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It was my good fortune to have a father who was blustery and kind and adored his daughters, and whose worst faults—anger and stubbornness—were sometimes put to use in protection of us.
My dad was a master sergeant in the Second World War, stationed for three years near Blackpool, England, where he was in charge of operations on a supply base for the European theater. On payday, the men in his company were granted leave to go roam the pubs in town. M.Sgt. Caldwell, who loved a drink as much as anyone, usually stayed behind on base. After his men came back to meet the midnight curfew, many of them having stayed too long at the bar, he’d ask if anyone wanted to play cards. He was a farm boy from Texas, and he had a sweet, low way of talking that throughout his life made him seem trustworthy, which in turn made him a dangerously good poker player.
He came home from England in 1946 with a money belt hidden on his waist. That was how he put a down payment on the little house in Amarillo, Texas, that he and my mom bought after the war: from the winnings he made on Friday nights. He taught me to play cards when I was four.
An element of that family legend became more resonant to me after my father’s death. The ninth of ten children, he was raised on a struggling farm in east Texas, and his family worked so hard to put food on the table that he remembered his finest Christmas as the one when every child got an orange. His eyes shone when he told us about that orange. And though I spent most of my childhood thinking he was a fearless and invincible man, I know now that the one thing that terrified him was poverty.
The poker story changes when you realize that the master sergeant was a barefoot boy from Sulphur Springs, trying to wile his way out of the lion’s mouth. He picked cotton in the fields when he was little, and he told me that two of his older sisters, one on either side of him in the Texas sun, had taught him how to count to ten by using his knuckles. Then he got a little older, and his five brothers showed him how to use his knuckles in another way. Even after he put himself through college by working three jobs, he declared those two early lessons the most valuable of his life.
We fought for decades about politics, and often it was senseless and ugly, and we could bring out the worst in each other. I was prideful and high-minded; he called me stupid and said I knew nothing about the world. He was an old-fashioned conservative Democrat who went over to Nixon and Reagan; I went home from Austin wearing jeans with a Vietcong flag embroidered on my ass, thrilled at my ability to infuriate him. What fools we were. He always contended that half of life was knowing how to bluff, and fifteen years after his death, I no longer think that’s just funny but also, regrettably, true.
My sister texted me during the weeks before the election and wrote, How would Dad have voted? A real dilemma.
I wrote back, fast: No dilemma. Hillary.
Her answer, surprised and skeptical and no doubt trying to avoid a tirade from me: Why? What would he have thought of Trump? One word.
Me: Two words. Six bankruptcies.
Then again: Two more: Sexual bully.
Her response. Really laughing out loud. In fact guffawing. We may have been remembering the same thing.
* * *
—
The hundred acres in east Texas where my dad had grown up was swamp-and-mosquito land, planted with cotton and watermelon. His parents, Pink and Della, had both died before I was born, and the house they built, with ten-foot ceilings and no indoor plumbing, was where we all gathered for family reunions. By the 1950s, when I was born, it was mostly a place of memories and card games and tall tales. There was the long table where Della had fed her ten kids, where my dad remembered eating as fast as he could before she ran out of second helpings. There was the bedroom he’d shared with his brothers, the setting for one of his scariest stories: When he was eight, he told us, he got up in the night to go use the outhouse, and noted, half-asleep, that his pillow seemed lumpy. He came back to bed and turned the pillow over, and in the moonlit dark saw a poisonous copperhead, coiled where his head had been. He hated snakes from then on, and I, his prankster daughter, loved to sneak up behind him with colored photos from the reptile section of the encyclopedia. He always bellowed in mock terror, or so I assumed. It was unthinkable to me that he might actually be afraid of a little snake.
“The farm,” we called it, even though my maternal grandparents also lived on a farm closer to us and visited more often. But Della and Pink’s place would forever be the farm, singular fount of my father’s stories, and stays so in my mind’s eye. Of all the aunts and uncles and cousins, our family had to drive the farthest: clear across Texas, from Amarillo to Sulphur Springs, which took us about ten hours. There was always a crush of cousins, with my sister and me—she was two years older—on the quiet fringe of the crowd. We were both readers, for which we were teased, and though she was a tomboy, she usually held back long enough to keep an eye on me.
The latch on the outhouse door had been broken for as long as I knew. I can still smell the earthen lime we used as a scoop, see the shadowy sunlight between the slats. The outhouse may have been an icon of rural poverty, but it was not a scary place. Kids are practical and rarely squeamish. When we were playing tag or war in the field beyond the house, the shed offered quick, efficient relief.
But as with that snake in my dad’s sleeping quarters, the outhouse had an unwelcome visitor. Lance was a few years older than us, and the leader of the boy cousins. Most of us tried to avoid him or followed meekly in his path; those were the obvious options. His torments were mercurial—like most bullies, he bored easily—and one summer when he was twelve or thirteen he turned his sights on the girls.
We usually guarded each other at the outhouse because of the broken latch. Lance’s strategy was to lie in wait until one of us had to go, then shove the spotter out of the way and fling open the outhouse door. Most outhouses are simple sheds surrounding a wooden platform with a hole built over a deep trench. Whoever is inside is fully exposed if the door is open.
My sister was older and bigger and she stood up to Lance, and he never got past her to humiliate me. But I remember a year when the girls spent their days in fear of Lance’s attention, being too afraid to pee or waiting for the brief window when he wasn’t watching.
I don’t remember who told. Probably one of the younger cousins, for whom silence was not yet a code of honor. And I never knew which adult they approached, only that my dad was the one who would intervene. He waited until the next day when all the kids were playing in the field, and he strolled over to Lance with a smile on his face. Then he picked him up in an overhead hold and held him there, the way a rancher might hold a thrashing calf. My dad had been a middleweight wrestler in college, and the move was probably easy for him. He talked to his dangling nephew in a whisper-quiet voice, and then he put him down, almost gently. Lance was very still. None of us kids could hear what was said. But Lance never bothered us again.
All the uncles took Lance on a snipe hunt that night—a classic prank in east Texas that sent a boy into the woods for a few hours in search of an imagined prey. But I suspect the die was already cast by my father’s swift maneuver in the field. The bully had been out-bullied by someone twice his size and age, in the name of protecting his daughters.
I idealized my father, both before and since his death, and that tough, low voice that terrorized Lance that day was one I knew well. But I was never scared of him, because I was part of the castle that the dragon was defending. Good news for me, less so for cousin Lance.
More than half a century later, I think my father’s selective force was more an asset to me than a burden. With his sometimes infuriating Texas swagger, he provided a world of jokes and monsters—outhouses and snakes and blackguard cousins—and then proved it was manageable by swooping in at the right moment. His confidence and his love took; they made me brave, later on, when I needed to be. Invaluable lessons for a girl in the Texas
Panhandle on the cusp of the 1960s: that somebody had my back, and that I was somebody worth saving.
TYLER’S T-SHIRT LEGEND SAYS GIRL power, with several descriptors on its front: SMART, ARTIST, STRONG. I try to turn the T-shirt into a reading lesson but she bores quickly: She’s already memorized all the words, and seems to assume she is or will be all those things. Instead she wants to run hurdles in the backyard, and has the idea of building an agility course for Tula. Soon I am setting up brooms and rakes slung across lawn chairs, low jumps that become increasingly challenging. Then I am holding my breath while the girl and the dog, my precious charges, make their way through a maze of obstacles without a hitch. And then I am hollering encouragement, timing Tyler’s laps on my phone’s stopwatch. A small Usain Bolt is flying through and over our makeshift track. “How fast?” she calls after the last jump, after I have yelled “Go go go you’ve got it!” Finally we all collapse on the cool grass. Tyler is pleased and spent; Tula is panting; I’m hoarse from cheering, a cross between a soccer mom and Bill Belichick. Now I understand how parents find themselves in bouncy castles.
“You are raising me really badly,” I say later. We are dipping strawberries in the sugar bowl, something she convinced me to try after I’d admonished her for doing it. The rules over here are pretty lax. But when Tyler starts to fantasize about what an actual sleepover would be like, I up the ante. Military drills, I say. A bugle call, then jumping jacks, at five A.M. Cold cereal for breakfast, but only after you clean the basement. “And then what?” she cries. She adores this story. Every story we make up delights us both.
3
Weeks before the 2016 election, I was in the South End in Boston, having dinner with a friend, when the audio-video broke of Trump bragging about his sexual prowess to Billy Bush. Sick of the ever-present news cycle, I had gone off the grid for a few hours, and when I hit my phone at ten P.M., I was deluged with texts: “Did you see?” “It’s all over.” The next several days were an information blitz: With four weeks to go before the election, a dozen women came forward and accused the Republican nominee of sexual misconduct.
Social media maven Kelly Oxford posted something on Twitter that prompted an explosion in return. “Women: tweet me your first assaults,” she wrote on the night of the Bush videotape release. “I’ll go first: Old man on city bus grabs my ‘pussy’ and smiles at me, I’m 12.”
She later told an interviewer she expected only a handful of responses. By the end of the day after her posting, she had more than a million.
For every woman I knew, the story about the tape was appalling, Oxford’s responses mind-blowing, but none of it was unfamiliar. A lot of women wrote the tweet equivalent of a shrug: “Sure. Which assault? First or worst?” It became a grim parlor game. I texted a friend that I had counted to fifteen and then paused, having to reconsider my criteria. Do I count the flashers when I’m rowing on the river? I wrote her. In which case it’s way more than fifteen. What about the time the guy tried to grab my breast on a plane but I blocked his arm?
Wow you have way more than me, she wrote back, remembering a clumsy sexual pass by a fellow musician whom she slugged. That’s because you married at twenty-seven, I shot back. Husbands protect you. (Some of them, I should have added.) Chattel. I’m remembering things from way back. Like the time a colleague grabbed me in an empty newsroom and stuck his tongue in my mouth. Tried to, anyway.
Humor saved us, but it also shielded old anger, and mine called up deep, embedded messages: How to block a pass, walk faster on a dark street, cross a parking lot alone, make eye contact, yell, cajole, outtalk, run, carry your keys between your knuckles, get a whistle, learn judo. A survival guide to being female.
In the days between that first bombshell and the election itself, I felt dry-mouthed, pissed off, ready to spring. I swam harder to calm myself down, talked faster because I couldn’t help it. My typical reaction to calamitous events, personal and societal, was not like this. I tend to get calm in a crisis, fall apart later, and have a pretty good ego barrier between global terrors and the monsters in my own closet. When 9/11 happened, I shared a collective shock and heartbreak, but I didn’t think I was next. When the Boston Marathon bombers were being pursued in my neighborhood and we were under orders to shelter in place, I spent a lot of the day reassuring people who called, especially the friend in Texas who asked if I had a gun. Most awful things that happen in the world are not about me. It helps sometimes, not always, to know that.
* * *
—
The swell of memory that spread over those next few weeks couldn’t be captured by front page coverage. You could see it in the eyes of women on the street, hear it in our locker rooms, wake up dreaming about it. Something toxic had been unleashed, some archive of shame and ancient past, and it was hard to look at without the old cultural strictures of defeat and fatalism. The headlock of the status quo. Fear and silence, two powerful, invisible weapons, once kept the darker elements of being female in a cloistered space, unshared and even unremembered. We still roll our eyes or sigh. Why did so many women vote for Trump? I asked an old friend in Texas. How do they rationalize at least ten public accusations of sexual assault?
“They don’t care,” she said, weariness in her voice. “Or they don’t believe them. Or they say it’s always been this way.” The specious reasoning of history, where the past is used to justify an intolerable present.
* * *
—
The spring of 2016 had been spectacular, everything in bloom twice over, and a friend from Texas whom I’d known for thirty-five years came to visit. We walked around the narrow backstreets of Cambridge near the river, where nineteenth-century workers’ cottages were converted into small palaces of order, climbing roses and peonies draped over little hand-painted signs like END THE WAR NOW (which war? who knew?) and ATTENTION: CHIEN BIZARRE. All of it so insufferably, wonderfully Cambridge.
“This is your place now, isn’t it?” Shannon asked me. “The East.” Maybe this meandering neighborhood walk had finally cinched it for her, some thirty years after I’d left Texas. A month later an extreme drought hit New England, and our lush fortress of green now seemed fragile and fleeting. The ennui mirrored the political climate. What had begun as verdant and promising was turning into scorched earth. In September I escaped to the South Shore, where I walked the coastline and watched the dog herd the waves. One evening when the beach was emptying, I laid my clothes on a high rock—I had left my suit in the car, a mile back—and went swimming in my underwear.
Sacred moment, that, when you go in on instinct, close your eyes, and let the waves carry you. Dive into the wave. If you get caught in a riptide don’t fight it. Swim parallel to the shore, and if you get tired, float on your back. Look at the sky and remember that most of life is bigger than you and your fear. Let your body be a vessel of air atop water, your lungs filling with the life force that will be your raft. Don’t thrash, as this will only make you sink, make the water your enemy. The water and the earth are never your enemies; they are not interested in you, so it is your job to work with, not against, the forces of nature. Then you can survive and even feel joy as you disappear into the wave, no rocks in your pockets, not yet; this is not the River Ouse. Your T-shirt is waiting on the rocks, on land, where the real enemies are. But first let the sea remind you about strength and grace.
Because really, it’s always about sheltering in place.
* * *
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I took shelter that autumn in the usual places: the swimming pool, the woods with the dog, an AA meeting I’ve gone to for thirty-plus years. AA: for me, an institute of higher learning for the human heart. This particular meeting hosts a far-flung demographic, like most of AA, except that it’s usually about a nine-to-one attendance ratio of men to women. I feel known there, and respected, and trust most of the guys to have my back in a minute. I had no problem walking into that room the w
eek after the election and saying I felt angry, unnerved. A lot of them did, too.
One night after a meeting I was standing in the parking lot with two good friends, men I’ve cared about for decades, and I was telling them how women were swapping stories about being harassed. About being messed with on the job or the street. I realized my voice had gotten a little higher, my throat tightened. And G., an easy six two and as physically self-possessed as he is funny and soft-spoken, said that everyone, male and female, had to go through certain rites of humiliation; the boot camp of being alive was gender-free and primal. I paused, thinking No no no and also thinking that my argument wasn’t, couldn’t be, neutral. And then my other friend spoke up, W., a runner with the soul of a poet. He said, “No, I don’t ever remember feeling that way. Not this way,” his switch from “that” to “this” bringing me into his circle of memory. “Not this threatened.” And I said that I had been counting incidents—call them macro-aggressions—and had stopped counting around twenty, which on the timeline was only about halfway through my long life.
What a Molotov cocktail that turned out to be. I was half-laughing when I said it, because I presumed we all knew. I thought everybody knew. And yet the shock on their faces—I’d unwittingly brought them in on a conversation that women have been having all their lives. W. said something so unexpected and somber that it brought tears to my eyes, brought me out of my tough-hombre narrator role. “I am so, so sorry that happened to you,” he said. “My God. I had no idea.”
Words had been tumbling out of me, talking to these men I loved, and everything I was saying was true, even if it was couched in my own bravado or humor to make it bearable. I wanted to break the code of silence between men and women. “Why do you think I walk around with a fifty-pound dog?” I said. “It levels the playing field.”
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