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| |  Illustration by Sarah Robbins | In October 2015, I was performing the part of Golde in Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway just as the Syrian-refugee crisis hit its American-media peak. For those of you who don’t know, Fiddler on the Roof is, at its core, about refugees: It’s the story of a Jewish man and his five daughters in 1905 Russia who are about to be thrown out of their village by the Tsar’s edict because of their religion. I felt the resonance of the story we were performing as I looked at the haunting images of dead children and desperate families fleeing their homes. I gave myself the task of putting on a weekly bake sale backstage to raise money. By the end of my year in Fiddler, we’d collected about $30,000. I didn’t want to cluelessly give that money to organizations that weren’t assisting refugees directly. I found an article called “How to Help Syrian Refugees? These Groups You May Not Know Are Doing Important Work.” This inspired piece made me want to get involved on a more intimate level. It described civilians who responded to the crisis with a variety of backgrounds not immediately associated with aid work. I was also struck by a story about a Hamlet production that toured nearly every country in the world and performed at five refugee camps. By the time I had finished playing Golde, I decided to try to mount a production of a classic play at a refugee camp. The idea that people in difficult circumstances might benefit from performing is not an original notion. A cousin who survived the Holocaust recalled a production he did of The Gold Diggers while awaiting entry to Israel at a displaced-persons camp in Munich. I shared the seeds of my project with an actor friend who is also a brilliant activist. He connected me with I AM YOU, and that’s when I started to plan. I AM YOU is an NGO working to make the lives of displaced people at Syrian-refugee camps better through education. My very first professional job in the theater was with the company Theatre for a New Audience, doing Shakespeare workshops and abridged productions for New York City schoolkids and their teachers. I pitched the basic idea of performing at a camp to Katina Saoulli, executive director of I AM YOU, and we were on our way … to Greece. Katina loved the idea but said it could not happen unless we took a good look at the conditions in Ritsona, a refugee camp near Athens, first. Shakespeare is tough. Even the most erudite actors can have a hard time deciphering the meaning of every line. That said, the stories he told were beyond. Take, for example, The Tempest: There’s a beloved guy who happens to rank quite high in the government. He spoke out against corruption and was thrown into the sea with his three-year-old daughter to die in a “rotten carcass of a butt [a boat].” Instead, he landed on an island and remained there for twelve years, tamed the wilds of this island with a bit of magic and a lot of compassion, and finally found redemption in the form of family. We told this story to some boys at the Ritsona camp when we were there in December. Hamza, one of the boys, had offered to translate from English to Arabic. He’d come to Ritsona two years earlier. His father, a blacklisted scholar of some note, had fled to Germany. Hamza and his brother Mustafa waited for reunification with their dad. They wrote passionate articles to the world on their arrival and read to us from their journal: “We are people. Not animals. How can you let us live in the woods … exposed to animals? If you understand what being humane is, being human is … a border should be opened. I challenge the president of any country to stay in a tent for a night if they can. I thank everyone who comes to help us and respects humanity.” We continued our halting attempts to tell Shakespeare’s tale, written in 1610 and translated into Arabic much later. The boys sitting next to me were nearly sixteen. Hamza remained optimistic that he’d be reunited with his father in Germany so he could resume his studies after years without school. Another boy, Ibrahim, told me he wanted to be a pediatrician. When the retelling finally came to an end, Ibrahim stared ahead and said, “That’s the most beautiful story I’ve ever heard.” *** You can tell the need for art, for beauty, is central to all communities, no matter how makeshift, just by looking around the camp: any space that might welcome a drawing has been covered in many. The crumbling walls are now all painted with messages of possibility: “Why not Hope??” is written above the images of a home, a heart, a flower, and a butterfly. Every structure not covered in tarps and towels for insulation is painted in vibrant colors and moving slogans. “We have the right to human rights” sits above an enormous blue dove and sets the tone. When we go back to Ritsona this summer to put on The Tempest, we’ll return with a team of twelve. Four of the actors in our corps speak Arabic. One of them, a Syrian named Adham Murched, trained at the National Theatre School and just recently came to the United States. He had quite a career before the war and will be known to many of the residents from his TV work. This is my first venture into drama as therapy, drama as healing, but the theater community is small, and finding our team was surprisingly easy — within a week of reaching out to a few performers of Middle Eastern descent, we were cast. The mask master, clown, choreographer, and composer are all magnetic artists whom I’ve worked with or swooned over, and they’ve all collaborated with nonprofessional performers under less-than-ideal circumstances. Our monthlong stay will draw all residents into the production. We will engage men, women, and kids as actors, designers, musicians, tailors, and technicians. Art, music, and dance will frame our production. The performance will be a melding of two sensibilities, but the heart of the production will be theirs. There is a small, white IsoBox you first see as you enter the children’s safe space. It could be a home, or a playroom for dozens. A young man, Malek, wrote on it in Arabic and English: “The world is too big, bigger than the size of your sorrows, you can overcome your problems. Just close the doors that are bothering you, and open new doors, and start a new life, and make sure that no one will hinder the way of your dreams.” I don’t know what magic we will perform or what dreams will be born. But think back to those days in high school when doing a play meant you got to be someone else. You got to make a crappy auditorium look like a palace or a bordello or a desert island in the middle of a storm. And despite your adolescent malaise, a sense of community set in, and suddenly you were special. I do believe that just the task of putting on this play will arouse those feelings we all had when even for a moment, we felt unique, and the words we spoke onstage seemed like the “most beautiful story I’ve ever heard.” Jessica Hecht, founder of the Campfire Project, is an actress and teacher in New York. Donate to the organization’s Kickstarter campaign here. | | | | |  Illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban | Don't miss all of Daughter, First: In part 1, we meet the Governor's daughter, Katie Mahoney Brown; in part 2, the attorney who's going to take down the administration digs into the family secrets; in part 3, the matriarch, Rosemary Mahoney, uncovers her husband's dirty business deals; in part 4, Katie's marriage begins to unravel; and in part 5, the federal prosecutor has second thoughts as she closes in on the Mahoney family. Big Jim was enjoying his dinner alone at his desk when Tom stepped in the door. “You look like hell,” Jim said. Tom sad-sacked across the room, his pale-pink button-down damp at the armpits, his tie yanked loose around his neck. “Do you know how many hours they kept me in that interrogation room?” “You must be starving.” Jim held up what was left of his KFC drumstick. “Chicken?” Tom shook his head, dropped into the chair across from Jim’s desk. “It’s real this time,” he said. “They have us.” No, Jim thought. They have you. “I said as little as I could,” Tom said. “I tried to follow the script, but …” “I know everything. I already talked to the lawyer.” Jim stared into Tom’s too-symmetrical, freakishly boyish face, with those damn freckles across his pointy little nose. “There will be no immunity deal from this prosecutor,” Jim said, louder than he’d intended. He took a breath and forced himself to continue in a calmer voice. “No immunity deal. We knew that, we discussed that. I told you what my guys on the inside said about this Dia Morgan, whoever she is. For whatever reason, this is personal for her for. She’s out for blood, yours as much as mine.” Jim was pleased with himself for remaining cool and composed when he’d much rather wrap his thick hands around the boy’s skinny neck and squeeze him back into submission. Tom had not, in fact, said as little as he could. He had not followed the script. He’d come undone in that interrogation room and tried to throw Jim under the bus. If not for the fact that Tom’s lawyer was on Jim’s payroll, the Feds might’ve been in Jim’s office right now. Tom sat rigid in his chair, even in his current state of exhaustion. How did the boy manage to be so stiff and yet so floppy all at once? He was so clearly inferior to Jim’s Katie. Though, in fairness, Katie did set a high bar. Unlike snot-nosed Jim Junior, or knuckleheaded Patrick, or inconsequential Mary. Rose was a loyal wife — Jim loved her for that, and she’d been a real looker in her younger days. But, let’s be honest, she was never the brightest bulb on the porch. Katie alone was perfect. Jim could be hard on Katie, tough on her, and it only made her stronger. He had tested her countless times, since she was just a little doll in pigtails, and she’d always come through for him. The older Katie got, the more perceptive she became, until she could intuit exactly what Jim needed from her in any situation. It had been this way between Jim and his own father, too, but Katie succeeded at making Jim proud in ways Jim never could with George. Hell, Katie may have actually been smarter than Jim. But even when they disagreed, Katie wouldn’t dare contradict him in public. She understood family and fealty like no one else. “I did my best,” Tom said. “But this prosecutor already knows everything. What we did with Katie’s store, how we laundered the money. She’s not going to stop until someone, maybe both of us, are behind bars.” Jim pushed his tray of chicken bones and cold potato wedges aside. He opened his desk drawer and pulled out the deck of cards he kept for instances such as this. “Let’s play.” “Not now, Jim. We have to talk about what’s going to happen next.” “Tommy boy, you need to relax.” Jim divided up the deck, urged a neat stack toward Tom. This was Jim’s game. He’d first learned it from some old Wop at a Dorchester bar called the Golden Horseshoe while campaigning for mayor in the ’80s. The game had an Italian name Jim couldn’t remember and a complicated scoring method that took all the real fun out of it — so over time, Jim had simplified it, dismissed the rules he didn’t like, and kept the part he loved best, which was that the game was won by throwing an ace at the perfect time. When Jim had shown this better, more populist version of the card game, which he took to calling Card-on, to his father, wouldn’t you know old George, cunning bastard that he was, quickly figured out — just as Jim had when playing the Italian — the obvious way to cheat. By the second round, Jim noticed George palming his Aces, using magic-trick-style sleight of hand to keep and hold his winning cards till just the right moment. As every good Irish son worth his salt would do, Jim let his father cheat and win every time till the day he died. “Go on, now,” Jim said. Tom exhaled a defeated breath, ran his bony fingers through his wispy hair, and then reluctantly threw down a card. *** The first time Katie brought Tom home to meet Jim, Jim had made the boy play — somewhat against his will, like now. Katie kept an encouraging hand on Tom’s back while Jim explained the simple rules. “I throw a card, you throw a card. We’re flipping for matches. If you throw a match, you take those two cards. No match, the cards accumulate in a pile. Only an ace takes the whole pile.” A delicate flush had colored Tom’s anemic baby face. He seemed confused, like someone had told a joke he wasn’t sure was a joke. “So it’s just a game of chance,” he said. “No,” Katie corrected him, with her flawless blend of gentility and forcefulness. “It’s a game of skill.” Tom had capitulated that night — they played. But when Jim threw down his game-winning ace, Tom squinted his beady little eyes. The boy was meek, but he wasn’t stupid. He opened his thin-lipped mouth to protest but hadn’t had the chance to squeak out the first sound of accusation before Katie silenced him with one pointed look. Jim’s Katie, his shark. She’d smiled brightly for her father and said to Tom, “Daddy always wins.” Tom had adjusted his expression then, to complement Katie’s angelic obedience. This was the moment Jim knew for sure that Katie had finally chosen the right man. Tom was tamable, trainable. He could be trusted to yield to Katie’s authority. Over the years, Jim was proven correct. Tom stayed in line and propped Katie up as she propped up Jim. This was the dynamic he could always count on — that he was counting on now. But what if he’d underestimated the boy? *** “We really need to talk about the plan,” Tom said now, irately flipping cards onto Jim’s desk. His usual docility had been replaced by a smoldering defiance that was making Jim nervous. “I think we need to reevaluate,” Tom continued. “Get Katie over here and go over all this with her, make sure we can keep her out of it.” “Don’t you worry about Katie,” Jim said. As if Tom knew the first thing about how to protect his daughter. As if she, with her brilliant mind and iron will, needed him to. Of course it would all come down to Katie. Tom must see that. How polite, universally admired, impeccably bred Katie — whose testimony would be verbal gold — would decide everything. “This is no time to fall apart on me, Tommy,” Jim said, keeping his eyes on his cards. “You knew from the beginning that we all had a role to play. You knew what you were signing on for when I made you my top adviser.” “You mean advisers,” Tom said. “Katie and me.” Jim didn’t appreciate the aggression in Tom’s voice just then. He raised his eyes to stare the boy down. “Katie is an informal adviser. You’re the only one with the official title, my friend. Are you forgetting how this all started, with Wychmere? How you suddenly came alive with a million ideas of how to move the money around, how to sidestep every rule and regulation? That was all you. I’d never seen you so lit up.” “I did all of that for you,” Tom shot back. He rose out of his seat and lunged forward. Jim would not flinch. “No.” He shook his head. “You did it because all you could see was green.” “You know what? I’m done with this.” Tom chucked all his cards down onto Jim’s desk. “I’m tired of always letting you win.” Jim leaned back in his big, throne-like chair, procured his ace seemingly from thin air, and flicked it forward into Tom’s flaccid face. Tom remained still, closed his eyes, and reopened them. “I can’t go to prison, Jim. I won’t.” “You’re talking now like an innocent man,” Jim said, crossing his arms over his chest. “And you’re not.” “Neither are you,” Tom said. Jim forbade himself from showing an ounce of fear, even as his heart raced. “Maybe you’re right.” Jim reached for the receiver of his desk phone. “Maybe it is time we brought Katie in here.” Tom fumbled for his cell. They both started dialing. Katie would never side with Tom, would she? If Tom forced her to choose, if he refused to roll over? Jim’s Katie, his shark. Did she have it in her to betray him? No. No way. The Mahoneys were a clan, a dynasty. And Katie was a Mahoney, through and through. She worshipped Jim just as Jim had worshipped his own father, with unshakable devotion and a steely determination to please. Katie only saw the best in Jim, always. “Katie’s my wife.” Tom brought his phone up to his ear. Jim listened for a ring. “She was my daughter first.” Thanks to Instagram user @kellykcarroll for the Golden Horseshoe detail and @kjc_ham for naming the card game. Camille Perri’s new novel, When Katie Met Cassidy, is available for preorder now. | | | | |  Gif by Claire Merchlinsky | I quit my job on a Wednesday afternoon. By the time Wednesday evening rolled around, the first of several anxiety-induced crying jags already out of the way — how could I have quit without another job lined up? Was I sure I hadn’t overreacted? — I was seated directly in front of my tiny television with the pilot episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show blaring at top volume. My future was uncertain, and I didn’t yet have a game plan, but for the next 23 minutes, I would watch Mary Richards arrive in Minneapolis with a similarly precarious situation and somehow make do. After it was over, I would feel calmer, less off-kilter. Of course, that had been the plan all along. When I find myself adrift, unfocused, spiraling, a dose of Mary is the only surefire coping mechanism I’ve got. My mother was a fan of MTM when it first aired, and as a child, I’d watch along with her as she recalled her favorite episodes. At the time, she was new to the United States, living in a cramped Prospect Heights apartment with her parents and five younger siblings. She wanted to live on her own, but a large portion of her paychecks was required to keep the household afloat. Mary Richards represented a kind of independence she hadn’t quite grasped yet. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I returned to the show not long after I moved out of my mother’s house. I rewatched the entire series, drinking in the styling and décor, laughing out loud at the writing, marveling at how modern it still felt. I saw myself in Mary’s plucky determination to do well, in her friend Rhoda’s inability to see herself as more than a perpetual second-stringer. Arguably the most iconic visual takes places within the final moments of the opening theme: Mary, gleefully taking in the sights along Nicollet Mall, grins broadly, twirls around, and tosses her knit beret high above her head, a freeze frame pausing the hat in mid-air before it comes tumbling back down to earth. However, the show is hardly as giddy as the opening might suggest. The sitcom’s original proposal, as written by creators James L. Brooks and Allan Burns, described it as such: “This series will … be comedically populated. But it is clearly about one person living in and coping with the world of the 1970s … tough enough in itself … even tougher when you’re 30, single, and female.” The pilot episode introduces Mary Richards as a jobless apartment seeker, still on the mend from a bad breakup, making a fresh start in Minneapolis and off to a rocky beginning. Phyllis, an old friend, is hoping that Mary will love the apartment upstairs from her — and to move the proceedings along, she has already signed Mary’s name to the lease. Rhoda, the upstairs neighbor, is under the impression that the apartment is hers, and she’s willing to yell, lie, and pick the locks in order to get it. In the same episode, Mary is interrogated and barked at by her new boss at a job where she’s underpaid, ignored, and leered at on her first day. She tries to stand up for herself at one point, telling Rhoda, “If you push me, then I might have to push back — hard.” “Come on,” her soon-to-be best friend replies, laughing in her face. “You can’t carry that off.” “I know,” Mary admits, rolling her eyes and admitting defeat. The producers had to swim upstream in order to get CBS executives to sign off on the show the way they envisioned it. Once they received the go-ahead from the network, they doubled down on their commitment to authenticity by hiring female writers like Treva Silverman to tell women’s stories. The characters they collaborated on emerged fully formed on-screen, three-dimensional and true to life. Mary is a pushover, yes, but she does have her limits. Rhoda is brash and self-deprecating, her insecurities simmering just beneath every dig she makes at her own expense. Phyllis is whip-smart and driven, though marriage and motherhood prove to be limited outlets for her talents. Meanwhile, the show’s episodes placed these characters in situations that tested their mettle without pushing the bounds of believability: getting roped into standing up in a wedding for a woman you hardly know, crossing the picket line when your coworkers were on strike, bringing a recovering gambling addict back from the edge. By the end of the pilot episode, Mary’s ex has turned up on her doorstep, unwilling to discuss their relationship but not exactly opposed to a quick hook-up. Mary realizes that it’s really, truly over between them, and, choking back tears, she reminds herself that it’s for the best: “You know, I’m really lucky? I am so lucky,” she tells her Mr. Grant, her boss, who’s just stopped by the apartment. Mr. Grant assumes that she’s glad to have kicked her boyfriend to the curb. “You feel good now, huh?” “Yeah,” she says, nodding and smiling, before shaking her head emphatically, giving in to the truth. “No, I feel rotten. But lucky!” *** Many episodes end like this, without a happy ending so much as the narrative equivalent of a shrug and sigh. In Mary’s world, much like mine, a bad day quite often turns into a bad week (see: season three, episode 23, “Put On a Happy Face,” which begins with a coffee stain and ends with Mary, sick and rumpled with a sprained foot, the result of a “lousy streak”). Friendships are tested, and sometimes their wear and tear doesn’t dissolve with a well-intentioned apology, as seen when one of Rhoda’s beaus makes a play for Mary in season one. You can attempt something to the best of your ability and fall flat on your face — publicly. You can get jerked around and screwed over by someone, and there will be no comeuppance. Sometimes you feel rotten, even when you know you’re incredibly lucky. As my affinity for Mary grew, I began incorporating as much of it as I could into my own life. I now have a golden R, like Mary’s golden M, in my living room; an “etc.” sign like Rhoda’s hanging in my kitchen. One of my favorite Christmas gifts ever is a customized rubber hand stamp: my name rendered in Peignot, the font that accompanies Mary’s name in the opening credits. I surround myself with The Mary Tyler Moore Show ephemera the way some people rely on healing crystals. The show has a timelessness to it, a buoyancy that’s withstood more than two decades of repeated viewings, but I’ve also leaned on it for comfort when I need it most — depressive episodes when I’m unable to get out of bed, paralyzing spells of anxiety. I keep it in heavy rotation as a constant and much-needed reminder that, in spite of everything, I might just make it after all. Roxanne Fequiere is a New York–based writer and editor who’s 60 percent Rhoda Morgenstern, 40 percent Mary Richards. | | | | |  Illustration by Marne Grahlman | Jennie Stevenson always carried a pistol. “She kept it in her bosom, all the time,” cousins and uncles would say to me at my in-laws’ family reunions. Jennie was my husband’s great-aunt. “She and her husband ran a hush-hush, and she might be dancing, but she’d have that pistol in her dress. Just in case.” A hush-hush was a speakeasy, and Jennie and her husband ran one in their home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, during the 1920s. Jennie was worried about robbery or fighting in their place. People knew Jennie, knew she’d protect herself and her house if she had to, but I never heard of her using the pistol there. She had used a gun before when she was younger, a teenage girl who’d fled a violent, abusive stepfather in Texas. The granddaughter of an enslaved woman, she had made her way to Oklahoma, and the legend was that she worked in a “place outside town, you know. One of those places.” There was a house in front, run by a white woman, for white customers; Jennie worked in the smaller house in back, for black customers. But one night, a white man forced his way into the back house and raped Jennie. She shot him in the head. She’d had a little pistol in her dress pocket. During that same time, on the desolate prairies of eastern Colorado, my grandmother went to a dance at a one-room schoolhouse with three of her four sisters. She was nineteen, very small, with dark hair and big, dark eyes. The walls were lined with young men, but not a single one asked her to dance. She was forlorn until a young rancher named Robert Straight finally approached her. He was her sole suitor, and they were married shortly after. My great-uncles and cousins, sitting in a small clapboard house in Nunn, Colorado, told me this story two years ago, glancing at me with some pity because I never knew my grandmother, who died long before I was born, whose life was short because of violence and poverty and hypertension. The story goes that when Robert Straight walked into that dance, he decided then and there that he wanted to marry Ruby. He’d gone around the schoolhouse and displayed his gun to every single man, telling them that if anyone asked her to dance, he’d shoot. I keep thinking about those single weapons, hidden inside clothes, and how their presence changed two women’s lives. Jennie was a survivor of sexual violence — and she survived because she owned a gun. Ruby never knew about that hidden weapon and married a violent, abusive man who constantly threatened others with guns. She fled him again and again but always went back. She never shot a gun in her life. I’ve raised three daughters whose heritage includes both Jennie and Ruby. I’ve taught them the history and weight of guns, never thinking that the world would be as random and lawless as the past. I’ve taught them to be wary and protective of themselves, their sisters, and their friends, and to take a long time to trust a man. Even though their father took each daughter to the shooting range once and had them fire his shotgun at male targets, now they would never own guns or associate with people who do. Their lives are very different from ours: my husband and I met in junior high and grew up in a rough place during a rough time. But these rough times are far worse: we confess our fears to each other, as Americans living with the constant, soul-crushing worry of strangers with automatic weapons, or a disgruntled spouse, or student, or coworker, or neighbor with a rifle or handgun. *** I recall so many times after national reports of rising crime such as carjackings and random murders seeing news accounts of an uptick of women at gun ranges, women buying handguns to conceal in their purses, women being encouraged to “protect themselves from predators.” I remember arguing with my husband about his guns: he, the son of a man who survived by hunting rabbits and squirrels with a rifle. I understood his desire for protection but hated that he owned five guns, that everyone we knew was armed, that the men talked constantly about their strategies for intruders. I didn’t like my girls hearing that. When we divorced in 1997 and I found 48 shotgun shells tucked along the wooden moldings high on the plaster walls of our house, I realized how frightened he was, as a husband and father, that a stranger would invade our small home, would attack his family of four women. We lived in the southern-California city where both of us were born and raised; violence was common when I was a teenager and young adult — but not gun violence. I remember walking downtown before or after my movie-theater job and men following me, harassing me, trying to get me into cars. Nobody ever pulled a gun on me. But during the recession of the 1980s and then the crack years of the 1990s, everything changed. Suddenly cheap little handguns were everywhere: people were robbed for jewelry, kids were shot while standing on corners. One day, at the YWCA day care, my daughters’ teacher found a handful of bullets on the playground and gave them to me to give to my husband. I have them still in my desk with other bullets we found in our yard and on the street nearby. Back then, my husband worked in a juvenile correctional facility where boys of thirteen and fourteen told him that if he treated them badly, they would “pop a cap in his membrane” when they were released. I know that this job, which he had for twenty years, and the drug culture around us were the origins of his fears. One night we went to the apartment of my childhood friend and her boyfriend to see their new baby. While we sat on the couch talking, a knock came at the door. Her boyfriend pulled a semi-automatic rifle from under the couch, waiting for the visitor to identify himself. We hadn’t known our friend was selling drugs — not just weed but crack, which meant dangerous customers. Back in our car, shaken, we looked at each other and knew we could never go back. We wouldn’t live like that, we told each other. But those fears are different from our fears now. Now we are afraid of bullets flying from the ether. We watch security footage of the man who shot hundreds of people in Las Vegas. We see him laughing and eating and carrying the bags containing enough weaponry to attack a military battalion. It gives us nightmares. He killed the daughters of people I know. They died because a man went to war against strangers. *** This week, I keep thinking of two fictional women with guns and of why they fired them, how those images never left me. In the novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, one of the first books I ever read as a child, Francie is a young girl attacked by a man on the stairwell in her apartment building; he pries her fingers from the spindles one by one, and then Francie’s mother, who had been scrubbing the stairs, shoots him through her apron. She fires into his genitals. In Gone With the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara is menaced by a military deserter who calls her a spitfire and leers while climbing the stairs toward her; she shoots him in the face. As women now — daughters and mothers and teachers and aunts and neighbors and nurses — we live in a nation where we are afraid of not only the stranger we were taught to watch for but also the air around us, at work and school and the mall and the auditorium. Being told to arm ourselves — whether we are men or women — will not assuage this fear. How can we make sense of the air, when it feels as if phantom bullets are tracing the space around us, when the sniper is risen from everyday people. Here in the room where I write, I have two black-and-white photographs from the 1920s. The only portraits made of two brave women: my grandmother Ruby, with her soft face and shy smile, weeks before she met my grandfather, and my father-in-law’s aunt Jennie, in a fur collar and imperious gaze, just after she became prosperous. I am small like Ruby but always prided myself that I would never be caught in a web of violence; I felt nothing but admiration for Jennie, who, after she made it to Los Angeles, helped raise dozens of children belonging to her relatives and friends, children who weren’t her own. Jennie was never bowed by fear. If we told them what we are afraid of, they would be incredulous. Susan Straight’s new short story “The Princess of Valencia,” about a mother and daughter and a nation changed by a mass shooting, has just been published by Amazon Original Stories. Her memoir, In the Country of Women, will be published in 2019 by Catapult. | | | | | | | | |
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