Spring 2016 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

there is no approaching



infinity, nothing



taught



or finagled in



roots and the bodied. divining



link and



link invert and



whether letters push



   hollow air or beads



   of jowl. it could



be emerald—be,



could emerald!



or should not—should



have



been infuriated



since wu. for leibniz



   the people



applauded



and fucked



and the lake



was not



placid at all. axes



shift disbanding



salaciousness and there



   is device



that steals



from the magpies



—push



gdp,



   make usefulness



   smaller, no one



wants to see it, it



is indecent. it reeks



of boredom and



   fuck you, john, who



   was ever bored?



try and ask—

it is fifty-fifty that she



ever gets it back. in



the gold room, the plaques



were all late for us, leafy



once, now fifty-plus



years overdue. had we



vaulted ourselves from the room, it



might have thinned, anxious



at the prospect of turn, of



crawl, of smoothing



that inability to burn. she



pulls her tendons tight for



the grass in these ways,



knowing only glare and, twice,



reflection. legs are



sectioned, heaving under wrap. shoulders



flake away in passing and



   are gutted in the lap.

The spud keyed up the ice



like Tec was trying to chip



flakes into his lemonade.



That’s pretty fucking deep



right there, he massaged



from cheeks taut



with the cracked



shake of trees



unchewed: not much



but jagged beeches,



stretching their necks



against the settling



cut of cold.



 



He stepped slow



through the flat snow,



enough to cover the leaded gouge



of the spud.



 



Gotta cut some poles,



he said, kicking a clean chew astray.



That’s a big house.



He fingered the painted hatchet.



 



His hole echoed across the



whited bog—long enough to get



the dead-spruce poles down,



wide enough to get



a fifty pounder up. Diving



his hand and wrist and arm



into the black,



it came back crystalized.



 



Right there—that’s the channel to



the feed bed over there,



a snapped stick lump



large enough for four.



 



Tec pinched the springs in place,



strapped those to the poles.



Using a three-thirty here,



a blind set here.



Tec rapped on smiling



green splint sticks



in his oiled pack basket.



This here popple



is candy to them.



He wired a chunk



to the wiley trigger.



 



The ice moaned deep and low,



the pins, the masses



leaned in, stared.



 



Tec sets the toothless jaw wide,



a gummy smile of rust,



it slips into the water,



nestles aside the muck.

We’ve climbed up on the roof before,



barefoot and shivering, at one time



there were no empty rooms, so many people in



the house, sounds of living and maybe



even singing. A voice that wasn’t ours.



We heard it then, under all those blazing stars



 



I mean pixels. Screen glows from within,



pulses in a waterfall, some kind of heartbeat



when we finally get up to close the door



when we do our homework after all these hours.



My mother calls, I want to be right where you are,



sleep, I love you, TV ruins your eyes.



 



It’s 11 pm and death is on my mind,



accidents upon accidents, blood and gore



somewhere in the streets, she



is the time passing and sick, invading dark



people gone missing—could she have been?



No, says my sister, but she’s young and has no power



 



over things we can’t trust and things we can’t see.



I’m young and have no power, am small, never win



but I check the empty driveway, look up at the sky line



inside, it’s my sister; outside, the lights and cars,



and all I want are her footsteps upstairs, the shower



running in the bathroom, her work clothes on the floor.



 



I daydream of flashes and have visions of scars



studding the roads, the bodies, my mother and flowers



I left her, Fiji in the back seat and rosary beads



I prophesy the petals tearing, stems breaking into the night



as glass shatters the world and blends into her skin,



she doesn’t pick up and I’m still watching the war



 



footage from Iraq. Fallujah’s dust rises into towers



and creates people out of nothing, I blink and start



to think my eyes are deceiving me. Behind, my sister snores



and listening I think that the roof would be cold by now, heat



extinguished in the stars above the lamplights hanging, pinned.



This is the part where we find out she dies.

*2013*



 



I don’t know when the AIDS crisis happens. In the sixties? Seventies?



The eighties. My AP U.S. History teacher calls the virus “hiv”, like it doesn’t stand for something else, like it’s supposed to be funny. When we watch *Forrest Gump *in class,he says that’s what Jenny probably died from. Nobody understands how. A contaminated needle? Sex work?



“All right, calm down,” he tells us. “It was hiv that killed her, definitely. You all have heard of it. Okay. Anyway. Now, Reaganomics.”



I’ve never heard of Reaganomics before, nor do I care much for Ronald Reagan, but I do know about HIV. Or, at least, I know about AIDS. My babysitter, a twenty-five year old from Mali, had told my sister and me about it when we were children.



“You have to take medication forever,” she said. “No cure at all.”



“How do you get it?”



“You have to touch body fluid.”



“So what if you want to kiss your baby?”



“You can’t.”



I am 15 years old clicking a pen in the back of the classroom, thinking about the babysitter and her miseducation. Mine, too: I take Health on Tuesday and Thursday mornings but sex ed consists of researching the statistics of condom failure and taking quizzes on the effects of latex versus those of polyurethane. I am 15 and have never touched a condom even in its wrapper, don’t know what one looks like in real life or how to put one on a banana. That it prevents HIV infection I know from watching *Grey’s Anatomy *and *Degrassi*, the same way I pieced together sex years after my classmates had already started doing it.



My pediatrician never asks me if I’m sexually active. He’s from Ghana and has known me since I was a baby. When he retires in May and I have to go to an out-of-town medical center to do my physical, the doctor ends up being a Nigerian who goes to my church. She also does not bother asking me if I’m sexually active, but there are papers taped to the wall reminding girls over the age of fourteen to get tested for HIV.



She sees me staring. “It’s important,” she says. “For girls in this area.” It doesn’t occur to me to even ask about the boys.



 



*2016*



 



For Africa I could see the realism. Photos of rail-thin women, their robes falling down, and their children starving, flies swarming their mouths.



My mother never talked to us about AIDS in Nigeria. By the time I could understand the connections people made between Africans and disease, I was old enough to brush off the jokes as First World ignorance. It didn’t matter, anyway—she didn’t tell us much about her country in general. My sister and I only knew about the dust, from visiting in 2001, and the bombings because of the newspapers, and then the rice at parties.



My mother, though, has actually lived in the United States longer than she has lived in Nigeria. She came here in 1986, a nineteen-year old graduate student living with her brother and his family in Brooklyn. The first cases of AIDS in the U.S. had been published in newspapers five years earlier. When I asked her what she thought about the epidemic at the time, she texted back:



 



**I was not Scare because I knew what to do .. I knew Aids is spread in certain way and people need to use Condom I was not having unprotect ed sex nor was i using contaminated needles.**



 



I responded:



 



**it wasn’t a scary thing, all those people dying? even if you weren’t affected?**



 



She called me then. “It’s not that I didn’t care,” she said. “It’s just that I wasn’t scared, because I knew.”



College in Nigeria had taught her well: safe sex workshops and doctors coming to speak about how AIDS *really *kills, more than malaria or polio.



“How did they teach you?”



“Workshops.”



“What kind of workshops?”



“Just workshops.” She pauses. “Why do you like this class so much, anyway?”



She’s referring to the one class I’m required to take as a freshman at Harvard, Expository Writing. I’d told her I put HIV/AIDS in Culture as my first choice.



“You shouldn’t have it as a first choice,” she continues. “Those times are done, it won’t help you to learn about it. AIDS? Why would you want to learn about that?”



I’m not very sure how to answer that question. I have read *Three Junes*, *How I Loved You, Just Between Us, *and *The Hours*—all novels with HIV-positive gay men as central characters. I’ve read *Two Boys Kissing *and felt my eyes widen with horror at the author’s description of death, constant death, before this new wave of LGBTQ liberation. AIDS, for me, is associated with terrible loss. For my mother, though, AIDS is not about homosexuality at all. It’s about the stigmatization of her homeland, racial slurs against her people, Africa becoming an embodiment of contamination. In America, she only saw the illness on the news and heard about protests on the radio, but she did not know the extent to which AIDS was ravaging the cities. I think of her sitting on the subway in her long skirts and sweaters, Jeri-curled hair, staring, perplexed, at an ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) poster wheat-pasted on the other side of the train.



My father might also have seen these posters, but on the Capital Metro in Austin where he was an undergrad at the University of Texas. When I call to ask him what he thought about AIDS in the eighties, he says, “Oh, it was very, very scary. We didn’t really know what was going on. Nobody know what was going on, people sick, dying, left to right…there was so much people, nobody I knew but still…nobody knew what was AIDS...”



It’s an answer I hadn’t expected. My mother is typically more aware of her surroundings, and of current events, than he is. But she had come from the village and America was paradise. My father, in contrast, came from a very wealthy family in Nigeria, and consequently poverty was not a characteristic he was trying to shake off; he came to study in the U.S. only because he failed his WAEC, West Africa’s version of the SAT. His confusion throughout the years of the epidemic, as he goes on to explain to me, stemmed from everyone else’s confusion. People said you could get it from touching hands. People said that was impossible, you could only get it from sex. People said heterosexuals didn’t have to worry about contracting anything.



“You see,” he tells me. “Very crazy. Very scary.”



“What was the government doing? Reagan, or whoever.”



“Eh. A lot of stuff, I think. The disease was just very bad.”



But on Reagan’s Wikipedia page, his response to the AIDS epidemic consists of two thin paragraphs detailing how the administration mostly ignored the crisis. Even the War on Drugs and a list of his filmography both have lengthy descriptions (and links to their own separate articles), and there is nothing about AIDS in regards to his legacy. Instead, Wikipedia describes his restoration of the American morale and a renewal of the American Dream.



“Why are you asking?” my father wants to know, and so I answer him the way I answered my mother: “Because I don’t have much knowledge about that time in history.”



He makes no comment about it. My mother had repeated, “But how is *that* going to help *you*?”



 



*2014*



 



There is a new drug called Truvada that prevents HIV infection. I learn about it at an AIDS Walk in July, an end-of-the-year activity planned by my STEP program.



At this point, I have a love-hate relationship with the STEP program. On one hand, I like it better than school because of all the friends I’ve made there. On the other, I’d undeclared myself pre-med in February, and attending the Saturday classes remind me of the nightmare that was tenth grade chemistry.



Despite the program’s deep emphasis on medicine, we receive no information about HIV and AIDS before assembling on 168th Street to board the train together. The event is sent to the email list, highlighted mandatory, and that’s that. We are expected to show up robust and attentive.



It’s the twenty-eighth annual AIDS Walk NY, hosted by the GMHC. Nobody has any idea what GMHC stands for. My friend Jude suggests that it is a medical insurance company, perhaps, or some kind of fundraising organization like the American Cancer Society. There are stands named after people who’ve died from AIDS, testing stations, merchandise being given out. Tearful black women thanking us for our support. We are too confused to understand why. Even more confused when the STEP administrator asks us to hold up signs with the program’s name on them.



“We’re representing the university,” he says, but it just seems so strange to me, so callous, when everyone else is carrying signs with the names of the dead.



DeBlasio speaks about the cost of the pills for high risk populations and I raise up my arms to take snapchats of him, a tiny glowing figure at the podium under the American flag. Smells of body, as we are all so close together, sounds of crying as DeBlasio addresses the audience. People start the walk in tears. We, a blue-shirted, poster-wielding group of high school students, complain about the humidity along the checkpoints, stopping at random to pose for group photos.



I don’t even make it out until the end. It gets too hot, I’m tired, and once I can see the streets over Central Park’s hills, I duck under the security tape and dash into a convenience store for air conditioning.



*Why is AIDS such a big thing in New York City anyway? *I wonder, fanning myself against the wall, wiping the sweat off my phone screen to scroll through my Legião Urbana albums. *Nobody dies from it in America anymore.*



My birthday’s passed but I have not yet read *Three Junes, *and so I don’t know about Malachy Burns dying alone in his Greenwich Village apartment. I know, however, that the lead singer of Legião Urbana, Renato Russo, died of complications due to AIDS in 1996. But I have seen him too many times on YouTube, strolling across the stage, sinking to his knees and wailing into the microphone. The greatest artist of all time could not have died horrifically.



I picture Jenny from* Forrest Gump*, dressed in white with flowers in her hair, peacefully going in her sleep—*that’s how it must have been,* I think, *for lots of people*.



 



*2016*



 



I’ve cried a lot this semester because of Expository Writing. I finish watching *The Normal Heart *at 2 a.m. and sit there on my bed in the dark, sobbing. One of the documentaries we’re asked to watch, *How to Survive a Plague, *almost brings me to tears in the common room. In the car over spring break, I read *Angels in America, *one of our required texts, and my mother asks me if I’m developing a cold, from the sound of my sniffling.



“No,” I say. “It’s this book.”



“What about the book?”



“Just. The book.”



Actually, the readings. And the “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” posters. And the pictures of emaciated bodies tied up in garbage bags, turned away from funeral homes: one of the nation’s greatest manifestations of indifference. How disturbing that it was a relief at that time, when my AP U.S. History teacher skipped over the unit, to not have to take another test on something else.



We don’t take exams in Expos, but we don’t skip over anything related to the epidemic either. We analyze ACT UP t-shirt designs and learn that if we were to be transported back into the nineties, most students on campus would have been wearing them, and we would have had SILENCE=DEATH buttons on our backpacks.



*Would I have had a button on my backpack?*



I look to my bare laptop, no stickers that identify me as a supporter of anything significant. The only rally I’ve ever attended was that AIDS Walk in 2014, and as a child, had accompanied my mother to a March for Life. There were other demonstrations, ones sponsored by Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, but they were in New York City and my suburban lifestyle encouraged laziness: the Long Island Rail Road was expensive, I could never figure out how to navigate the subway trains, and moreover, I was deathly afraid of getting arrested for protesting.



I am not, however, afraid of reading about AIDS. Or talking about it. In fact, I call my mother all the time to tell her about the literature we read and the films I’ve watched. Every time I say, “So in my HIV/AIDS class…” I can feel her discomfort on the other end of the line. *Which is totally okay*, I want to tell her. For a lot of people, it’s an uncomfortable topic.



She doesn’t ask me why I care about the class anymore, she just listens to me. And that is the most gratifying part.

*The poor thing stands there vainly,*



*Vainly he strains his voice. *



*Perhaps he’ll die. Then can you say*



*How beautiful is the world today?*



 



“Birdsong II”



…*I never saw another butterfly… *



Anonymous 



 



Your first memory is upside down. The skyline hangs in the air like a mangled overbite. Spires drip downward toward the sky. Your back curves around the arm of the chair, and you slide, moving toward the floor, until you lose sight of the window, and bang your head against the firm carpet. You’ll learn later that this is called a concierge lounge, or a club floor. That hotels stock bibles and other books in their bedside tables. Some will charge you if you steal their robes, but the two in your closet managed to arrive unknown, uncharged. A rollaway bed sometimes costs extra, but happens to be less comfortable than sharing a bed with your younger brother, even though he kicks at night. When you’re on a beach vacation, the sand finds its way to the bottom of the covers. A smoking room will smell. And never sleep by the window; Dad thinks you’ll roll off and fall out, or something like that.



Grandpa Charles stands over you now. You look at the bottom of his chin, curving outward from his shirt. He has a box in his hand, it’s a present. A carton of blueberries. Each pops in your mouth, those explosions that taste blue. You sit upright to finish the entire carton. You’ll learn later that sometimes you overeat, that repeated taste isn’t necessarily worth curling against an inflated and enflamed stomach, and enjoying need not entail engorging.



This is your happiest memory. It’s not actually your first, though. That one is the dream where you live on a small moon, like *Le Petit Prince, *walking about with other denim-covered children. Suddenly, you slip, and start to fall, screaming as the moon sinks into space, your back buffeting the air until you land, in your own bed, and wake up. 



That one is okay. It sounds more poetic to start the story with blueberries, upside down.



 



The pedophile lives one or two blocks away, you’re uncertain. Your trailer is on Whitewing Way, and from above you can’t see the debris in every yard, or the chain link fences that refuse to rust. When you run, in the late afternoon, a mother and daughter or a man and his dog are out. For a few days they’ll stare, then they’ll stop you, and let you know that no one runs in this part of Arizona.



The man knew your grandparents, Don and Jean, although he could just be reading the crooked sign on the front of the trailer, underneath the dangling light bulb whose disarray looks like a purposely derelict piece of contemporary art. He says they were the talk of the town, a fine duo. He needs dental work, you think. The next day, you see him unexpectedly on the edge of the alfalfa field, teaching a woman how to fly a model airplane.



Your father drove up for the weekend, to drop you off, in his own car. You caravanned. He says his father would leave before dawn, but you don’t hit the road till after lunchtime. It’s five hours from Los Angeles, six if you include the fact it’s an hour ahead. Arizona doesn’t use Daylight Savings Time, and you can only imagine what New Years is like here, celebrations on the other side of the Colorado River one hour, then rafts of people wading over to celebrate again, in Mountain Time. 



This is where he shot his first rabbit. He was in the backseat when he saw it moving in the field and said Mom, pull over. This is the marsh where locals go duck hunting. This is how you skip a stone. You know how to skip a stone, but let him explain. 



Your grandparents didn’t have the issue of iPhones switching between time zones every few blocks when they arrived in Arizona. They bought this place as a vacation home, and added a few more trailers over the years. You imagine them as trailer park slum lords, renting out 4x4’s around the central property, which includes two trailers, a shed, and a garage. The phone line does not work during your two weeks alone at the Colorado River. You sleep in the front bedroom, walls so thin you expect a coyote to approach and tear through the façade. The house behind yours is made entirely of cinderblocks. There’s a faded porcelain toilet upside down in the back yard. At night, without street lights, the only sign of life nearby appears down the block, where you’re uncertain if someone is living, or if an out of towner has just mistakenly left their lights on. Far away, the lights from the casinos rise into the sky, like columnar pillars of smoke.



The phone line is dead. Your dad calls the phone company, but when your uncle arrives next weekend, he says let’s fix it. He leads you into the workshop, behind two padlocks and by the yellow speedboat your grandfather bought that just smells 70s. Your grandfather was a mechanic, by trade, and a school administrator, by profession, so the shop reflects organization and craftsmanship. All supplies are stocked and in place.



To fix a phone line, first clean the two small bolts connected to the company line, then scrub the tips of your wires for corrosion. The steel wool won’t prick your skin, but the pads of your fingers will turn red before the bolts are clean. You try the line again and still nothing. Must be the wire, he says. He pulls at one, it holds, he pulls at the other and it crumbles. Your aunt is in the front yard, smoking. You pass her every time you check the line, running between the receiver inside, still dead, and Uncle hammering at the cement foundation to unearth the wire. You suggest, maybe, crawling under the house, cutting the wire loose from the cement, and using the slack to pull it out and splice it out here. Uncle looks at what he’s started, says sure, let’s do it. It works. The dial tone returns, and you call your dad to gloat. He doesn’t answer, so you text him a selfie. Your uncle reminds you that even though you haven’t been here since you were five, that your mother doesn’t care for it, this belongs to you, it’s what dad would have wanted, he says to your father when the whole family is up next weekend. You take a photograph of the family over bacon and eggs for grandma. She loves to read, and you pick up an old book from the coffee table, an insider’s history of the FBI. You skim, until noticing the cockroach relaxing in the stiff, mottled carpet. You throw the book at the bug, leap up, stomp on it, until it’s crushed, then clean the book and bug and carpet. You decide maybe you’ll read something else tonight.



Your mother doesn’t like the River. You think it’s because she’s from New York, proper, European, as Dad says, and isn’t the kind who enjoys roughing it but instead refused the desert tortoise your grandma gave you and returned the parakeets after three days. You learn, later, that she fell ill here, twice. You sit in the bathroom, feeling guilty for your own health, when twenty-two years ago you imagine her, in this same spot, the yellow toilet with the plush seat, curled around herself. You normally enjoy shitting and such, but you’re an efficient bathroom user at the River.



Many houses have thirty-feet tall cacti in their front yards, dug up in the desert, years ago, replanted, and let to tower over the property. You see one Confederate flag, at the house with the aviary. The River water is cool year-round, because when it sits in one of the dams, the heat rises and the cool water sinks, until it hits the bottom and slips out a slot at 55 **°**F. The accountant for the community club has been indicted for embezzlement. You’re sure the white, clean Honda down the street was bought with meth money. You try to write every day, but can’t make anything stay. Your rental car will start to smell like you. Your girlfriend is on the other side of the world, but it’s going to end soon, you’re both thinking it, just let it coalesce. You’ll both be fine.



On the last day you fill the car with full trash bags, and dump them at the Safeway. Up the road, you ate the best enchilada you’ve ever had. Farther, at the casino, the prime rib was cold, and the blackjack players groaned after you hit when you should have stayed. Every time you cashed out, your mom bought you more chips from across the table. Your grandfather didn’t gamble, and spent most of his time in casinos ratting out your then-sixteen-year-old dad, who hid under a ten-galloon hat and a pubic-inspired stache, leaning against the table, saying hit me.



You make your last plate of bacon and eggs. Someone knocks on your door. You don’t know who I am, do you?You don’t, but you shake his moist hand, watch the stiff gaps in his coifed hair, and you know it’s him. I live just one block away. Your grandmother and grandfather were like family to me*.* You nod, smile politely, that’s how you respond. But you keep the screen door in your hand. 



Dad reminds you he won’t do anything to you. You’re a man, and he’s not.



 



This will take around two hours, and your train leaves for Brussels in three. You’ve always imagined your mother’s parents ice skating here, on the river that runs through Antwerp, the Scheldt, a bruiser slapping a puck, and a young girl just enjoying her skates. Later, you’ll read a TS Eliot poem where “The Jew squats on the window sill, the owner/spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,” which reminds you of the 8th grade thought exercise, you can say something positive about anyone, your teacher said, even Hitler, and you immediately raised your hand to say he was a good strategist, or something like that, only six months after you became the first person in your family since before the War, seventy-five years it had been, to be Bar Mitzvahed. The rabbi announced that from now on, Sammy would be Sam.



Your aunt sent your mom a list of the places to visit, the Catholic primary school, the house where your grandmother was born. You plug them into Google Maps, and drag them around to create a loop. You print out a copy, and text it to yourself, and save an image, so you won’t lose it. 



You lead your mom, dad, and brother on a tour. The diamond district has become Orthodox, with small boys riding on scooters and BMX bikes, underneath keepot, with curling peyot, those sideburns. Peyot comes from the Hebrew word for corner, side, edge, but Yemenite Jews call them simonem, literal “signs” of Jewishness. You think of your obfuscating name, which means “god favoring” in another tradition, but it’s the same god, so who cares, except the churchgoers who told your mother she was going to hell and forced your father to choose between them and their house of god and your mom. They had a civil wedding, married by a judge. You want your mom, a judge herself now, to perform the ceremony at yours.



A man waiting at a crosswalk opens his flip phone, and you lose sight of it in the peyot. Microsoft Word autocorrects this to peyote, don’t be confused or alarmed. Green light, green light, cross the street. The house where your grandmother lived is covered in grey siding and graffiti. ALORS, FOR, SAME. You laugh at the small boys walking in front of BOYS! Around the corner a class gets out, and the students mull around as you pass through saying this way, grandma’s school, right there. Your brother poses with his tongue out. Some signs are written in Hebrew. Bagel Bar, the Place for Bagels. The street curves, and your mother asks to pose in front of her mother’s birthplace. A woman walks by, and your mother asks her, in halting French, if she knew the family who lived there. She does not. You continue walking, and end up at the Cathedral for sunset. You’ll later learn the feeling of ascent implicit in sublime experiences, the stretch as you curve your neck upward. It’s dark, and cold and snowing. Again, you see your grandmother and grandfather, ice skating kids, unconscious of the displacement in their near future, of the places they’ll go to escape, to Nice and Cuba and camps. 



This is another lie, though. They probably did not ice skate together, him several years older, more likely testing the Scheldt while she toddled about at home. You have the sense that even as children they knew they would be going, not necessarily knowing where to, but that they had to leave, sometime soon, that the smoke was rising across the border, sifting through the air, making it harder to breath. You don’t know what else to do today. You continue taking photographs, trying to remember.



 



You don’t drink coffee but you have to try this Turkish coffee. It tastes like mud, and you can’t finish it. You’re introducing your girlfriend to your grandmother and aunt, and have driven an hour from Westchester into New Jersey. It’s part of a grandparent tour, your suggestion. Lunch with yours, then swing up to hers in Ossining. You’re both Jewish, something you rarely encountered in your blonde suburb. Her grandparents are having guests, you know ahead of time, her mother tells you with that grin, but you don’t know until you arrive that it’s the reunion of the 1950-something Columbia Lions baseball team, the men outside sipping on drinks and their wives all indoors, seated, fanning, meeting your girlfriend and you, her friend, the polite boy. 



A man walks in with a cake. You ask her grandmother if he’s a baker. He’s not a baker, she says, he’s a widower. You laugh. It’s not funny, she says, it’s just the truth, so you blush. Before you leave, you shake many hands, and everyone rises to meet you. Your aunt drove your grandmother home from the restaurant. You should call her more. You leave with your girlfriend, and can’t stop laughing.



 



The letter is in the book of poems. …*I never saw another butterfly…* Your family has two copies, so you don’t know which this is, the one you found underneath the Disney VHSs. It has nothing inside, so you yell for Dad to come find the right one. The book is a collection of poems and drawings made by children at the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp. Your family was there. An artist, Bauhaus-trained, taught art classes to children in secret, allocating all available supplies to her students, saving none for herself. Much of the work in the book is anonymous. A few poems list your mother’s maiden name as the author. The Theresienstadt Concentration Camp served a unique function, in that it was used to show off Germany’s “model treatment” of the Jews to the West. If a unthinking person were to stop by for a quick visit, fifteen-to-thirty minutes, leaving their eyes shut the entire time, they would hear the mumbling leaders of the town, the local theatre’s applause, the society mulling about the smoky air of this glorified pit stop for Auschwitz. 



You mom’s cousin urged his mother to write the letter before she died. You find the book on a low shelf, underneath the Battleship box. The letter is six pages, cursive. At the suggestion of my children, I shall try to recollect and put down on paper my experiences during the Holocaust years.



They were packed to leave for a weekend at the beach when it started, the bombs that sounded like firecrackers. For six days they hid in the cellar, until their father returned with their diamonds. There’re diamonds in your blood, dealing, cutting, it’s what you would have been allowed to do seventy-five, three-hundred years ago. Your great-grandfather begged a cobbler to bore a hole in the heel of his shoes, bury the diamonds inside, and cover it with a piece of leather. He walked on those diamonds until the end of the war. 



They escaped into France, resting in a town called Royan, for a moment, until their foreign license plate gave them away, and the French police arrested your grandfather and his father. They were taken to a detention camp. Your great-aunt and great-grandmother left the rest of their family in Royan, and spent the next morning on a bus, to plead their case to the camp commander. He told your great-aunt and her mother that your grandfather and his father were arrested for being Germans. They are not German, but Jewish. Your country is being invaded by Germans, therefore you are considered Germans. Commander, I can hear the German boots coming this direction, if they will invade these parts, will you become German? Enraged, he threw your great-aunt and her mother out of the camp. They spent the rest of the afternoon on the bus returning to Royan, where the found their other family members gone, back to Antwerp to see what they could salvage of their belongings. The note said they would bring them back soon, but they were never seen again.



Two weeks later, your grandfather and his father appeared to your great-aunt and her mother, covered in beards. The Germans had invaded France, and the camp guards fled their posts, running, unlocking all the prisoners. Your great-grandfather had the idea to flee South, to Nice, for one year. The letter fills the year with attempts to get into Shanghai, Cuba, Brazil, Spain, and finally succeeds with America, but only after your great-grandfather bribes a Protestant priest to list them as parishioners, since the Vichy government would not let Jews out of the country. For the brief moment from Nice to Lisbon, your grandfather was Protestant, but twelve days later, he arrived in America, still a Jew. Here, he will live, marry, divorce, and remarry, to the woman he knew as a child, the ice-skating girl who fled over the Pyrenees and stayed in Cuba during the war. She tanned, moved to New York, married, divorced, then married your grandfather. In 1986, your family will learn the relatives who returned to Belgium were captured, sent to Auschwitz, and exterminated.



Even if this chapter in our lives was a very difficult and seemingly endless and hopeless one, we had to thank the Lord for sparing us from the fate of many other people who perished in the Holocaust under horrible circumstances and this chapter in my life has helped and convinced me to never lose my faith and forever by grateful.



You ask your mother about Nice. Sounds nice. Sunny, warm, South, a paradoxical place to hide. She says your grandfather played with le Hot Club de France, a French jazz group, while in hiding. You pull up their work on Youtube. The rough vinyl whirls, twangy guitar jumping around a quick beat. Onstage, you see him. He sits at the piano, tapping his foot, laying down the chords, in public, playing while his life is hiding. You’ve always heard, how do you make art after the Holocaust, but now you see the art made during it, and for all the sadness it contains, again, you feel that feeling in your neck, the muscles pulling as you crane up at something.



Even though you know it’s probably not true, you imagine your grandfather wearing your great-grandfather’s shoes while he performed. Diamonds hidden in his heels, fingers zipping over keys, he drags music into a world desperately in need of joy.

 We go clockwise around the circle of folding chairs. Most of us are shy. We say our names and, per our leader’s prompt, something we like about Quakers. A shiny-headed man with a gold-tipped cane is one of the last to speak.** **



He sits close to me in the circle, wearing a dark blue suit and loafers and clutching two books to his lap. One is a Bible. He does not wear a wedding ring. He shifts positions constantly, putting varied amounts of weight on the cane as he tries to sit up straighter. He struggles to get his sentences out, lips moving frantically around sounds he cannot make. His dark eyes bug with the strain. When the words emerge they are painstakingly placed, each one a piece of fragile glassware set on a high shelf.  



“I….am….in love….with….God.” 



The sentence takes a good fifteen seconds to emerge. By the time it does, the Quakers and I are transfixed; we’re staring at him, and everyone is smiling. Mehmet Rona’s face splits into a grin. Exhausted and pleased, he snuggles back into his chair. Silence. 



I think: My God, this man is a prophet. 



Mehmet Rona has presence. In another life he might have been a politician or a door-to-door salesman; people are drawn to him like moths to light. At our break for tea, he moves around the circle to take hands, kissing fingers. He offers a ride to a woman when he learns she doesn’t have one. I tell the group I’m interested in conducting interviews with Cambridge Quakers, and am met with suspicious looks. Mehmet speaks up. “I’m…..in,” he proclaims, shakily raising a fist to the air. Everyone laughs. I flush to my scalp and beam at my bald knight in shining armor. 



Mehmet the prophet speaks boldly. This particular session of New Lights (an evening teaching group affiliated with the local Friends Meeting) is predominated by ‘non-deists.’ Mehmet, quite obviously, finds their opinions blasphemous. He squints his licorice eyes in frustration when someone conflates God with natural beauty, or identifies Him as the creative impulse they feel before penning poetry. Mehmet adores the Friends Meeting. He exalts its prison fellowship and commitment to the poor. As a vegetarian pacifist, he’s at home here. Nevertheless, his God is bigger than a landscape or a good idea. I know he wishes he could speak more. When he does, everybody listens.  



“The Quakers are hungry for Christ,” Mehmet tells me later, in private. “And they deny it.”



 



***



 



The Society of Friends first coalesced in 17th-century England around a group of Puritan dissenters: the most famous of these, George Fox. Shepherd and shoemaker turned theologian and preacher, drawings of Fox portray a hook-nosed gentleman dressed like the beloved oatmeal mascot. (Contrary to popular belief, Quaker Oats claims their beaming front man is neither Fox nor his contemporary, William Penn; he’s a fictional Friend named Larry.)  



Depressed and dissatisfied by clerical advice and the political pandering of the English Civil War, Fox eventually accessed what he identified as true authority. In solitary prayer, he heard a voice: “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition.” No bishop’s robe or hefty tithe could improve or subsume Fox’s own intimate access to God. There was undiluted wisdom straight from the fount, and it was there for everyone. Fox and his followers envisioned their sect as “primitive Christianity revived.”  



But at the Cambridge Meeting, most of the Quakers are not Christians. 



Quaker worship means sitting in silence for exactly one hour. In Cambridge, that entails filling a bare, tallow-colored room with a predominantly white congregation, shoed in Birkenstocks and draped in scarves, mostly elderly. Some gaze at trees out the window. Some stare at their hands. All mediate, or talk to a higher power(s). Many are Buddhists. Some are atheists. Some are Jewish, some are lapsed Catholics. No text is read. No songs are sung. “Quaker” in Cambridge is a far cry from Fox’s unfettered but rigorous Protestantism.  



The hour of worship isn’t always *entirely* silent. An individual can speak if he or she is ‘quaking’—overcome with the impulse to ‘give a message’ to the Meeting. Anyone can do this. As one member tells me, the Quakers are not so much a society of laypeople as they are a society of clergymen—each ministering to their own conception of God. 



At the close of the hour, before homemade breads and tea, there are announcements: for climate change walks and camp-outs at nuclear power plants, for Israel-Palestine video screenings and singing in the streets. At Meeting, earthly actions collapse into religious worth. They are the sum of faith. The Quakers do good, even though at times they feel more like a left-wing service club than a unified religious community. 



In the midst of it all, there is Mehmet, a bald sore thumb, proclaiming the Gospel whenever he can get words out. Why does he stay—why doesn’t he find a Baptist congregation to join, or a Catholic priest to hear his sins? It’s because in theory, what the Quakers have going on appeals to him—this unmediated means of communing with God. 



 



***



 



Talking is hard labor for Mehmet. I watch flashes of delayed electricity working in the muscles of his forehead, popping his veins in frustrated embarrassment. Tongue, teeth, and lips collide and tangle. I silently cheer when they manage to cooperate, spitting out a word or fragment. Mehmet has primary progressive apraxia of speech. Often, the condition is caused by a left-hemisphere stroke—I’m not sure if this is what happened to him. 



The eating itself is calming to Mehmet; the waitress knows him by name and meatless order. Mehmet comes to the Plough and Stars almost every day for lunch. It’s close to his apartment, accessible even with heavy dependence on a cane. We’ve got our hats and coats in a bundle together on the chair, and Mehmet is leaning forward to speak. Without his disease, he would be a lecturing professor, holding all the cards of wisdom and prestige. He dresses like an academic, clad in a dark suit jacket and sweater. But the power dynamics are wonky. I am the one that can articulate quickly, pulling words from recesses with ease. 



It is poignant that the man who for decades practiced silence as spiritual discipline is now confined to it. He takes it lightly—“God wants me to shut up,” he chuckles—but still, it’s sad. Mehmet made his living as a renowned physicist; now, equations and proofs pool in the contours of his brain. Mehmet is funny; when he makes me laugh, his face goes radiant. 



Mehmet loves words, and actively seeks God in collections of them. “The…Bible is prose….written…in poetry,” he opines. In 1989, hospitalized after a motorcycle accident, he read both Homeric epics, plowed through the King James Bible in its entirety, and taught himself Ancient Greek.  



 



***



 



I’ve been attending Quaker Meetings for months. They aren’t easy. The noisiness of my own body is an impediment—the grumbles and pops of a stomach, the creaks of a tense jaw, the scratch of denim as I cross and re-cross my legs. I am so noisy. 



In Morning Meeting, attendance 150 on average, ‘settling’ takes about fifteen minutes. That’s how long children are required to stew before being released to Day School. Tiny cries produce parental shushes. Little boots bump the benches. I like having the kids around. They give me cover to get comfortable.  



It’s 10:35, and the room has filled. Nestled in my pew, I dispose of the ideas that come to mind most readily. Those ones are never about God. I fret over academic assignments I need to complete, wishing I had a pen and pad to make lists. God keeps the lilies and the sparrows, but what about me, bearing the petty burdens of grocery bills and cover letters and homesickness? I don’t know what it will be like to not have a bedroom at home next year. I don’t know how I will get up in the morning without hearing my roommates bustling around, turning on the shower water. But these worries lack gravitas; they aren’t noble. Can You speak to my condition, Lord? Even if You could, why would you want to?



This isn’t what I went to spend my hour on. 



 I picture a broom, knocking down cobwebs from the eaves of my brain—a pair of hands taking out the trash. I know the dust will be stirred up when the Meeting is over. For now, I move it into the corners. 



Next, I must try not to fall asleep. Once, in Morning Meeting, I gave up. I slumped against the tallow-colored wall, closed my eyes, and shamelessly dozed. Every morning is a battle with leaden eyelids. I worry a little about how my mouth might hang open, how my breathing might grow labored. Perhaps I even snore a little. 



I hear the spoken messages: a confession, a snippet of policy talk. I join the singing when it arrives (the same guy sings “Give Peace a Chance” almost every week.)



Finally, I approach something like prayer. It is shocking how tiresome conversation with God is these days. I must knead myself into it. 



The Quaker meetings put the impetus on me. If I want to have an experience of worship, I must focus. There is no guidance from a speaker, no set of songs or parcel of text, just the cloudy space of my own thoughts. For some, like Mehmet, this is where the God of Israel lives—speaking into grey slimy tissues, washing them clean.  



 



***



 



Turkey, the 1950s.Six-year-old Mehmet lived with his parents (culturally Muslim atheists) and his older, adopted brother (Armenian by birth, converted to Islam while living in Turkey).  



The Armenian brother, disgusted with his father’s cankerous doubt, demanded that a lamb be sacrificed. His sin brought shame on the household; atonement was necessary. A lamb was ordered. 



“I….played…with…the…lamb,” muses Mehmet. The sentence comes out surprisingly fluid, not much space between the words. I envision small, brown Mehmet in dust or grass, running wool through his fingers and kissing a pink nose. They’re running together, two young created things. I can see this in Mehmet’s eyes: unadulterated joy, decades old, all the fresher for being stored so long. 



The next day, a man with a mustache arrived at the house and took the lamb from Mehmet. I imagine it came away from his scrawny arms with a bleat, a panicked scuffle of hooves that struck his collarbone.



“I…made…eye…contact….with…the lamb…at the moment…of slaughter,” stutters Mehmet. By this point I’m glued to him, elbows forward on the table, water glass and pen alike forgotten. Recollected blood runs in Mehmet’s irises: life leaking crimson for the sake of his father, whom he loved. But was it really necessary to kill the innocent? 



“It…was…that…moment…I…found…my…religion,” whispers Mehmet. The blood in his eyes turns to tears. I flush. Mehmet pauses. He rasps a little around his breath. His tears collect, almost to the point of spill. 



“You…write…” says the old man, “…I…collect…myself.”  



Mehmet has lived a life of visions. In 1973, he was living in Ankara with his wife Josephine, teaching physics at a university. One night, he sat straight up in bed, waking his bride. She noticed fuzzy light, a halo maybe, tangled in his hair. 



Mehmet dreamt he was strolling into his living room. In the dream, he peered at a print of *Mona Lisa* hanging on the wall. *La Joconde*, Mehmet insists, became the Virgin Mary. Hand outstretched, she tugged Mehmet into the canvas. Suddenly, he was in Biblical times, the illustrations in my purple book blown to size. Mehmet doesn’t provide details of what he saw after that. It’s enough to know that he saw something. 



Mehmet’s official conversion was anticlimactic. In 1981, during the baptism of his godson, a priest asked the Turkish professor if he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. Mehmet, of course, said yes—he had for decades, even if this ceremony was his first time articulating the choice. “That’s so beautiful, so subtle,” I murmur. “After all that time.” Mehmet approves: “I’m…glad…you…see…the…beauty…in it.” 



And how did Mehmet become a Quaker? The whole thing is a big joke. He made friends with a man named Michael Shannahan, an Irish guy with seven children. After a few months of shared meals, Mehmet asked Michael to introduce him to his parish priest. Stereotypes were foiled; Michael was a Quaker. From then on, Mehmet was a Meeting-goer. 



Mehmet has lived a life of tragedies. Michael Shannahan went through a horrible divorce with a wife “addicted to being pregnant,” and drank a lot. For months, Mehmet spent all his free time sitting with his friend. Mehmet’s motorcycle accident left him paralyzed from the waist down for a year and a half. His own marriage with Josephine crumbled. This mysterious illness rendered him mute in all settings except the most controlled and intentional. And yet he is all praise, all love. 



Mehmet has arrested me. He grasps my hand when proving a point. He makes me order dessert, and won’t let me pay for my meal. Eying my notebook, he tells me he has a “similar fetish” for luscious journals and smooth pens. He praises my home city. He tells his waitress friend what to do with his untouched half of pizza. “Oh, Gary?” she says. “Of course.” It’s Mehmet’s ritual to apportion his meals to the needy. For all his etherealness, Mehmet is a man of the people, offering rides and food and compliments with abandon. “My…whole…life,” he tells me, “people…have said…I have a…transparency…for God. I…leak…my faith.” 



It’s true: Mehmet has a rare life of allegories, a symbolic pattern you can’t ignore. The Lamb of God, the faith of a small boy. The silver tip of a knife pulverizing innocence, all the sadness of the world spilled from sheep veins.  



Mehmet himself is a symbol for holy silence. In the still of Meeting, he comes to know a Lord he has always encountered through noticing and listening and the love of others—not through traditional avenues. “My…relationship…with Christ…is very intense,” he says. Natural. Felt. “Meetings…help me…to organize that.” His relationship with people is intense too. “You…have to love…other…human beings,” he insists—a simple sentence made overwhelming by palsied hands and desperate eyes. He wants me to understand—there are so many ways to know this God. One’s own mind can be a cathedral; one’s own life can be the liturgy. 



 



***



 



When I was a child, God and I met in silence. Like many American families, mine didn’t attend church. Yet even without a pastor’s spoken word for it, I always knew God existed. I liked Him. Whenever our cat got lost in the fields behind our house, I wrote God suppliant letters in fat felt marker. I plunked His spirituals in my piano lessons, singing along as I practiced. 



I never learned about God. I had no sermons to listen to, no Sunday school lessons to complete, no verses to memorize for candies. I hadn’t heard any of the gossip: that some people didn’t believe in Him, or denounced His definition of justice, or found his Son’s claims—the one Way, Truth, Life, etc.—restrictive. My relationship with the Creator was all intuition and innocence. After bedtime, door closed, I thought over spelling tests and worried about friends at school. I felt listened to. God was my friend. 



When my father sang to me in the bathtub, or directed magic shows with me, or helped me with math homework, God was there. When my mother gave up her teaching job to raise me, shuttling me to the library and the zoo and the dentist, God was there. My parents indefatigably modeled sacrifice and adoration, and we never stepped foot in a sanctuary. 



As a little girl, I remember feeling guilty about not going to church. I wanted my family of four busy on Sunday mornings. I wanted us to acquire teachings and talk about them together, or pray before dinner like my friends’ families. I wanted us to follow the rules. Now as an adult, I choose a church with a sermon and songs and communion and structure—because there’s something good about that too: having spoken norms and covenant community and a pastor I trust to keep me on my toes. Church matters.  



But “the church” is fluid, and Mehmet understands this, the Quakers understand this: how God can operate covertly, in an unstructured Sunday service where there is nothing but calm, in the six other days of a week. And while I’m personally convicted that God must be at the center of the Meeting in order for it to operate as a religious community—a God that looks like Christ—I find the fluidity somewhat refreshing, indicative of how invasive He can be. 



God is vast. This has always been an idea that both terrifies me—how can I believe in something I can never see the boundaries of?—and comforts me—that’s what faith is all about. And don’t you want faith in something your limited mind can’t fully comprehend, can never completely espouse in a sermon or hymnal? 



When I rise to leave the table, Mehmet embraces me. He kisses me on the cheek twice, warm and soft, loneliness incarnate in the way he holds me close. He tells me he’d like to keep getting lunch, please. I feel unconditionally loved in the grit of the city. I feel touched by God. 

 I.



 



When I was about six weeks old and still inside my mother, my milk lines formed. This happens in every mammal: the skin of the fetus suddenly thickens along two parallel lines that run diagonally from the groin to the armpits. Then, just as quickly as they form, the mountain ranges collapse back onto the skin. Within just three weeks they have disappeared almost completely, leaving behind only two small peaks at the chest. These are the buds from which future nipples will form. Other mammals have different rates of milk line recession, resulting in more nipples later on. Pigs, for example, can have as many as eighteen nipples from which little piglets can suck.Humans would ideally have two nipples, and in some cases where the recession does not happen properly, third nipples will grow out from the improperly reduced milk line. Luckily, or perhaps not so luckily for me, I came into the world with the correct number of mammary seeds planted in my chest. 



I felt them when I was nine, sitting in front of the computer after dinner and playing Snake. Something compelled me to reach under my shirt. Perhaps it was just natural childhood inquisitiveness—students in my class that year had started to whisper things they somehow knew should not be heard by our teacher. Or perhaps it was an odd new sensation of my shirt rubbing against something that had not been there before. 



The giggling curiosity that compelled me, as well as all the other blushing boys and girls, was a byproduct of having new chemicals inside my body, in all of our bodies. My ovaries, having received some very specific chemical inclinations, had begun seeping estrogen into the bloodstream. When the signals reached my chest, the seeds started to grow, evolving into a lump of milk, tissue, and glands, otherwise known as a breast bud. The more precise term is *thelarche*, which derives from two Greek words: *thele*, meaning nipple, and *arche*, meaning the beginning, or onset.



I made sure that no one else was close by and slid my right hand up to my chest, massaging the area under the left nipple. A hard lump, like a little stone, was lodged underneath the skin. At first I was unsure if it truly existed, but each trial resulted in the same discovery: a nickel sized lump nested right under the left nipple. It hurt when I squeezed it too hard, and I kept pinching, as if in a dream, the pain affirming its existence. I checked the right side, and sure enough, it had its own bump. It was smaller, but it ached the same. The stones were real. I could not excise them from my body, and I could tell no one. 



What I did do, however, was observe. I figured whatever happened to my older sisters would inevitably happen to me. My middle sister, seven years older than me, bore the biggest breasts, the most slender neck, and the daintiest wrists. Her unique combination of beauty traits made her a pageant queen many times over, but we will not get into that.I knew that my neck was shorter and that my bones were thicker than hers, so there was never any hope of competing with that. However, I gauged that there was potential in my breasts. On the weekends I sat on the bed examining the way she applied mascara and lipstick, brushed on rouge and eyeshadow, and put every hair in place. Most of all, I admired the portion of fabric that stretched between the two mounds of her chest, wondering when the day would come that my body could impose the same physical effect on the fabric surrounding me. 



 



II.



 



I came home from the fifth grade one day, and my mom handed me my first bra. “You’re a big girl now,” she said, “You need to wear this.” This first one was a simple sports bra, with the most intricate part being the elastic band that clung like death to my chest. I could not see any practicality in wearing it, only that it helped me fit in with the other girls in the locker room. It still seemed possible, perhaps, that these things were temporary, and by tomorrow we would be free of them. That same year, I was taught that the sun would someday die, and I, feeling the pressure of the contraption beneath my shirt, realized that my childhood, too, would eventually dissipate just like the sun.



The sports bras turned into slightly more shaped training bras, where the cut and design suggested something a bit more feminine. The day came when my two sisters took me to Victoria’s Secret to buy my first real bra, like the ones my mom wore. “See the numbers? That’s for the diameter of your chest.” They said. “You’re a 32.” They explained the meaning of the letters, the clasps, the straps, and how the cups should never ride up when I raise my arms to the air. If they do, then I should loosen the straps, and they taught me how to do that too. We settled with a black bra with no metal reinforcement or padding, frills or laces. It was a polyester and spandex breed that sat smoothly on my skin, invisible to anyone but myself. “You’re an A cup,” my sisters said. I repeated that in my head. My breasts seemed so inadequate next to theirs, but at the end of the day, I was glad to have my letter.  



Aside from the excitement of having something that all the other women in my family wore, I still could not see the purpose of bras. And so, inevitably, there were times when I neglected to wear one. This happened when I was ten and traveling back to Vietnam. My grandfather was a monk, and we visited him at his temple. When we arrived at the ornamented gates outside his residence, my eldest sister looked at me, furrowed her brows, and asked me why I was not wearing my bra. I had simply forgotten. Though I asked why it was so important, she did not explain her concern and instead just told me to keep my arms folded over my chest. 



The temple had a courtyard at the center with statues and bonsai trees. When we had finished drinking tea outside my grandfather’s dormitory, I ran to the courtyard, sat down beneath a Bodhi tree, and posed as the meditating Buddha. Then we all lined up along either side of my grandfather and smiled at the camera. When we came back from the trip, I looked back at the photographs and was shocked to see that my nipples were very clearly protruding through the shirt in every picture. It then became clear why my sister had told me to cross my arms. I learned that nipples were something to be ashamed of, and since then, I have worn a bra every single day of my life. 



 



III.



 



It turns out that the body carries its own natural brassiere. Coopers ligaments, a set of connective tissue, are accredited for maintaining the shape and position of breasts. The ligaments descend from the clavicle and stretch through and around breast tissue. The clavicle thus becomes the line demarcating the beginning of breasts, and this may partly explain the sexual allure of that bone. 



Cooper’s ligaments are named after Sir Astley Cooper, a British surgeon and anatomist who first described these ligaments in 1840. He also named many other anatomical parts, including Cooper's fascia, a thin film covering the spermatic cord; Cooper's pubic ligament, the superior [pubic ligament](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pectineal_ligament); Cooper's stripes, a fibrous structure in the [ulnar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulna) ligaments, and a variety of diseases. 



Cooper is not the only man to insert his name into various aspects of the female body. Roughly a century after Cooper coined his ligaments, a pediatric endocrinologist by the name of James Tanner, who was also a Brit, came up with a system to measure breast development. Aside from breasts, he also demarcates stages in the development of genitals and pubic hair for both girls and boys.His scale, appropriately called the Tanner scale, defines five stages of physical development based on external sex characteristics. 



In Tanner’s world, Stage One features nothing but the nipple floating on a sea of skin. There are no glands, ducts, or lobules, only the remnants of the milk ridges from the fetal landscape. Stage Two, and the thelarches form; I am playing Snake, feeling the buds. Stage Three, a continuation of Stage Two as I sit with my nipples exposed underneath the Bodhi tree. In Stage Four, the nipples start to protrude from the surrounding breast tissue, and I have sex for the first time. During those years, my left breast was frequently bigger than my right, as is common in many women, but my boyfriends didn’t seem to mind. 



 



IV.



 



At this point in my life, I have reason to believe that my breasts are mature, and that if Tanner, were he still alive and could analyze them, would surely place me in that fifth and final stage. But for several years, from when I was nineteen to twenty-two years old, I put no thought into my breasts. They seemed inert and happy as they were, and I conducted my relationships fairly confident in my body’s ability to allure. 



It did not occur to me that they had grown silently until I went to Victoria’s Secret to replace my old bras. The sales representative asked me what size I was looking for. I told her 34B, at which point she made a face and said, after glancing at my chest, “Really? No, you’re definitely a C.” I felt a bit violated that she could look through me like that, but also flattered. A part of me also questioned my feeling of flattery as a product of her attempt to sell a bra, knowing that Victoria’s Secret sometimes uses vanity sizes to make women feel more accomplished about their sexual development. Nevertheless, I tried the C’s, and they fit better than the B’s. 



I remained incredulous for quite some time. I never thought that I would someday be able to match my sisters in breast size, but since then multiple incidences have me think that my breasts have become substantial. My boyfriend, whom I was in a long distance relationship at the time, told me each time we met that they were bigger. They were also more or less the same size which suggests that they had reached beyond the growing phase of Stage Four. At one point, out of the blue, he also told me that I had nice breasts. I asked him why they were nice, and he explained that they were very round and full, and the nipples pointed in the same direction. Though the relationship did not last, I will always remember him fondly for those words.



More recently, a young man asked me while we laid in bed if my breasts were fake. I sat up, wide eyed, and exclaimed that they were real. “Are you kidding me? Fake boobs are hard and cold, and not nearly as sensitive.” I said. “Mine are soft!” 



I said these things with confidence because my aunt has fake breasts, and she let us touch them. A week after her operation, she sat with us at dinner, and the topic settled on her implants. “Do you want to see?” She asked. Before anyone could give a response, she unbuttoned her shirt halfway and pulled out her left breast. My mother, father, sisters and I took turns pressing down on the engorged organs as the food grew cold on the table. They felt stiff and plastic, nothing like what their roundness implied, and judging from the blank expressions on my aunt’s face as we probed her chest, they were not very sensitive either. Nevertheless, they were beautiful.



After telling him that story, I cupped each breast in my hand, as if checking that my assertions were true. Each one filled up my palms with heavy, soft flesh that bulged out between the fingers. They felt solid and warm on my body. The weight of my womanhood suddenly felt very clear to me.



 



V.



 



The baby looks a lot smaller than he does in the pictures. “Be prepared for flashes of nudity,” my sister says. “The boy has to feed every two hours.” She paused, as if thinking about something, and a look of vague revulsion creeps onto her face. “My breasts are huge now, look.” She lifts up her shirt. 



I stare, wide-eyed. They are immense. I feel inclined to look away but cannot stop staring, as if her mammary demanded worship. Both breasts have inflated to about twice their size before pregnancy. They sag with the weight of milk and hang from her body like ripe papayas, dripping with sap, from the tree. Fresh veins, which have grown to supply blood to the glands now in full operation, decorate the surface of her pale, smooth skin. The nipples, once small and innocent, have darkened and grown into long, meaty tubes that now give milk. 



The source of this milk comes from deep within the breast, inside little chambers called alveoli. Like underground caves with dripping stalactites, the alveoli are lined with secreting cells that trickle milk into little holding places called lobules. Bunches of lobules congregate to form a lobe, which empties its contents into a lactiferous duct that flows all the way to the nipple. Each breast contains ten to twenty of these lobes arranged like flower petals around the center. I can see the ends of those ducts clearly on the surface of my sister’s skin. They appear as little elevated dots that sprout in a circle much like the way mushrooms grow around in a fairy ring. 



“This is a good learning experience for you,” she says as she breastfeeds the small, squirming child. He clings to the softness of her chest, and I think of Henry Harlow’s monkeys. 



The experiments started in the 1950s. Harlow used Rhesus monkeys. He took the babies away from their mothers at birth and raised them on two types of surrogates: a bare wire mesh monkey and another one covered in cloth. They were both equipped to dispense milk through a nipples at the chest. Harlow found that the baby monkeys held onto the cloth mother for longer periods of time. In modified experiments, both surrogates were available, but the cloth mother no longer provided milk. Despite the wire monkey’s ability to feed, the baby monkeys still spent most of their time hugging their fuzzier option. If they were hungry, they would clamber up the bony frame of the metal mother, feed themselves, and then run back to the softer mother, their eyes wet with need.   



The way these monkeys held onto the cloth surrogate is not too different from the way Joseph lies on my sister’s body. His head fits perfectly into the crevice of her breasts, and his arms splay out comfortably on top of her milk-filled pillows. It is as if everything beforehand, the bras, the beauty pageants, the cleavage, attraction, and the buildup of glands, all existed in order to build up to this one moment when the breast, engorged to its limit with milk, can expunge its contents into the hungry mouth of an infant.



It is two in the morning, and I tell my sister that after witnessing her sleep deprivation and hearing of the rips and tears and screams that occurred during her fifteen hour labor, I do not want to have kids. She doesn’t respond, but I know she is listening. When she finishes feeding, she asks me, “Does Auntie My Ngoc want to hold Baby Joseph?” 



I nod excitedly, and pick him up with both hands, making sure to support his neck. The baby lies cradled in my elbow, gurgling. He looks like both his parents. He has his dad’s long torso and limbs, his eyes, and his lips. He has the tip of my sister’s nose perched on a bridge that resembles that of his fathers. My sister goes to get some rest. 



I rock Joseph back and forth. His mouth points towards my breast, and I am painfully aware of how incapable my body is to nurture him. His eyes start to close for longer periods of time, and I can tell that sleep is settling. Something gives me the idea to hum jazz melodies to him, for they are the only melodies I know at heart these days. I start with Stardust, then Someone to Watch Over Me. By the time I am halfway through Misty, the baby is fast asleep. I hold him for just a bit longer, even though his tiny body was starting to feel heavy against my chest.

Angela straightens my hair next to the window so she can smoke and breathe it outside. Every second or so her eyes do a one-two flick: around the room, outside, back around. It’s a Sunday night, so it’s only the two of us home, plus her friend Heloise, who sits on the bed painting her nails, watching us watch the house next door.

Zoe was standing at the valet trying to bum a cigarette off Vince. She’d just gotten off work and it was pouring, but Beverly Hills was even more beautiful in the rain. In the dark the yellow headlights glinted off Sunset Boulevard like a shining warped record. Vince was leaning with his back against the valet booth not paying much attention to Zoe, probably because he knew she really was just after the nicotine and wasn’t even flirting with him. But Zoe wasn’t shy about asking for favors, and she knew Vince liked that about her. He straightened his bowtie and pulled out a pack of Parliaments. Wet palm fronds whacked the pink stucco of the hotel.

Dad has been dead for at least fifteen minutes, and all I have done during this time is sit on the other side of the room from his chilling corpse, repeating to myself, at least with him gone, no one can call me Junior. Excuse the vanity, but pain brings out the worst in me, like the pulsating acne I can already feel swelling around my lips. As a child I often tumbled unexpectedly, leaving my thin body covered in bruises, with magenta pimples to arrive within minutes of the accident. While I have less experience with direct emotional pain, I can only assume that in trying moments of the heart, my skin will blossom as expected.