| |  Illustration by Gel Jamlang | Smell is the first and strongest memory, and the last to leave us. Incoming smells are processed by the olfactory bulb, which sends them through to the amygdala and hippocampus, centers of emotion and memory. All scents go through these two centers, whose marquee should read: ALL THE FEELINGS. Scent is not everything, but it does get all balls rolling. TWO I’m lying on the lawn in front of our house, which is (as I will later discover) just like the houses to the right and left, and also across the street and behind us. We all have narrow backyards and neat squares of lawn on either side of the cement walk. I’ve planted myself in the grass, arms and legs outstretched. No shoes. My face is sideways on the grass, and I am overcome with green. I can smell green, and when I pull out clumps of grass and wave them over my face, I smell the loamy, mineral smell of backyard dirt. I breathe deeply as little clumps fall on my face and hair. There’s a vast world out there and I am in it! FOUR Chickenshit is a thing, not just one of my father’s expressions. My aunt and uncle have a chicken farm in New Jersey. With a lot of chickens. They are enormous, Leghorns and Rhode Island Reds, with dirty feathers, beady eyes, and personalities to match. My aunt Fritzie, otherwise the kindest of women, demands that I help out. She feels that I have been spoiled by suburban living. What she really feels, I think, as I grow up, is that it was a very good idea to leave Russia and not be massacred in her home but that some lesser things — Yiddish, chicken management, competent children — have been forever lost. She lets me choose between helping her wring the chickens’ necks and gathering eggs. I gather eggs. Inside the chicken coop, it’s shadowy. The air palpates with shit and eggshell, corn and feathers. I can hardly breathe, but even after I succeed in gathering six eggs and putting them in my padded flour sack, I don’t want to leave. The air is a living thing. SIX My father smokes a pipe all the time. As an extra treat — as it seems to me, like ice cream instead of a single cookie — he smokes a Montecristo No. 4 cigar in the evening. He’s enveloped in a cloud of herby, cedary smoke. He blows smoke rings, and he gives me the cigar bands to wear. (When I’m three months pregnant one winter, I won’t let him smoke in my house, because the smell doesn’t just make me nauseous — like everything — it actually makes me vomit. My father puts on his hat and coat, unfolds a lawn chair, takes the newspaper and a cereal bowl to use as an ashtray, and settles himself in the garage under the one hanging lightbulb. I see now that my self-centered and implacable father didn’t complain, even a little. The garage smells of Montecristos for years. After his death, I find myself in the garage, sitting in a lawn chair.)  Illustration by Gel Jamlang |
SEVEN We have moved on up. We have left my beloved neighborhood of small square houses and ruptured sidewalks and moved to a part of town with big houses and no sidewalks at all. I’ve been invited to Linda’s house to play the Barbie Game. I hate it. (I also prefer Poindexter, the universally despised boyfriend, to the “good” boyfriends, who remind me of the Nazis of my nightmares, but I am ashamed of my preference.) I leave the game and wander around, finding my way to Linda’s father’s den. It smells wonderfully of old leather. I bury myself in his Chesterfield sofa, and I find a side table filled with Playboy magazines. This is where Linda and Cherry find me, an hour later, stretched out and breathing deeply. NINE My parents are going to a fancy party. They smell like Heaven, especially if Heaven has layers of fragrance. Jean Nate talc, with a powder puff bigger than my hand. On top of that are Pond’s cold cream and hand cream that comes in a lilac, metal tube. It’s from France. My mother rubs the lilac cream into her hands, elbows, and heels. On top of that is Ma Griffe (“My signature”), the only perfume my mother wears. I love this fragrance. It is my mother at her best: sharp, confident, and warm. It has cinnamon and leather, jasmine and vetiver, gardenia and ylang-ylang. All of these scents become favorites of mine. (I am 50 years old, sitting in a theater. An older woman is in front of me, her fur coat tossed back over her seat. She, and the coat, are wearing Ma Griffe. Surreptitiously, I hold the sleeve of the coat. I bend closer, to inhale. I love this woman. I am blind and deaf to the first act. ) TWENTY-SIX Apple juice and milk. I have a baby. Any piece of the world that is not shit or pee or puréed green beans, is apple juice and milk. I live in a scented fog, moving from task to task, with scrambled synapses and heavy feet. (Light heart, love the baby, blah blah. Still.) The combination of these smells binds me then and leaves me now both queasy and nostalgic, longing and relieved. NOW The old-fashioned roses in my garden, Honey Perfume, are exactly as described, and more so when the sun warms them. (My mother’s dear friend up the street had a full rose garden and a bed of Honey Perfume at the center.) My husband’s scent, which is peppery and salty, almost always has a hint of vetiver, because it’s his favorite cologne and has been for many years. Sometimes, I am near another man who wears some form of vetiver, and I am compelled and a little anxious. Bread baking. Whoever’s made the bread, it’s not me, and the smell, like the act of being in a kitchen where someone else is cooking, is the most delightful way of being a child that I can think of. Amy Bloom is a novelist. Her latest work, White Houses, is out now. | | | | |  Gif by Louisa Bertman | In this column, Alexis Coe, Lenny’s historian at large, conducts Q&As with specialists in archives across the country, focusing on one primary source. For this entry, Alexis spoke with historian Tera Hunter, author of Bound in Wedlock, the first comprehensive study of black marriage, from slavery through emancipation, which was recently named a Lincoln Prize finalist. (Read Alexis’s previous columns here and here.) Alexis Coe: I read your last book, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War, in graduate school, and it was a revelation to me. Your new book, Bound in Wedlock, is even more ambitious — and personal. You open the book with a marriage certificate that belonged to Ellen and Moses Hunter, your great-great-grandparents. What did that document tell you about your own family and about the larger story you wanted to tell in this book? Tera Hunter: The marriage certificate of my great-great-grandparents served as a source of inspiration as I researched and wrote Bound in Wedlock. I kept it pasted above my writing desk. It amplified the stories of the multitudes of anonymous people in the book. It reminded me how the work that I do is quite personal and yet historically relevant and significant beyond my biography. Ellen Morrison and Moses Hunter were both enslaved people prior to their marriage in 1872. We still have family members who remember Ellen, who was also a midwife, who assisted in their birth. The era of slavery seems far away, and yet we are only a few generations removed from it. AC: That’s incredible. Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, which means Ellen and Moses should have been free for almost a decade by the time they married. (Slaves in Texas didn’t find out about it until June 19, 1865.) When and how did they meet? When they were freed, how did they decide where to settle and how to build a life? TH: We do not know the details of their relationship. My paternal family was rooted in the same Georgia/South Carolina region stretching as far back as we can trace them. They were part of a close-knit community. We can only decipher the timing of their coupling by the birth of their first child, just after the Civil War. Moses was born free in 1835 but then enslaved in his youth, which shows how precarious freedom was for African Americans. Ellen was a slave until the institution was abolished. They did not formalize their relationship until 1872, as the marriage certificate indicates. AC: Why do you think they waited? TH: There are a lot of factors that may explain the delay. Many slaves, with the help of the Union Army and Northern missionaries, began the process to formalize their unions during the Civil War, when they were in proximity to the occupied troops and contraband camps. After the war ended, it could take some time for ex-slaves to gain access to civil agencies to put their marriages on legal footing. It is noteworthy, too, that the certificate was issued the same year as the arrival of a black minister at the family’s (previously biracial) church. He would have performed the ceremony. AC: Ellen and Moses had grown up seeing slaves around them enter into intimate bonds they called marriage, but those couples had none of the rights and protections guaranteed after the Civil War. You write about those marriages, in which the benefits were considerable and familiar to us: emotional bonds, intimacy, support, and children. It also made them incredibly vulnerable, as if they weren’t vulnerable enough already, to the whims and cruelties of whites — which was acknowledged in a very blunt and heartbreaking line in their vows. Tell us about that, and the constant threat of separation they lived under? TH: The fear of separation was especially haunting for couples. Slaves faced the greatest threats of being sold away in their prime years, precisely when they would have been young couples. They were most prized as workers and able to fetch a higher price on the market then. The trepidation loomed large over their relationships, which sometimes made them ambivalent about whether to wed or not. The threat of separation was used as a form of punishment and containment to keep slaves obedient. It also became an issue when the finances of the slave owners lagged or when they passed away and their estates had to be settled. As you have noted, masters were quite blunt in making this clear even in the marital vows exchanged between slaves — “until death or distance do you part.” AC: My god. And some of those marriages weren’t always voluntary, right? Slaveholders wanted their slaves to marry in the hopes that they would appease abolitionists by appearing to emphasize marriage, and if the couple had children, they too were slaves, thus adding to their own wealth. TH: Most slave marriages were voluntary, as masters saw the benefits of using coupling as a stabilizing influence on plantations and, of course, encouraging reproduction of their property. Masters used marriage to lay claim to their benevolence and Christianity, to counter the arguments that abolitionists made about the brutality of slavery. But the use of force was common, as masters often paired slaves together against their will. This was a gross form of sexual violation of both women and men. Not to mention, the marital beds of voluntary couples were often exploited by the masters themselves, using their prerogative to molest female slaves. AC: How did a marriage work when one person was free and another still enslaved? TH: Mixed-status marriages were similar to enslaved marriages in the sense that they were not legally recognized. Free persons’ rights were thus restricted because of their close ties to enslaved relatives. In some cases, couples lived together in the cabins of the enslaved person. In other cases, the free person might live elsewhere and visit back and forth with the enslaved spouse. (The latter were called “abroad” marriages, though slaves married to one another often used the same arrangement when each person had a different owner.) Mixed-status relationships existed because slave and free black communities intermingled through work and leisure activities. This was especially true in urban places, where the boundaries of caste were more fluid. These relationships also existed as some enslaved people gained their freedom and maintained ties with those still enslaved. AC: I imagine that slaveholders would find that quite threatening. TH: Some states, like North Carolina, even prohibited them by law, though they were not so successful in enforcing it. The law itself shows that it was considered a menace difficult for officials to repress and contain. AC: There was so much violence, chaos, and confusion during and after the Civil War. What happened to slave marriages during that transition? TH: The Civil War opened the door to both chaos and unforeseen possibilities. It became an important turning point in the history of African American marriages. Slaves ran away in droves at the sight of the Union Army as battles were fought in Confederate territory. They forced the federal government to reckon with a population that it assumed would be neutral in the war. AC: Remain neutral! What a crazy thing to imagine. TH: Contraband camps were set up to house the runaways and to put them to work aiding the United States military. Northern missionaries and abolitionists seized the opportunity to use these sites to cultivate Christian norms and values associated with citizenship in a post-slavery world. They began the process of marrying slaves “under the flag” — that is, formalizing their relationships under the authority of the federal government. Thousands of former slaves were remarried or married for the first time in this context. But it would take winning the war before those relationships would be fully free and legal. The defeated Southern states were forced to pass laws during Reconstruction recognizing the marriages of former slaves. AC: Books take a long time to write. When you started this, we didn’t have a president who emboldened white nationalists, openly and repeatedly defending them. How do you think it’s influenced the book’s reception and the kinds of questions you get asked about it? TH: Yes, books take a long time! I will just say I started it during the Bush years. I worked on the final revisions as Obama was leaving and Trump was coming into the White House, which made it feel like déjà vu. The book is about a tumultuous century of our nation’s history. It opens during the peak of the most profitable slavery era and ends after slavery has been defeated. Then there was a moment of democratic possibilities that opened during Reconstruction, followed by a fierce backlash of white supremacy in the form of disenfranchisement, lynchings, debt peonage, etc. A lot of readers find the book helpful to reflect on the resonance between those times and ours. Not to mention, we are continually jolted by reminders that proslavery views inform racial stereotypes about black families, without any appreciation for what African American marriages and families have had to overcome. Alexis Coe is a historian and the author of Alice+Freda Forever. | | | | |  Illustration by Marne Grahlman | Your late 40s, the truism goes, are a dangerous age. Two years ago, I fell in love with someone who wasn’t my husband. But the unexpected love of my life is not a boy toy or a first love sought out on Facebook — she’s a 130-pound Great Pyrenean mountain dog. I had no intentions of acquiring another pet; we were, as my husband puts it, “at peak animal,” with three horses, three cats, and a Border terrier (as well as three children). But we’d just moved into a large house when a friend noticed a dog on a local rescue center’s website; too vast and, at age seven, too old, apparently, for easy rehoming. Nobody wants a dog likely to need imminent veterinary care or worse (oversize dogs don’t tend to make old bones). Looking back, I’m not sure what made me agree to meet her. But we drove as a family to a small house, bursting with fostered dogs — and there she was: a subdued, white canine pony. They told us she loved children and cheese, ignored cats, and would “be no trouble.” I told myself it would be a decent thing to do. I was so nervous awaiting our simple doggy home check that I was awake fretting at 3 a.m.: Should we have fenced the pond? Would my un-brushed hair suggest negligence on the canine grooming front? But in the event, the man from the charity pulled up, gazed at the land, and said, “I’m not sure why we’re doing this. Frankly, I’d like you to adopt me.” A week later, I found myself driving home with a dog it had taken two of us twenty minutes to hoist into the back of my 4x4 (she is too old to jump). She cried the entire hour’s journey — a terrible, mournful sound — while I watched her in the mirror and thought: What on earth have I done? Later, I realized she had been fostered so many times she’d simply assumed she was being moved on again. Routine and exercise, I’ve found, are the best way to settle an animal. We set about regular, frequent walks. But within days, BigDog was limping badly. I researched arthritis, joint problems, hip scores — then finally checked her feet. Her pads were pink silk — common among dogs that have been kept for breeding. We walked on grass until her feet toughened, and I nurtured dark thoughts about puppy farms. The early weeks were not easy. She cried often, suffered bladder infections, ate sporadically. Our cats were black-eyed and outraged. Our children had no misgivings; they buried themselves in her soft fur, lay on her, told her things. Pyreneans love children; while any adult caller to our house gets a reception not dissimilar to The Revenant, a child can walk straight in and she will lower her head, instantly gentle and submissive. (This is peculiar to the breed.) And as the months went on, she cheered up and stopped crying in the car (we ordered a special ramp from Germany to help her in and out). The cats began to accompany us on walks. And I, unexpectedly, fell totally in love. I love all my animals. But BigDog adores me in a way I was unprepared for. It is distracting, passionate, time-consuming. Most dogs will look away if you hold their gaze, but she just keeps looking, as if she wants to drink you in. At rest, she will lift her head to check my whereabouts, before grunting with approval. At night, she comes to each member of the family to have her huge, soft head stroked before taking herself to bed. *** A year after she moved in, her tail began to wag (it broke my heart when I registered the delay). And she began to play, tossing toys deftly in the air and galloping up and down the hallway. We’ve learned when this happens to flatten swiftly against a wall. Lamps fly, rugs concertina, ornaments bounce off shelves. Larger than a Shetland pony, she has knocked both my husband and me clean off our feet (I did the promotional tour for my novel Me Before You with a busted ligament; he is currently wearing a knee brace after she welcomed him home too enthusiastically). Recently, she began to “talk” to us during supper. She lies on her side by the kitchen table and yowls and grunts, waiting for a response before she “speaks” again.* The unexpected pleasure of taking on a rescue animal is in watching them open up, trust in their surroundings, and express happiness. I’m aware with every bounce through the woods, every tummy rub, that I have made her life infinitely better, and in a couple of tough years in which our family has negotiated serious illness, a child’s surgery, and the lumps and bumps of work, politics, and life, she in turn has been a constant source of joy and affection. It’s not without its challenges. The carpet shampooer is in frequent use — her weak bladder means she needs walking every three hours. She disapproves fiercely of cyclists, scooters, and, once (to our utter mortification), a motorized wheelchair. She fosters irrational dislikes and has to be shut away to stop her “herding” of the odd guest. She has nearly dislocated my shoulder and requires regular specialist grooming and glucosamine for her joints, and if she sits on your lap, you have twenty minutes before your legs go numb and start falling off. Like most Pyreneans, BigDog considers the leash an affront to her dignity and recall to be optional. Last summer, when my New York editor came to lunch, she simply disappeared halfway through pudding. I have no idea how something so large and white can vanish so effectively, but the meal was abandoned while we combed the surrounding countryside on foot, car, and quad-bike. After two hours, I became quietly hysterical; it felt like when our son, at two, briefly disappeared in a supermarket. I paid a local taxi to take the editor back to London, explaining that I couldn’t go anywhere while BigDog was missing. We finally located her an hour afterward, exhausted, delighted, and inky black, having apparently been swimming in the county’s most brackish, foul-smelling ditch. I cried with relief (and then cried again when I saw the groomer’s bill). My teenage children joke that I miss her more than them when I’m away. This is only funny because they miss her more than me too (they’ve set up an Instagram account devoted to her). Even my husband, not the most expressive of men, is putty around her, as I discovered when I overheard: “Do you not want your breakfast? No? Shall I grate some Parmesan on it?” (the dog in my new book, Still Me, has adopted this culinary habit). She has inadvertently improved my writer’s back, as I’m forced to leave my desk at least four times a day; she’s brought me and my husband closer — we walk together at dawn. Even the mardiest teenager can’t help giggling at her fearful deference to our fierce, elderly rescue cat, or watching Madame Floof (as they call her) paddling her enormous feet through her dreams. When we first brought BigDog home, we told the children that given her age she would be, at best, a four-year dog. I felt almost nonchalant saying it. Two years in, I become tearful if I think too hard about what that means and watch every limp, every exhausted flop, with concern. But maybe the lesson we learn from animals is just this: love is fleeting, often unexpected, and to be relished when it comes. For now, a mournful-faced, oversize dog has taught me to live in the present and simply enjoy every day we have. What we as a family have learned from rescue dogs in particular is that it is in giving that you really do receive. And if anyone is interested, Heathlands Animal Rescue currently needs a home for Glenda, an exceptionally gloomy-looking six-year-old Saint Bernard. I bet she’s marvelous. *There is footage on my Instagram account, @jojomoyesofficial, if you want to watch her talk. It’s mostly BigDog. A version of this story was originally published in The Times of London. Still Me by Jojo Moyes is out now. She is the New York Times best-selling author of After You, Me Before You, The Horse Dancer, Paris for One and Other Stories, One Plus One, The Girl You Left Behind, The Last Letter From Your Lover, Silver Bay, and The Ship of Brides. She lives with her husband and three children in Essex, England. | | | | |  Illustration by Tiffany Pai | We sat around on folding chairs, pinning ostrich plumes into one another’s hair, sharing college gossip. Near the door that led into the bowels of the Municipal Auditorium, our chaperone was shouting about curtsies — demonstrating, in her tight satin skirt, how we were to bend at the knees without bowing our heads. Our bodies must not betray one trace of submission, she said; we were debutantes, not subjects, after all. Her breath — tuna-laced, necrotic — tossed our feathers. They bobbed as if they were in the bridles of carriage ponies. This felt apt. My father was offered goats for me once at a dinner party Uptown. The host’s friend, just back from a stint for Shell, had a son as yet unmarried; he thought we’d be a good match. A camel and four goats was the right price, he said, for a basic model like me, but, given what my daddy had paid for my schooling, maybe an Arabian horse should be thrown in too. He laughed, looking down my dress. I took my mother’s scarf from her chair. My father, bless him, barely chuckled before he started talking. My father has a talent for talking; he can go on for hours about things that interest no one but himself: circuit-court rulings, collegiate a capella, etymologically incorrect usages of common words. That night, huddled under the coral pashmina, I didn’t even try to interrupt so that, by the time dessert arrived, the rest of the table had forgotten about the goats. My father chuckled again as he took my arm and lead me to the dance floor of the Municipal Auditorium, through a tunnel, into the spotlight. The carriage feather bobbing above my chignon, I felt a little bit like a linebacker, a little bit like I’d died. Patting my hand through two layers of kid gloves, he whispered: Just like a yearling sale. He meant the subversion to be obvious. Meant the whole thing, I think, as a lesson. Meant for me to see the antique pistons that drive the debauch of Mardi Gras: classism, racism, patriarchy, the commodification of my sex. I suppose he believed some things are best learned by doing. *** One thing I learned: The “Greatest Free Party on Earth” is paid for by debs’ daddies. I shared this revelation with my college friends in Connecticut, trying to get them to stop making those faces at me. They were horrified by all this: the white dress, the pageant. They spoke to me in those tones that people use to speak to the brainwashed, lecturing me on the history of something of which they were not a part. I tried to explain how funny it was. That all this had originated in a joke — Mardi Gras as a reprisal of Roman Saturnalia, a sort of class-based opposite day. I quoted Bakhtin — “All were considered equal during Carnival” — explaining that every socioeconomic stratum had a “krewe” that threw its own parade and ball. I got into the innate symbolism of rhinestones and the hermeneutics of the Zulu parade, whose African-American members wear whiteface under blackface, a send-up of minstrelsy that consternates still today. I told them about the hot-sauce heiress, who’d passed out, drunk, on her way to the throne. I made fun of Rex, the “King of Carnival,” who proclaimed his throwing of lead-tainted plastic pearls to be pro bono publico. It was cringeworthy, sure. But I figured it was my civic duty to be cringeworthy too. It was early January, one ball down, two balls to go (some girls do as many as six during the weeks of Carnival between Epiphany and Mardi Gras Day), when Jonas called me on the common-room phone. Jonas, a friend of a friend, had New Orleans roots; he’d agreed to escort me to one of the balls over spring break. “My dad says to tell you that I’m Jewish,” he said. “Yes, Jonas. So?” Then I figured out what he meant. As I scrambled to assure him it was OK, it dawned on me just how OK it wasn’t. At these particular balls, anti-Semitism was out of vogue, but racism was still in. Carnival was de jure desegregated with the Mardi Gras Ordinance of 1991, which stripped parading privileges from krewes that refused to open their membership across race and gender lines. Dorothy May Taylor, a city-council member-at-large, argued that New Orleans had an interest in the makeup of these private clubs — they were powerful business engines, generators of jobs and opportunities unavailable to those excluded from membership. The “Old Line” Krewes — Comus, Momus, Proteus, and Rex — were indeed made up of the city’s business elite. The Old Line excluded plenty. The Old Line would not change. I have woozy memories of the Carnival season that followed, the last before the ordinance went into effect: eating cold hot dogs at the Boston Club while watching the last march of Momus’s stilt-walkers; pumping the keg for people who showed up to parade parties in T-shirts portraying Taylor as “The Grinch Who Stole Mardi Gras”; the low tones of my parents’ friend in Comus, the Oldest of the Old Line, as he discussed the doom of Carnival. Comus, Lord of Misrule, would never parade again. Instead, to this day, his minions spend Mardi Gras Day on foot in the French Quarter, clanging cowbells, a tarnished remnant. We were still invited to the Comus balls, even after they stopped parading. I should have known better than to go. Should have known better than to giggle when one of the women there, brittle in her mothballed dress, berated me for attending underaged. I should have recognized her — gatekeeper to the secret inner sanctum of the “elite” — should have stuck out my tongue. Should have backed away to the outside, slammed that gate. But instead I went back at sixteen in pearls, then eighteen, in my lilac dress. At twenty, it was me out there under the spotlights, wearing white as if for innocence, wearing plumes. *** My father wants me to tell you about the ice. How, during the brief period the New Orleans Brass played ice hockey in the Municipal Auditorium, the dance floor was laid over the team’s rink. How a fog of frost hung low in the air and I shivered in my gown. How, after curtsying to the king and queen, I walked backward in heels (one must never turn one’s back on royalty) to my place on the dais. How, as I stood there, my feet went slowly numb from the cold. It turns out I was wrong about Bakhtin. Carnival in New Orleans is not a time of anarchic equality; no oppressive hierarchies get turned inside out. No, with each handshake, each time I was congratulated for being white, and rich, and coddled, each time I was presented like a gift to “society,” I learned that Carnival was where those structures were reinforced. And we girls up there in our white dresses made a wall. I couldn’t articulate all that then. I was twenty and well-conditioned — I’d not yet learned to unmask ugliness when it bowed to me in disguise. Instead, my body rang with unspoken rage, my mind vacillating between depression and revolt. I had been zipped, only half-willing, into that white dress, and I wanted to take it off. So I took it off, over and over again. Left it strewn across my parents’ stairs and at the foot of my dorm bed after a party (titled “Debutantes and Bondage” — I kept the handcuffs on all night). I took it off and streaked the quad, took it off and posed nude for photographs, took it off and stood around at naked parties with my friends. I took it off, giving my body away in huge handfuls, just to prove it was my own. *** Since Katrina, the Municipal Auditorium has fallen into ruin, a symbol, for some, of the city’s mismanagement — there’s not enough money, not enough energy, not enough time. For others, it stands in for other structures we wish would fall. Each year, the parades still roll, and new krewes — fresher, integrated, sometimes funny — are slowly eclipsing the Old Line. The balls are thrown now at the downtown hotels, the trumpet’s fanfare absorbed by acoustic tile. Now, at midnight, via the long escalators at the Sheraton, Comus descends in rhinestones from his throne. When my grandmother died last year, her cedar locker disgorged its contents, and the dress returned. It hangs from a hook in my grown-up closet, its satin breast stuffed with yellowed paper to approximate a woman. “I want a party, Mama,” my five-year-old says, sticking her head up the dress’s skirt. “I want to curtsy to the queen.” “We’ll see,” I smirk. “I do!” she insists, wrapped in white satin. “You might not later, love,” I say. As I pull her into my lap and begin the explanation from the beginning, the dress falls finally to the floor. C. Morgan Babst is a New Orleans native and the author of The Floating World, a novel about Hurricane Katrina, published in October by Algonquin Books. | | | | |  Illustration by Kati Szilágyi | “Is Alex home or traveling? Kids in bed?” Vera texted me. No, I’m not having an affair. Vera is a friend, recently displaced to the West Coast, and she was texting me to see if I’m free to talk on the phone. I am a phone person: part legacy from a family of talkers, part habit honed in the pre-smartphone years of my adolescence and early adulthood. When I was younger, the phone was my lifeline to family and friends and romantic partners; I tied up the line because my friends and I did not have the freedom to leave the house and see one another. Now in our 30s and 40s, many of us live time zones apart, and even if we are in the same city, having our own kids keeps us from being able to meet up in person. We call because we want a break: from creative projects, from talking to children, or being around children. We call because we feel alone but don’t want to be left alone. We call because we need space for joy and connection; talking makes that space. For me, talking on the phone is a full-body activity that prevents me from doing more than the most basic of multitasking. I’ll pace my apartment or pet the dog or, if I am feeling ambitious, wash the dishes or straighten up. Anything that requires thinking doesn’t last. Too often these days, my phone connects me to what can feel too difficult to bear — news of the latest horror from our inhumane administration, a fresh revelation of a sexual assault, a preventable shooting: my screen is a cascade of events I can’t fix. But when I talk on the phone, it feels more like a blissful locking of a door behind me, shutting out the world the way I used to close the literal door to my adolescent bedroom for privacy. My friend Brian in San Francisco and I talk about our art. I talk to Paige, who I’ve known since I was sixteen, twice a year, on our birthdays. KC is in Queens; some nights we drink wine together, but she’s a single parent, so we do it in our respective living rooms, a few miles apart. Brit is in Texas. Mika is in Michigan. Neela is in Los Angeles, the city that won’t stop stealing my friends. Calls are as much about the big stuff in our lives — our relationships and accomplishments — as they are about nothing at all. I talk to Vera most frequently. We begin by spilling our rage over the news, over how fucked the world is. We move on to projects we’re working on, to what we’re reading or watching. We talk about the deep mysteries of the sleeves on women’s clothing these days, about that one horrible job we used to have, or how lucky we are to not have met at eighteen, when our politics and life experiences meant we would have never been friends. Sometimes we talk for only ten minutes but often well over an hour. When it’s time for school pickup or feeding a child, we say “Love you” and “More soon.” When I hang up with Vera, it feels like taking a break from an ongoing conversation; her voice reminds me that not everything around me is falling down, and the stuff that is, I can always yell about to her. “I’m here if you want to talk,” I know one of us will type at the next sign of distress. These days, it’s easy to avoid phone calls; there are so many other ways — more efficient, less awkward ways — to communicate. But there’s something we miss in our habit of predigesting our feelings before we hit send on a text or post on social media. There’s something we can give each other, and ourselves, in speaking with no filters or in carefully considered takes. There’s room, suddenly, for the stories we don’t feel like typing out or might not even know we want to share. Sometimes on the phone, I say something I didn’t know was coming: a story from my past that I’ve buried, or haven’t ever shared with my friend, or that I’ve just realized all these years later is part of what makes me who I am. Sometimes I’ll let slip some worry or fear that feels foolish, but in sharing it, I’ve lessened its hold on me — I’ve admitted to something I was trying to pretend wasn’t eating me up, handed it over to someone I trust. When a woman is in labor, midwives will often ask to speak to her on the phone; they listen to how the pain changes her voice to help gauge how far along she might be. You can’t hide on the phone — and there are definitely times when I haven’t picked it up (my best excuse was when I was giving birth to my second child in the backseat of our Subaru and couldn’t even pick up the call from my midwife — seriously), or when I’ve picked it up and failed to mask my unrulier feelings: annoyance at a family member, lack of enthusiasm for someone else’s news, unsure of what to say when you can hear someone is hurting or angry with you. Phone calls have taught me about the power of this intimacy, how to be present in an emotional space with another person. It’s good to hear joy and anger and sadness, to receive it in your body, and to be heard in all of these states, too. This is what we mean when we say “It’s so good to hear your voice.” Even the most mundane conversations can feel cathartic because I’ve shared and been shared with. It’s an hour of being tethered to someone I love. And even though there’s no record of the call when we hang up, it leaves me with a high I can ride on for hours — the sensation of actually connecting to someone else, the way telephone lines used to work and still, in other ways, do. Danielle Lazarin is the author of Back Talk: Stories. | | | | | | | | |
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