my father, is master of the listening cabinet, which houses our stereo and her old record player.



 



She uses the stereo when she entertains or when she is overcome with dramatic emotions, because she “really just *feels* like it.” My mother likes feelings.



 



The record player was always a bit of an enigma. Silent mostly, except for rare occasions when nostalgia overwhelmed my mother and she simply had to hear Pete Seeger’s *Abiyoyo* on vinyl. Mostly, this strange plastic prism felt simply out of place. Older even than the television in right cabinet I figured it couldn’t possibly live in the world of my neon green binder. In the way that JFK accents and hoop skirts are nice in movies but bizarre on modern-day street corners, I concluded that the record player fit inside a different time.



 



But it was such a crucial element of her lying-on-the-carpet stories that I eventually began to wonder why we didn’t use the record player for our musical binges. I asked her, once, and she told me a story that made me feel weird.



 



She talked about a time after college when she lived in an apartment next to a commune. She didn’t pay much attention to the commune, and they didn’t pay much attention to her. But they were plenty nice. She quite liked them, actually, except that along with societal norms and my mother, they also mostly ignored material concerns. This was fine until the day their toilet got backed up and they didn’t notice until it exploded, covering their room, oozing into the hallway, seeping under my mother’s door in waves of pungent filth.



 



Most of her valuables were covered with sewage in the Great Toilet Flood of 1990.



 



She hired two men to help sort through what was left of her belongings. Like some sort of biblical catharsis, everything she owned was suddenly subject to a dichotomous *keep* or *abandon*. And on the seventh day, the men said *it is good* about the records–plastic impervious to water–but refused to bless the cardboard album covers. Sewage had seeped into the gritty pores, putrid and decaying, permanent.



 



She’d loved her album covers, she told me. She loved the thin, smooth surfaces; the dappled colors; the way the collection looked when she lined the covers up and pulled out different ones to look at, like synchronized swimmers diving sideways into a pool. She was so visibly heartbroken at losing the album covers that when the men – both Venezuelan immigrants – came back the next day, they brought her a record of Venezuelan music with a kaleidoscopic cover. Today it sits in the left cabinet, dressed up square and fancy next to its round, eternally naked peers.



 



She always gets sort of bashful when she tells this part of the story, embarrassed at how much she cared. But she twinkles, too; quietly grateful for these two saviors who noticed her pain and tried to alleviate it. My mother believes in people.



 



But no longer in musicals, not after the flood. Once the covers were gone, she stopped caring so much about the soundtracks. She switched apartments and lost track of a few, moved again and lost a few more. Without covers, the collection became a lifeless amoeba of ridged darkness. The musicals lost their own identities and slipped out of hers. By the time the record player found a home in our left cabinet, her collection had dwindled to a couple dozen, none of them musicals.



 



I didn’t understand how she could just abandon them.



 



Didn’t you still want to listen to them? I asked her. I’d never pegged my mother for a materialist. Judge ye not lest the book cover… something. Hadn’t she herself told me that??



 



Not really, she said with a shrug. That was all she had to say.



 



***



 



My mother’s muted resignation never made sense to me, not in the context of the fluffy couch and the stereo’s hypnotic unspooling of my melodic stories. How could she so tenderly fill me with mouthwatering morsels she herself felt so ambivalent about?



 



These days I’m beginning to understand what she meant. Musicals, as a general rule, overexplain. A drama teacher of mine once explained musicals as representing situations in which people are so overwhelmed with emotions that they can no longer speak, and so must sing and move their bodies. Songs force you to sit in a moment, to swim around in it, to explore it from all sides. Choreography requires characters to clarify emotions, to magnify subtle bodily responses to the world around them. When you musicalize your feelings, you articulate them again and again, a different way with each verse, backed by trumpets and fanfare, underscored by pirouettes and tap shoes.



 



There comes a time when such relentless emoting feels naïve, or perhaps simply unhelpful. The feelings you are feeling do not add up into one megafeeling that can be sung at maximum volume with maximum fanfare until one final downbeat vanquishes them forever. Life and people and feelings do not organize themselves into neatly exclamation pointed sentences. Sometimes they go dot dot dot and move on, forever withholding that satisfying final note. Sometimes they make sense as a frozen ideal, immortalized in primary colors in a hidden cardboard flap. But in motion, they feel dissonant, cloying, out of touch.



 



This is what I say to my friends as we snicker together at the concept of *SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical*.



 



Every once in a while, I scroll furtively through Spotify’s selection of Sondheim and Bernstein, Rogers and Larson. The pictures here are miniscule; much smaller than my mother’s long-decayed album covers, tinier even than my plastic CD fronts. I turn my volume down low–heaven help me if anyone hears the pitchy shrieks of “It’s A Hard Knock Life” as I strut coolly past jaded brick buildings in my black turtleneck. And I press my finger reluctantly over a title (this glowing material never yields any sense of possession from my smeared fingerprints no matter how much residue I leave).



 



The saccharine lessons, tidy aphorisms stream out of my headphones. *Though scary is exciting, / nice is different than good*, sings Little Red in *Into the Woods*. *Life is a cabaret!* shouts Sally Bowles in *Cabaret*.



 



*No, it isn’t*, I think to myself. *This is silly*.



 



But then the orchestra crescendos, Sally’s belt crackles with fortitude layered over misery, and I feel a tug at my stomach, a gnawing hunger.



 



These sugary treats have never quite lost their appeal. Because something happened to me years ago on that plump red couch tucked within my mother’s elbows, as my soundtracks swirled out of left cabinet like smoke from my dad’s botched fires, snaking into my brain.



 



Bits of musicals sped, honking, reckless, weaving through lanes; vehicles packed close together careening absolutely out of control call the cops toward my center of command. My brain, try as it might to log each musical facet passing through the tollbooth of emotional input, was simply overtaxed, absolutely bamboozled. It could not keep up with the bombardment of glissandos and lullabies, off-kilter cadences and diminished fifths, honeyed rhymes stacked on top of each other, the bounty of minutiae that comprised these fraught worlds.



 



So to avoid a five thousand car pileup, my brain sent these elements anywhere else, anywhere it could fit them. Off they zoomed, traversing new paths, laying down pavement wherever they could. They trickled into my hollowest corners like scalding hot soup that I could feel oozing down into my stomach and spreading, warming me from head to toe; decadent comfort food, satisfying vague taste buds in every corner of my body. Like an unexpected compliment that hits you right in the gut and radiates, fluffy and good.



 



What happened next was that these industrious pieces of musical, having ventured into virgin territory, planted a flag and plopped down criss cross applesauce for good. It’s like that story my granny used to tell me about the girl who ate so many watermelon seeds that one started growing inside of her. Too late, her parents realized, she had turned into a human watermelon. Like the Oompa Loompas’ warning–*Violet, you’re turning violet!*–musicals planted roots inside me, seeped deep into my bones, mingled with my essence at the atomic level. *Mine*, they said.



 



We’d claimed each other; I was disciple and deity both. I was wrapped up in the corn shucking sun setting smokey haze yellowed quiche, and they, in turn, bore my oily fingerprints. Try as I might to scrub these naive renderings of the world from my conscience, they’ve burrowed into my being inextricably, attaching themselves to me for good.



 



***



 



There is a moment in *A Chorus Line* when Morales, my favorite character, tells the story, in a sung monologue, about her experience in an acting class. It begins when her teacher, Mr. Karp, asks them to improvise various scenes. "Be a table, be a sportscar… / ice cream cone," he orders. Morales can’t do it. "I felt nothing," she reports, again and again. Mr. Karp humiliates her in front of the class. “I think you should transfer,” he says.



 



*Try, Morales. All alone*, she urges herself, too stubborn to concede. Karp continues to hound her. Finally, she breaks down and asks Jesus for help. A voice speaks to her from on high, sending a message which she relays in a triumphant swell: "This man is nothing! / This course is nothing! / If you want something, / Go find a better class."



 



It is a happy ending well-earned. We, the audience, relax. But the music continues. Morales has more to say. "Six months later," she says, as the music begins to slow, "I heard that Karp had died." Even slower: "And I dug right down to the bottom of my soul…" each word more reluctant than the next. Morales does not want to be telling this story anymore. But the music keeps playing, pulling her along.



 



A pause here. "And cried." Another pause.





"Cause I felt…" three words on the same note, like a hymn, like she is praying again, this time for proof of her own empathy. A third pause.



 



Here, a moment of limbo, perfectly engineered in performance. She gives the faintest of gasps, as if she’s only just now discovered how the story ends, as if it surprises her. Her eyes light up. The corners of her mouth curve, hopeful; her neck lifts, craning into the future. It is a subtle, safe sanguineness. So that until the very last, you think she’s moving her tongue toward the middle of her roof, anticipating *s,* that she felt *something.*



But alas, we cannot hide in this liminal moment forever. The song is waiting for its final note, the conclusion that will make the moment whole. So Morales pokes her tongue forward, lays it flat under her teeth, for *n*. "Nothing," she sings quietly. And we realize that she has tricked us; that her eyes were filled with anguish, not hope; that the corners of her mouth turned up in a grimace of pain, that the pause was not to savor the personal victory but to build up the courage to admit a truth she is ashamed of.



A tinkle of bells, and then the song is over. We are left with silence.



*I felt nothing, *she said.



But hidden inside that shell of ostensible desolation is a swirling mélange of pungently flavored feelings. Pain and joy mixed up–like in Morales’s face, more alike than they are different. Disappointment and vengeance, confusion and guilt. Feelings wrapped in emptiness wrapped in feelings. Blended together and served in spoonfuls.



 



That’s the kicker. In the world of a musical, you never feel nothing. You feel so much of everything.