| |  Illustration by Anna Strain | The parking lot at Shrine of the Little Flower church was packed with cars. Everywhere, girls stood around in overalls and tank tops, hugging their parents goodbye and giggling. In less than twenty minutes, we would be boarding one of the yellow school buses lined up against the curb and heading up into the middle of nowhere — the tip of Michigan’s thumb or, as I grew up knowing it, Up North. I was not sure exactly what I was doing there with all those other girls — girls who obviously knew one another from school or church, who seemed excited for the next two weeks, which we would spend doing god knows what. Hiking? Gossiping? Braiding hair? While all the other families milled around outside, my mother sat in the car with my little sister, Felicia, and me. She rattled off a list of things we should have in our backpacks: soap, swimsuit, socks. I was happy to stay in the car, to not have to mingle in the hot parking lot where the giant statue of Jesus strung upon his crucifix stood tall, watching over everyone. My mother warned us about getting lost or drowning, warned us against poison ivy and poison oak. Right before we boarded the bus, saying our final goodbye, she leaned in close to me and said, “Be careful and look out for your sister. You don’t know these girls.” On the bus, my sister and I sat pressed next to each other like kittens. When we weren’t watching the girls, we looked out the window, hypnotized by the blur of cornfields and farms and trailer parks that multiplied the farther we drove north. As the sun grew in the sky, the shadows of the fields took on a strange look. Nestled close, my sister fell asleep, but I was awake, a seed of nervousness rooting in my chest. I was up eavesdropping, taking note of some of the girls’ names and hometowns. There were girls with names I had never heard before — Tegan and Mallory and Lawler — all from places I had never heard of either: Kalamazoo, Orion, Muskegon. I looked at my right hand and wondered where in Michigan those towns could be. With my finger, I jabbed the spot where I lived and wondered if any of the girls had heard of Southfield, or at least driven through it to get to Detroit. *** It was early evening by the time we got there. Up North, the air smelled different, like seaweed and wet earth just beginning to dry. This was the first time my sister and I had ever been to camp, the first time we had ever entered a forest. A few feet away, sloping down a dirt path, you could see Lake Huron panting, washing across the shore. I looked at it in awe, surprised by its endlessness. My sister and I wandered around the open dirt driveway, looking for a place to sit, until we were given instructions on where to go. In the distance, we spotted a log where two other girls sat. As we made our way over, I scrunched my face, inspecting them. They were both black — as brown as my sister and I were — and hunched over together, arguing or whispering. I nudged my sister and pointed at them. “That looks like Rachelle, doesn’t it?” The taller girl, hearing her name, looked up, a wide, gap-toothed smile taking over her face. Felicia and I knew Rachelle and Alana from school and because our mothers had become friends. For a while, we had even lived in the same apartment complex. They stood as we approached, Alana wearing a tiny, pink leopard-print backpack while Rachelle had on a purse in the shape of a cat. In each of their hands, they held small garbage bags instead of luggage. I was relieved to see them, and I wondered if our mothers had planned this or if it was truly a coincidence. Rachelle and I ended up together in one of the cabins reserved for middle schoolers. We claimed a bunk near the door while the other girls bounded from one to the other, changing their minds again and again, like they were playing some sort of game we didn’t understand. It was easy to spot which girls had been here before — the ones who would always get to spend aimless summers on lakes. That first night, I did not sleep. I was too awake, too sensitive to the unfamiliarity around me to relax. A few feet away from me, a girl named Amy or Jenny snored happily. *** The next morning, Rachelle and I were up early for Polar Bears, one of the activities that we had been encouraged to sign up for. Polar Bears had seemed like the least demanding to me, aside from waking up at dawn. Each morning, we had to meet at the lakefront and swim out to the buoy and back in the freezing water. That early, it was still blue outside, and things howled and hummed in lullaby. Rachelle and I descended the path that led to the lake, slipping on the slick morning dew. There were four other girls waiting, all of them shivering against the early-morning air. One by one, we were ushered into the lake by a sporty, blonde-haired counselor named Jamie. Once we were in the water, bobbing like baby ducks, Jamie blew hard on her whistle: our signal to start swimming.  The author posing with her camp friends. Courtesy of the author |
The water was playful, sloshing us around on its tiny waves. The buoy marker floated far out in the distance. The waves were hard to navigate, pushing and pulling me back to the place I’d just swum from. So cold that it made my teeth rattle. Back home, Felicia and I had spent most of our summers at the pool, playing for hours while our mother lay in the shade reading. But the pool wasn’t alive like the lake was, and while the other girls burst forward, Rachelle and I floundered. Back on land, I curled into my towel, sandy and embarrassed. Rachelle sat next to me, doodling in the sand. We did not reach the buoy. The next morning was painful. Rachelle and I complained to each other about our sore bodies, the water that was still lodged in our ears. It was cold, and the forest seemed to reverberate with the embarrassment I still carried. Back in the water, I lay on my back and looked at the sky. I had always thought I took to the water naturally, but now I was doubtful, heartbroken even. I floated miserably for a bit, ducking under when my face grew hot with memory. A few feet away from me, Rachelle hummed gently to herself, trying to scoop a fallen moth out of the water. If we didn’t go too far out, the water stayed manageable, and we could drift undisturbed. I liked water best this way, friendly and rolling. Still, something propelled me forward, out to the buoy. After a bit of floating, I began to swim but only made it so far before the water wrapped around me, tugging. There was a divide, a place where the water seemed to turn on me, hurling me back to the shore. Over the sounds of the water, I heard Jamie’s whistle calling us back. My face hurt, slapped raw from the waves. I ducked down under the water and swam back as fast as I could. *** In the canteen, later, a girl asked me if black people know how to swim. It was a strange hour on the campgrounds, a slow high noon that approached just before lunch. A few girls were there already waiting for the lunch ladies to open the doors to the kitchen. I looked at the girl without speaking. I told her I know how to swim — that my sister and Rachelle and my family all know how to swim. I started bragging about myself, telling her about all the times I’d won a race or done a front flip. I learned to swim when I was four years old! But the door to the canteen creaked open, and the girl, no longer interested my answers, darted away. The next time I saw her, she was eating a sandwich, smiling. At lunch, Rachelle told me she wasn’t coming back to Polar Bears. I didn’t tell her about the girl’s question or her unimpressed gray eyes. When I asked her what she wanted to do instead, she giggled and pulled out a necklace she’d made for her sister, Alana. “Jewelry class,” she said, dangling the beaded necklace in front of me, “You should switch!” I nodded, but something inside of me was burning to make it out to the buoy. Suddenly, I had something to prove, an aching grudge fueling me. Lake Huron swallowed me whole, pushing me beneath wave after wave before I learned to bob with the tide rather than buck against it like a drowning animal. Each morning, I woke with the sun and made my way to the water. Embarrassment made me diligent, and even when I was not in the water, it still felt like I was pressing myself hard in the direction of the floating marker. Back in the cabin, Rachelle showed me her jewelry — bracelets and earrings made from feathers and stone — and I wished I had left Polar Bears like she had. But I was playing a long game. And every time I looked at the water, I knew I was struggling against myself, against the girl who asked me if I could swim, and with something large that I couldn’t name. *** On the last day of camp, we got together for a bonfire on the lake. Underneath a full moon, we took communion and recited a prayer as all the girls clasped their hands together around the fire. Rachelle and I mumbled made-up words beneath our breath — those prayers were not the same as ours. In the distance, the lake glittered. The waves were choppier than usual, and I wondered what it would be like to glide between them effortlessly, black like an eel. Rachelle was watching the water too, and after a few seconds of silence, she said, “I didn’t get to swim out here as much as I wanted to.” On our way back to the cabin, Rachelle and I decided that when we got back home, we would try to get our mothers to take us to Belle Isle. Rachelle always liked it better out there, with the cars and the barbecues and the skylines of Detroit and Windsor. “It’s easier to swim out of that water.” Gabrielle Rucker is a fiction writer and essayist. She is a 2016 Kimbilio Fiction Writing Fellow and has been featured in Strolling Series (USA), a short documentary series that aims to connect the scattered and untold stories of the global Black/African diaspora. Her writing has appeared in Nylon, PINE Magazine, Sunday Kinfolk, mater mea, and more. | | | | |  Illustration by África Pitarch | The sofa in our house was neutral. Not neutral as in beige — the thing was a mid-’70s assault on the early ’90s, any color welcome as long as it began with burnt, a hideous palette to those of us aspiring to Esprit pastels — but neutral as in untouched by evil. If you woke in the morning to find a parent on the sofa, it meant they had been kicked out of the waterbed for coming home a little too loaded up on G&Ts from the duckpin bowling lane. But if you woke to a kid on the sofa, it meant something malevolent had come for them in their sleep. Connecticut is thick with houses destined to serve as sets for horror films: old farmsteads and colonials on roads with names like Witches Rock and Satans Kingdom. But my family lived in a late-1960s rectangle constructed of hollow-core everything and held together with matted carpeting that may or may not have begun its life the soul-deep brown it was by the time we arrived in 1990. It was a structure that resembled military housing in its nothingness, not the kind of thing likely to be narrated about by Robert Stack on Unsolved Mysteries, but it was without a doubt infected with evil. And Michael — Michael with glasses like safety goggles, Michael who called soda pop and couldn’t ride a bike without the neighborhood kids humming the Miss Gulch theme from The Wizard of Oz — was naturally its primary target, because he was naturally everyone’s. Michael was ripe for haunting. He was the first of my mom’s boyfriend’s four kids to move in (he had been kicked out of his own mother’s house after trying to protect his sisters from their mom’s boyfriends — men equally violent when strung out or jonesing), and when he first arrived, totally unaccustomed to rules or order, he was as feral as a raccoon, the only kid I knew who’d been suspended from school for fighting a teacher. But once he realized he was no longer being chased by the Department of Children and Families, which was threatening foster placement, or his mom’s boyfriends, who somehow saw a skinny nine-year-old as competition for his mother’s limited care, he actually found that the relative domestication of his new home suited him just fine, and he grew into the kind of southern–New England kid who lived his life in Umbros and various shades of chino. Trauma wasn’t a thing back then, not in our world, anyway; bad things happened, and then hopefully bad things stopped, and you were supposed to be grateful if they did — and that was called recovery. If you got a new wardrobe and the top bunk out of it, all the better. So I was confused when I found him asleep on the sofa instead of in the safest bed he’d been tucked into in years. “I heard horses,” he said, when I asked him what he was doing out there. “Horses running past the window all night.” My siblings and I — Michael’s three sisters moved in not long after him, joining me and my biological brother in a house barely big enough for four — considered the dinky town we’d moved to fairly Little House on the Prairie compared to the industrial-Connecticut cities we’d been raised in, but really it was just a fledgling suburb. The only horses for miles were plastic and balanced on rusted springs in neglected front yards. “It had to be deer,” I suggested, and I’m sure we spent the next several days convincing ourselves that that was more likely than the undead cavalry it obviously was. At school, my class spent all year investigating the town’s history. I learned that back when the land had been Algonquin territory, the great chief Potuccus would trail deer, then trap them in a circle of flames, until one fateful day when he trapped himself instead, falling victim to his own predation. This seemed like something more likely to have happened to one of the modern-day yokels who dirt-biked the trails beneath power lines and carried with them accelerants of Colt 44 and sparks of Camel Lights, but whether or not the legend was true, it soon became very clear to us that we were living on accursed land. It was the most plausible explanation for the otherwise impossible occurrences in that ranch house, like the time the radio in my would-be stepdad’s workshop blasted on at maximum volume at 3 a.m., despite the switch being toggled firmly to the OFF position. Potuccus, it seemed, was a fan of WHCN’s late-night classic-rock programming. Or the time we played a Pat Benatar LP backward on the turntable and all of us heard, very clearly, the words There is no evil. Clearly there was evil, or else Pat Benatar would not be speaking in that devil’s voice. Or the many times that specters taunted Michael in his bed. First the laughing would wake him — quiet, ugly laughter, the kind that suggests the opposite of funny. He’d open his eyes, but his lids were the only part of him that could move. He had no choice but to look at the figure beside the bed, just a silhouette, something like a man but nothing human, because nothing human could be that menacing, not since he’d gotten away from the awful flesh-and-blood men who’d come for him in the places he used to live. He’d try to scream but couldn’t make a sound solid enough to break through our oldest brother’s soft snoring on the bunk below. The thing would laugh more, feeding, just as the horror tropes told us, on fear. And Michael was afraid, more afraid than he’d been ever. Or almost ever. And then, somehow, he’d finally conjure the strength to break through the spell and sprint to the safety of the sofa. He told me what happened only once, and I was too chicken to hear it again. After that, when I’d find him in the morning, tucked beneath the kind of afghan that could only be, and had been, crocheted by a French-Canadian nana named Gertrude, I didn’t want to ask what had happened. I also didn’t try to convince him, as an adult would have, that he’d just had a dream. There were things he would lie about, like having met former President Reagan at a 1984 rally in Hamilton Park, and things he wouldn’t lie about, like that kind of terror, especially among siblings who would not hesitate to be merciless about it in order to advance our own social standing. Although really, I don’t remember ever telling the others what he’d told me. A fear of yellow jackets, or Libyan invasions, or whatever sequel to Nightmare on Elm Street was in theaters at the time — those all seemed like something to laugh at someone over. Michael seemed stricken with a fear I understood had hit deeper than the guttural syllables from a Pat Benatar record. It was the kind of fear even a sibling would find too terrible to laugh at, even when he really deserved it, even when he ripped apart my Dirty Dancing soundtrack and streamed the cassette’s innards like confetti to celebrate never having to hear “She’s Like the Wind” again. Once we became teenagers, different things kept us up at night, mainly boyfriends and girlfriends, or in my case, the lack of them. Michael eventually joined ROTC and went off to the University of Connecticut, where he earned the nickname the Jackalope, the origins of which I’m still not clear on. He became an adult brother, someone you see only on holidays and talk to sometimes and write letters to when they ship off to war. You don’t know what goes on with them in the night. So I didn’t learn that Michael had been having nightmares until after he took his own life. They were described as a symptom of the PTSD he’d recently been diagnosed with after returning from his tour in Iraq, and I imagine the things he saw at nighttime had more in common with the kinds of horrors he’d witnessed in-country than the kinds of horrors a child’s psyche could conjure, but still. But still. There is an awful lot of what-if-ing that goes down when someone you love does something like that, but the dreams are the things that make me feel like I messed it all up the most. The dreams make me feel like I could have understood and reached out to him if I’d known, even though, really, if I’m being honest, I know I could not have understood, and I do not understand, and I will never, ever understand, no matter how many of my own dreams I’ve had about it. I have had many dreams since then featuring Michael: the good ones are like a visit, the sad ones wreck my day, and the bad one was singular but untranscribable. I now know enough to call that kind of thing a night terror, those paralyzing nighttime visitations that started for me in my twenties. Even as an adult, I feel in the morning as if I have barely survived each one, and I’m not entirely convinced there’s nothing supernatural about them. I’ve never managed to get the courage to charge straight past evil to the safety of my sofa, maybe because mine doesn’t have the same sacred properties as that stained plaid one in our old living room had, maybe because I’m not sure one place is safer than the other. Maybe that’s what Michael decided, too. But it’s funny, because if I could, I’d still try to convince him of that one safe place, because maybe just wanting it to be true is a kind of amulet. Xhenet Aliu is the author of the novel Brass and the short-story collection Domesticated Wild Things. | | | | |  Illustration by Kelsey Wroten | Around the Fourth of July, not long after Grey and I moved to our new neighborhood, he called me over to the open window. “You’re kidding me, right?” He didn’t sound amused. Out on the crowded sidewalk, little glistening girls shrieked in the fire hydrant’s capped spray. Men, uniformed in white tees, baggy, knee-length shorts, and open-toed pool slides with calf-high socks stood around. The one we had already christened the Leader of Outside flipped burgers on a half-barrel grill. The music, profane rap, was turned up to all. “What?” I wondered if he thought he’d seen a drug deal go down. “Can’t they go to the park? Why are they partying on the street?” I looked again and thought back to home, to Trinidad. We had partied like that. Liming, we called it. And maybe we’d gone to a beach or a river or a waterfall, but I hadn’t seen any nature like that in this part of Brooklyn. I wondered where they were supposed to go. “Christ,” he said, “they’ve got pit bulls.” And despite the fact that I had not become accustomed to the American way of treating dogs like full-blooded family members, I felt the need to stick up for the families outside, to their right to have a pet, too, a pet he might not find appropriate. “It’s their dog,” I said, feeling some trepidation as the stocky, unleashed pit bull bounded through the water. “Look how happy he is.” Grey and I had come to the neighborhood at the moment realtors rebranded part of it “Prospect Heights.” Previously Crown Heights, as yet, only the rental pitch had observed this artificial boundary shift, which was clearly meant to demarcate desirable from deplorable. He and I weren’t gentrifiers or prospectors, though; we didn’t invest in anything before the neighborhood boomed. We were a young, interracial couple looking for more space, affordable rent, and a decent commute. The neighborhood, largely African American, Hispanic, and one dreadlocked Japanese guy, was wary of us, and Grey and I had profoundly different experiences of the same streets. Alone, I was nodded at, verbally greeted, aggressively courted, somehow always acknowledged. Alone, Grey was ignored or silently stared at: he could be a solo Mormon missionary or, in his preferred dark clothing, a lost Hasid. Observed together, we were a whole different species: a black woman with a white man in what was then still an inner-city neighborhood. Young and old men either glared at us or shook their heads in sorrow, women did double-takes, small children looked up from their games. None of this is exaggeration. Where, coming from the Caribbean, I felt at home in a black Brooklyn enclave and could even understand their curiosity, Grey, introverted and originally from the South, was wary in return about his place in this community. *** Inside our middle-income, rent-stabilized, three-bedroom apartment, we lived in a bubble, doing the everyday things couples did at home. But our every outing became a minefield negotiation. Especially in those early days, we didn’t ever just leave our apartment for a carefree walk up to the Greenmarket or the Botanic Garden. Always in our minds was what kind of exit we would have today, and, tabled for later, the contemplation of our return home. Would we be heckled or spat at? Did we dare hold hands? A few short blocks in any direction brought us a world away, but not necessarily into a more welcoming orbit. On one visit to the Brooklyn Museum without Grey, I was denied entry. I’d forgotten my wallet, and the vigilant gatekeeper informed me that even though, yes, admission was by donation, I needed to donate at least a dime, and didn’t I have a dime? A nickel? A penny? Another time, a homeowner in bordering Park Slope insisted I had taken the book I held from his stoop sale without paying, until Grey wandered over and vouched that we’d bought it at another stately brownstone’s steps. (That book was The Alchemy of Race and Rights, by Patricia Williams.) And once, after I’d seen Martha Stewart magically wield a spatula I just had to have, we took a longer walk, to a cozy Brooklyn Heights cooking store. We browsed unnecessary kitchen tools, sometimes adjacent to each other, sometimes out of each other’s sight. After a third watchful employee offered me terse, unsmiling assistance, I was done. “Can we go?” I said to Grey, upset because I’d really wanted to smooth a cake like Martha. Outside, Grey sensed my annoyance and pointed out that I was the one who’d wanted to leave the shop. “Didn’t you see that?” I asked him. “See what?” “How many people asked if you needed help?” He was puzzled. “No one asked me if I needed help.” “And how many asked me?” “Beats me.” “Three,” I said. “One after the other. And don’t tell me they were doing their job. No one asks a guy in a kitchen shop if he needs help, and three workers ask me? Come on.” “You think?” he said, coming around to my point. “Yeah. I think.” *** We kept a grievance tally, measuring who received more guff. I complained about being policed in institutions meant to serve the public. His exclusions, I felt, were benign. He was a white man with a black girlfriend who had exercised an economic decision to live in a predominantly black area. People were gonna stare. What else could he say? Caribbean restaurants underestimated his palate and made his roti mild when he’d specifically asked for spicy? Back and forth we went, who was more wronged, until the assault. One day, coming home from work, Grey walked past a group of teenage boys making sport by dumping water on random strangers. He — never one to back down — confronted them, and the whole scene devolved into a shouting match. A man, older than the marauding teens, who perhaps thought Grey should have taken his wetting more graciously, broke through the crowd, swung a metal pot into his elbow, and disappeared. Grey thought his arm was broken. The teens dispersed. He was soaked, injured, and angry, but no one came to his aid. I had been in Poughkeepsie, but two days later, my gut seized when I saw the purple bruises on Grey’s arm. Outraged, we talked about moving but knew we had nowhere to go. Strangely enough, this resilience, or resignation, seemed to garner a measure of respect from the Leader of Outside. Grey told me that he’d been there during the assault. Unlike the assailant and the others who had thronged, he had stood apart from the fray. After, he still didn’t say hello, but for a while he gave Grey meaningful nods, as if he’d somehow earned his stripes by being assaulted on the street. The acknowledgment meant nothing to Grey, who did not nod back. “You know what would have been nice?” he said, when I told him the gesture was something. “If he’d stepped in when I was being attacked.” The assault marked a dual turning point: our tallying who was more aggrieved was pointless, and if we were more united, unmistakable change had permeated the neighborhood. There were additional newcomers for the tough teens to make sport of. Prospect Heights had finally pulled even with the realtors’ imagination. Grey and I became less of a curiosity, and then the new normal, and finally, we were outnumbered by hipsters and the real gentrifying horde, who bought up all the houses and factory buildings and brought in their seven-dollar lattes and Sriracha tacos and artisanal ice cream ironically named after crack. Old outside, which had been the entire neighborhood, was slowly squeezed into the two apartment buildings on the corner of Grand and St. Marks. But for our longevity, we could finally claim anonymity, walk holding hands, be pregnant together. After our daughter was born, we proudly carried her through the changed neighborhood. We walked past the Leader of Outside, still and forever working his corner. “What,” he said as we passed, “y’all ain’t gone even let me see the baby?” It had been almost a decade, and that was the first either of us recalled hearing his voice. Grey turned so he could see our sleeping child. “Boy or girl?” “A girl,” I said, “Helen.” He spoke to Grey. “Congratulations, man.” And then the Leader of Outside reached into his striped polo pocket, pulled out a slim cigar (which I immediately knew had been destined to become a blunt), and passed it to Grey. *** One night, not long before Grey and I finally left Brooklyn for Orlando, we rounded the corner from the newest Thai restaurant to see a massive, mostly African-American crowd, dressed in white. The mood was festive, but not raucous. I asked a woman leaning against a car what was going on. She pointed to a street memorial, the requisite bodega candles, small teddy bears clutching red hearts, and poster boards with scrawled messages and Xeroxed pictures. Her voice was both scratchy and husky. “Chucky died, baby. You know who that is?” For years, we’d called him the Leader of Outside, and his name was Charles. By then, it wasn’t a stretch to consider our part of Crown Heights Prospect Heights; the unofficial line had moved much farther east, and Crown Heights had its own bagel bars and raw-milk cheese shops and speakeasies staffed by mustachioed bartenders. Every empty lot was now an amenity-filled, multistoried condo or an active construction site. Hipsters walked pit bulls. The Brooklyn Museum actively courted minority visitors. Interracial couples were the norm (same-sex couples; same-sex couples of color!). Our daughter had been born in a Mecca for diversity, a place that, now that we were on our way out, was unrecognizable from where we had arrived. Chuck’s passing seemed a fitting elegy to that past. His death didn’t involve his business associates or the products he’d peddled. Chuck’s heart couldn’t take anymore. From the super, we later learned he’d had a massive coronary event and died before an ambulance arrived. Unnoticed at his alfresco wake on his corner, Grey and I held hands and paid our respects from the edge of the crowd before going upstairs to relieve our sitter. Victoria Brown left Brooklyn after 26 years and now teaches at Rollins College in Orlando. | | | | |  Illustration by Franziska Barczyk | I refuse to be the office Den Mother. True, I’m perfectly suited for the position: middle-aged, middle manager, generally forgiving, with a deep understanding of my business (corporate communications). Also true: I’m a mother in real life. But of all the roles I’ve played in my career — and after several decades in management consulting, there’ve been several — Den Mother would be the absolute worst. The requirements for Den Mother are surprisingly steep: maturity (though not necessarily age; I’m 54, which is more typical, but I’ve seen women as young as 23 get saddled with the position), a take-charge attitude, a willingness to arrive early and stay late, and the ability to get shit done with no complaint. (Den Mothers often double as Martyrs; more vocal female employees are generally ignored, or scoffed at, then ignored, or sent on long business trips and ignored from afar.) And yet, despite the high bar for entry, a Den Mother’s work is demeaning and her rewards are meager. If I agreed to be Den Mother, along with performing my own job, I would be expected to clean up everyone else’s messes — in the communal kitchen, on the shared-file drive, with pissed-off clients — while teaching my adult colleagues the difference between right and wrong. (“Bob, we don’t give ourselves insulin injections at our desks. The office is a public space.” “Sally? Sally? Sally! Put down your phone. We’re in a meeting.”) I’m supposed to be the older, frumpy, shapeless, sexless female who always has a stapler, never raises her voice, and pesters the team to submit their expenses. But I won’t do it. Yes, I’m a feminist. Yes, sexual harassment disgusts me. But I am too fucking busy to be the in-house cop. You’re grown-ups, I find myself shouting (silently). You should know how to act. It wasn’t always this way. When I was first starting out, raring-to-go, eager-to-please, and thrilled to have a job, I was grateful to play the Dutiful Daughter. I love my father — I love men in general — so when my (mostly male, mostly older) bosses offered insight and guidance, I accepted their help with grace and humility. Same with female managers — over the years, I’ve had a series of women mentors whom I have admired and emulated and whose advice I still seek. The Dutiful Daughter was a youthful phase, and like youth, it ended quickly, with a bittersweet sting. By my late twenties/early 30s, I was evolving into the Ingénue. Smart, savvy, and indefatigable, I was happy to flirt and to feign delight when more senior men (and occasionally women) showed interest in my work — and in me. Sure, there were inappropriate overtures and questionable behavior, but that’s a different conversation. Single, childless, and ambitious as hell, I lived fearlessly, saying yes, yes, yes, I’d love to, whether it was a swanky client dinner or a last-minute trip overseas. I understood my role and kept myself in check, especially when things crossed the line. (The Ingénue is alluring because she’s unattainable.) As long as she’s got looks, moxie, energy to burn, and nothing to lose, the Ingénue dazzles. But the clock is always ticking, and the party eventually ends. By 37, the fun was winding down; exhaustion had settled in. I was pregnant, married with two stepdaughters, and still — always — working. Forty came, then 45, and suddenly I was the Beck-and-Call Girl who never said no. “Thank God for you,” my manager used to say. Then she’d pause. “Hey, do you mind taking over Entropy for Mike?” Did I mind? Of course not! Beck-and-Call Girls live to serve; we love being productive, feeling important, knowing we’re vital to the operation. Beck-and-Call Girl was a great role — at first. I made lots of money, was promoted several times, and if my coworkers found me bossy and overbearing, what did I care? In addition to kids, I had a second career as a novelist, so being bossy enabled me to triage my clients, my family, and my books. But there were downsides. In business, success begets success, and work begets work, which means the more I did for Mike, Mark, Susan, and Celeste (and my kids and my husband), the less each one of them did for themselves. Along with turning in lousy first drafts, they skipped meetings and missed deadlines, knowing I’d pick up the slack. So I might’ve been thriving and flush, but I was also overworked, overwrought, and desperate for sleep. Beck-and-Call Girl was burning out. Now, at 54, Den Mother beckons. These days I’m wedged between the executives and the junior staff. (Likewise, my kids are older, but my parents are, too.) Demands come from all directions. Some tasks I despise but they’re part of my job; I do them to stay employed: teaching associates how to answer the phone, reminding consultants to track their billable hours, nudging my boss to approve vendor bills. It’s the other tasks I can’t abide, the ones I’m obliged to do simply because I’m a premenopausal female and (ostensibly) nonthreatening. I don’t know exactly when I crossed into Den Mother territory, but here are actual sentences I’ve said to my coworkers in recent months: —No, you can’t bring your dog to the office; there are liability issues. —Please walk faster; we’re going to be late. —Why do you keep arguing? Just do as I ask; we’ll discuss my reasons after the call. —I don’t know why Lauren doesn’t like you; maybe it’s because you’re mean to her. It’s not just trivial stuff, either. Now that the #MeToo movement is picking off predatory employees and has HR departments scrambling for cover, who do you think is expected to police bad behavior in the office day to day? That’s right — the Den Mothers; women of a certain age who, having survived our own #MeToo moments, are no longer taking any shit. We’re the ones expected to censor, interrupt, and confront offenders. (“Uh, Bob? Whipping out your penis during a performance review is inappropriate.”) No. Just no. I won’t do it. I won’t be a Den Mother. Instead, I’m a paid to be a boss, so I act like one. This means I … —Delegate: Team members are employees, not children; they’re getting paid, too. —Give clear instructions, including deadlines, when assigning projects, so there’s no ambiguity in what I expect. —Confront problems and enforce consequences. —Lead by example: Meet my deadlines, hit my sales targets, track my hours, and submit my expenses. This way, my solid performance eclipses my gender. —Maintain boundaries: I only discuss my age, weight, pap-smear results, and Botox when I’m with other women of a certain age. And you know what, younger colleagues? You shouldn’t be a Den Mother either. Not now, not ever. One thing I’ve learned in all my years of working (and mothering) is that people will step up when called upon. So the next time you’re thrust into a thankless role, follow my lead: Shake your head, move aside, let someone else bear the load. What happens next will amaze you. Jillian Medoff is a senior consultant with the Segal Group as well as a novelist; her most recent book is This Could Hurt. | | | | |  Courtesy CHAT! | Nary is a 24-year-old Cambodian garment-factory worker in the capital city, Phnom Penh. Her parents are rural fruit farmers, and, at age 17, she started working in the factory to support her family. She met her first boyfriend there. They fell in love, started having sex — in a country where premarital sex is quite taboo — and a few weeks later, she missed her period. When she told her boyfriend she was pregnant, he left her. Unaware of safe birth control and safe, legally available abortion methods, she bought an unknown pill from a shop a friend recommended. It left her in the hospital, heavily bleeding and in pain. She missed a week’s worth of wages. After another failed relationship and pregnancy scare, Nary reported feeling depressed and hopeless when she joined a program called CHAT! Contraception, which provides sexual-health education for young factory workers. More than half a million young women work in Cambodia’s factories. Most are poor. Many have no more than a primary-school education. And a lot of them, like Nary, are vulnerable to unwanted pregnancies, increased rates of STDs, and unsafe abortions. It’s their first time away from home, when they form new relationships and begin their first sexual experiences. CARE — one of the world’s largest humanitarian organizations, where I serve as innovator-in-residence — launched Chat! Contraception to empower young women factory workers like Nary to make informed, healthy sexual choices.  Courtesy CHAT! |
The program uses a blend of soap-opera-style videos of Cambodian factory women facing critical sexual choices. Chat! delivers those videos through in-factory screenings and via mobile devices. It also facilitates trust-building sessions in the workplace, along with a mobile app that provides once-daily quiz questions with the opportunity to build points and raise your rank within the game. The early results have been remarkable. So far, Chat! has reached 15,000 workers at factories serving big Western brands like Levi’s and Marks & Spencer. Rates of modern contraception use among sexually active factory workers have doubled, reaching nearly 50 percent. Unwanted pregnancies have declined, and women in the program report that their confidence in discussing contraception with their partners — and even in refusing sex altogether — has tripled. I spoke with Maly Man and Julia Battle, co-founders of Chat!, who are based in Phnom Penh. Tell me a bit about the typical female garment-factory employees you work with? Most of the factory workers are women who typically move from their rural villages when they are still teenagers to find work. The average age of workers in the factories is around 27. They come here with little education, limited literacy, no sexual-health knowledge. And what they’ve learned, they hear through the grapevine of their friends in the factory — who also may be misinformed. Around 50 percent of women in the factories report being sexually active, but it is hard to know how many who are not married are willing to report having sex. There is a huge stigma around it — that’s part of why we wanted to create safe online and offline spaces for learning and conversations.  Courtesy CHAT! |
What does a typical workday look like for the women in the program? How do they have time to participate? The typical workday in the factory is 7 a.m. until 4 p.m., with a lunch break, six days per week. But whenever possible, most of the women will add an overtime session from 4 to 6 p.m. The minimum wage in Cambodia is U.S. $153 per month. If they always work those overtime hours, they can come closer to U.S. $200 per month. Some of the women are living in small individual rooms in boardinghouses that are walking distance from the factories. A lot of women — especially those with husbands and kids — live farther away so they can have more space. There are these big trucks that pick up women along the route to the factories. With all the traffic, maybe you wake up at 5 a.m., commute for 90 minutes each way, and get back home around 8 p.m. Long days made the mobile-phone component of the program really important. The workday is very busy, and it is very hard to grab time with the workers. Time is money — we want to be available on their schedule. Now they can watch the videos on YouTube whenever they want, and they can choose what time each day they want the mobile-quiz questions delivered. You’ve mentioned that a lot of the women enter the program with major misconceptions about sexual health. What’s one example that sticks out for you? Here’s a big one — abortion is legal in Cambodia, but only 11 percent of women in the factories report knowing it is legal. The vast majority believe it is illegal! The impact of so many women (and men) thinking abortion is illegal here is that when women do need abortions, they rely on unsafe, outdated methods. Many women will visit unlicensed practitioners to give them surgical abortions, or they will use something popularly called the “Chinese pill,” packets that may contain some of the effective drugs, but in incorrect and variable doses. Otherwise, they might buy a licensed abortion pill from the shop but then will use it incorrectly. For instance, you are supposed to take one pill orally, wait 24 hours, and then insert four pills, but they might mix these up, take them incompletely, or not take them at the right time. Thai dramatic movies are some of the most popular video content for women in the factories — they watch a ton of movies. And in Thailand, abortion is illegal and often comes up in the story lines, so sometimes that is confusing. But the need for abortion in the first place is also due to this community having limited understanding about effective birth control. What are some of the misconceptions around birth control? One very popular misconception here is that if you haven’t ever been pregnant, if you use birth control, it will make you infertile, and you will never be able to have children. Another one is around IUDs and implants — that they will float out of your uterus or your arm and roam dangerously around your body forever. Also, many women in the factories don’t know about any of the side effects of birth control because they have never talked to a health practitioner and will just get the pill at a local pharmacy. So, they’ll experience side effects and panic. Side effects for contraception are very real — they have to be acknowledged, not ignored. Even in the Western world, if your contraception feels horrible, and you don’t understand why or how long they might last, that is really scary, and you can be sure you won’t keep using the method. .jpg) Courtesy CHAT! |
Are men part of the conversation? We don’t only work with female workers; we now have a separate program for their male counterparts. We noticed that a lot of women in the program would schedule their mobile-phone quiz to be delivered around 8 or 9 p.m., when they would be home with their partner and they could answer the questions together. And even though the workplace sessions were intended for women, men working in the factory were showing up to watch the videos because they are fun, but also because they have questions! It’s easier for women to have conversations about sex and contraception when their partners are familiar with accurate information also. Does the content focus only on unplanned pregnancies or also on STIs? STIs are a big issue at the factory — both absolute numbers of women contracting them and the ability of the women to identify and seek treatment for them. For instance, it’s hard to know if maybe they feel uncomfortable because it is just a yeast infection. They are sitting working in the factory ten hours a day in temperatures well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Or maybe they are menstruating and they’ve used the same sanitary products for a half-day or a whole day, which happens a lot. Women in the factories might feel uncomfortable but won’t go to their local or factory-provided health center because they do not feel comfortable having their bodies looked at or touched by men. One of the features of Chat! is that we provide a directory of local health-care centers that includes information on which centers have female practitioners that can treat them. How do the training sessions move from just online or within the factories to the outside world? We are trying to push boundaries both emotional and physical — in terms of where women feel comfortable going and who they feel empowered to talk to. So, for instance, we do treasure hunts — maybe the first day you just use your cell phone to call a sexual-health hotline and ask a question, then a few days later you have to take a picture with your phone of a place that sells condoms, and then to complete the treasure hunt, you actually need to go into a clinic and have a conversation. Each step feels like a big one sometimes. If you want to form your own fundraising team and support CARE’s work around the world, sign up for Walk in Her Shoes and walk in solidarity with women and girls worldwide. This interview has been condensed and edited. Elana Berkowitz is an entrepreneur, consultant, recovering Obama policy wonk, new momma, and innovator-in-residence with CARE. | | | | | | | | |
No comments:
Post a Comment