All the Silent Spaces

by Christine Ristaino

  During my leave of absence, my colleague Antonia and I met on a Saturday to talk about my future with our project. We walked and the air felt heavy. My steps were heavy.

  “I can tell your heart is no longer in this project,” she said.

  Antonia was referring to an online teaching method she created and we had codified in two textbooks and countless articles. It was a huge endeavor, one I had been working on with Antonia since my son was two months old. While he slept, strapped to my chest, I typed. There was an energy about this work—a feeling we could make changes in our field, become better teachers—but since the attack, I had been a lame duck, no longer willing to put in the long hours necessary to make the project a success, feeling the tug of my children and husband post-trauma, and a need to write.

  “It has been great,” I said. “I have learned so much. But no. You are right. I want to focus on my family.”

  “The door will always be open for you if you decide to come back,” she told me.

  But I knew I would never go back to this project, even though I was closing the door on something I enjoyed and believed in. In front of me for miles, I could see a trajectory of missed opportunities—conferences never attended, people never met, topics not discussed, unrealized articles, conversations with my colleague about teaching perhaps never fulfilled. And then, barely visible, something I had not noticed in a long time, perhaps never noticed before, another path, my own, about to be claimed.

  Retrogression 34:

  September 15, 2007, 7:01 p.m. and 30 seconds.

  I am stunned and in pain. My jaw is aching and I look at the man in front of us for some kind of explanation.

  Chapter 34:

  Nolo Contendere

  “If somebody had come to my house and asked me for an ID, I would have been pissed off,” my father says. “And I would have told him, too.”

  We are having dinner at my parents’ place in Maine and talking about Harvard scholar Henry Gates, a black man who was arrested in Cambridge, Massachusetts by a white officer for trespassing on his own property.

  “His big mistake was following the cop out and arguing with him,” my husband replies.

  “He was pissed,” my father says. “I would have done the same thing.”

  “Look, Bernie. If you and I were having an argument—”

  My father interrupts. “Like we are now.”

  “Yes. If we were arguing like we are now, and I walked away from the argument to collect myself and you followed and kept yelling at me, I would probably have turned around and clocked you one,” Mark says.

  “You would have clocked a seventy-year-old man?” my father asks and smiles.

  “Yeah,” Mark says, laughing.

  “Well, you bastard,” my father says and then all of us are laughing.

  “This officer,” I say, “he teaches a class to police on how to avoid racial profiling, so maybe his actions weren’t racially motivated.”

  “But Gates is one of the most respected men in his field,” my father says. “I’m sure he was really upset. He’s worked hard to get where he is. One of the top guys in his field, and then this man is at his door asking him for an ID.”

  “The man was only doing what he was supposed to do,” my brother Zach says. “Somebody called the police. He was obligated to go there.”

  “Yes, but he could have done it differently. He could have talked it out with this man. He didn’t have to come on so strong.”

  Mark looks at my father. “Gates probably totally pissed off the cop with his attitude. He was screaming and swearing at him. There’s a photo of him taken by a man who happened to be passing by, and you can see Gates in handcuffs and his mouth is all twisted as though he’s still yelling. But when you’re with a cop, you can’t swear and yell at him like that.”

  “Yeah, but that’s no reason to arrest him. What about freedom of speech?” my father says. “And again, he’s worked hard to get to where he is. You and Christine know how tough graduate school and academia are. Doesn’t he have a right to claim his successes? Shouldn’t he be pissed off beyond belief when this guy tries to arrest him?”

  I think about Gates’s position at Harvard. He went all the way in academia, a top researcher in his field. And yet yelling at authority figures is something I’ve never had the courage to do in my life. I’ve always been polite. “But Dad,” I say. “Isn’t there some law that says we can’t yell at the police?”

  “How can there be? Freedom of speech. The police are tougher than that. They can take a bit of yelling.”

  “But that’s not the point, Dad,” I say. “If a student in junior high used the F-word. If he said, ‘Mr. Ristaino, fuck you,’ you would have sent that student to the principal’s office and he would have been suspended.”

  “Yes, so what?”

  “Well,” Mark says, “jail is the police version of suspension.”

  “No, it’s not. They had no right to drag this man to jail because he was swearing at the police. Plus they dropped the charges, which means he wasn’t guilty.”

  “Of course they dropped the charges,” Mark says. “Of course he’s not guilty. It’s his house—he wasn’t breaking in.”

  “But if they were white guys trying to get into Gates’s apartment, I’m sure the neighbor wouldn’t have called the police,” Zach says. “I think that’s why Obama said what he did when he initially heard the story. Because there’s such a history here when it comes to calling the police on black men.”

  “This is the first time Obama has come out strongly on a race issue,” Mark comments. “Every black man has to deal with racial profiling. The problem is though, as soon as Obama put in his first unscripted words on the matter, true as they are, the press went crazy, saying he was taking sides.”

  “Obama’s calling both men over to the White House to have beer and pretzels so they can patch things up,” I say.

  “It’s really just a photo op,” Mark says. “On the other side of the coin, it’s true that white people are afraid of black men who commit crimes. Christine, sorry for going against the premise of your book, but I think all of you here have either been attacked or mugged by black men, and anyone who has been in that type of situation has some hurdles to jump over afterward.”

  Ernie admits, “The guys who held me up were black. Zach, all of those times you were mugged, were you mugged by black men?”

  “Yes,” Zach states.

  “I wasn’t robbed by a black man. He was white,” my brother George says with a Boston accent. “That night I was robbed at the sub shop, the guy didn’t know I was there. There were two girls working, and I was bending over, getting some meat out of the refrigerator. He didn’t see me, just these two women. They’re from Woonsocket so, you know, I thought he was one of their asshole friends.” George laughs. “He’s this white guy, and I don’t realize he has a gun even though he’s already told them. I can see they’re totally freaking out, so I stand, and that guy turns even whiter when he realizes I’m there. And I go, ‘What does he want?’ And then he says, ‘I got a gun, and I want your money.’”

  George pauses, almost for dramatic effect.

  “That’s the second time he’s said it, but the first time I’ve heard him. I can feel the exact spot in my brain where the adrenalin bursts out into my body, the exact spot, and now I’m hearing everything he’s saying. I have about two hundred dollars of tips in my pocket, and my wallet with about fifty bucks in that, but I don’t tell him. I just start emptying out the cash register and then I lift up the drawer and say, ‘Hey, sometimes we have twenties down here.’ We didn’t give him much, and when the cops came, we couldn’t agree on what he looked like—was he white or Mexican.”

  My father laughs.

  George continues, “The two girls were arguing like crazy. But I remember his face, every inch of it. He was white.”

  My father sighs. “In this country we are insane, insane people allowed to carry guns. This week the Senate just bare
ly got this thing taken out of a bill that would have let people take weapons into a state that didn’t allow weapons—as long as they had a permit from the place where they bought it. This would mean that in Massachusetts, which doesn’t allow anyone to have guns, people could bring their guns here if they had a permit from somewhere else. So I learned this bill didn’t pass, but upon looking into it further, I realized fifty senators, that’s half of them, voted in favor of it, which means a number of Democrats were so scared to go against it that they voted for it. Why the hell, in a country that supposedly has smart people in it, would we want guns around?”

  “Well, isn’t it from the founding fathers—the right to protect ourselves?” my mother asks.

  “You’re absolutely right, Sandra. That’s why. But people have really gone crazy with this right. They think they can carry semiautomatic weapons. It’s as though they think it says, ‘you have the right to bear Uzis’ rather than arms. And who really needs a gun anyway?”

  I’m back in Georgia, on my way to court. I have decided to fight a traffic ticket even though it’s obvious I have broken the law, gone nineteen miles over the speed limit. I listen as the judge calls people up one by one. There are two stop sign violations and the judge drops the fine by one hundred dollars each. Then there’s a man who has brought in tons of evidence. First the police officer stands. He tells the judge he has had extensive training in estimating speed limits, that this is the way police used to ticket people in the past based on training, their eyes, a siren, and a citation. He is very good at this and although he did not have a laser to track the exact speed, he believes the offender was going twenty miles over the speed limit.

  The man speaks next. He immediately states that the officer has misrepresented his case. “The officer said I was late for a golf game. I was not. I was on my way to the golf course and I told him to hurry up because I would be late for the tee. As you can see by this piece of paper, I was not late because it began at 7:30 a.m., and it was 7:15 a.m. when I was pulled over.”

  The man goes on to show the officer and the judge a map of the golf course and the street where he was pulled over and questions if the officer could see him driving at all from his vantage point.

  “I’m going to knock off a hundred and fifty dollars,” the judge says. “Because you prepared well, had a lot of information, and brought up some good points. However, please don’t tell an officer to hurry up. He’s just doing his job. It would be like telling me to hurry up. If I want to do a good job, I need a certain amount of time to do so. It’s disrespectful. I didn’t hold that against you when I made this decision. You prepared well. But you need to understand.”

  Then it’s my turn. I explain my situation. “I’m hoping you can be lenient with this ticket,” I say to the judge. “The reason I was going faster than normal was because I was in my husband’s car. My car’s transmission had been failing for months, and it took all kinds of effort to get it going every time I got to a stop sign or turned a corner. My husband had taken my car to be fixed, and he commented later that my car barely drove for him. So I think I was pushing hard on the gas in my husband’s car to make it go. But it went just fine . . . too fine, in fact.”

  “Unfortunately, ma’am, this would have been a good time to have chosen ‘nolo contendere.’ This is an unfortunate case because ‘nolo contendere’ was made for people like you who don’t have a record.”

  “Can I claim it now?” I ask.

  “No, you’ve already contended it with me. I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m going to have to say you’re guilty. Your speed was clocked on the radar.”

  The day of the ticket I had driven thirty-five miles to pick up a used bike for Samuel. It was his birthday, and we couldn’t afford to buy a new one. But the used bike with a price tag of twenty-five dollars would now cost us close to $300 after I paid the ticket.

  “But nobody told me ‘nolo contendere’ was even an option,” I argue.

  “There were plenty of opportunities to talk with the counsel.”

  “Yes, I went to the counsel. She asked me, ‘So you want to say not guilty?’ I said ‘yes’ and she told me to sit down. Although I had heard of ‘nolo contendere’ before, I had been confused about its function. And she didn’t mention this option at all.”

  “Sorry, ma’am. There’s nothing I can do now.”

  I turn to the officer, whose eyes show compassion for my situation. They had been the same way the day he gave me the ticket. “Why don’t you come to the court date,” he had told me. “If you don’t have a record, they’ll be lenient.” Had I understood the system, I could have spared myself the extra points.

  I realize court has gone horribly wrong, but I’m not unhappy that I’m standing in front of the judge, not having done my homework. It has taught me something. I shake the officer’s hand and then I look back at the judge before I pick up my things and leave. The judge had made it clear to the golf course man there is a code of conduct he should have followed when talking with the police. But my minor run-in with the law has made me a bit edgy and unsatisfied, and Gates had a lot more at stake than I did. Perhaps I understand why Gates had to do what he did, why he needed to challenge an authority figure when he thought he was being served an injustice, that his life, his voice, his whole being depended on it; or why my father, years before, had served ten days in jail to change an unfair maternity policy in his school system; and why the golf course man had brought in evidence to refute an officer who had eyeballed his speed. Nothing I say to the judge this day is profound, but at least I speak up, proclaim that I feel my circumstances are unfair in a system where the only people who understand the language are repeat offenders. “I wish somebody had explained things to me a bit better,” I say.

  It has taken me years to get here, years to be able to comment on my own rights to this judge, years to even realize I have rights to begin with. I wonder, had I told my parents immediately about the man, would I have lived my whole life differently?

  Retrogression 35:

  September 15, 2007, 7:01 p.m. and 25 seconds.

  A shooting pain rips through my jaw. My head jerks backward. My neck twists. I curl my fingers tighter around the bar of the cart and grip it with everything I have.

  Chapter 35:

  Gidget’s Got Gadgets

  We have adopted a dog named Gidget. She has a bung ear that flops over while the other one stands straight up. When I saw little Gidget with that flopped over ear, I knew she should be part of our family.

  Whenever there’s a thunderstorm, Gidget begins to shake like she’s having a mini-convulsion. The first time she did it, we brought her to the vet. “Lots of dogs shake when it thunders outside,” the vet told us. “It’s nothing. She’s fine.”

  Every day when we leave the house, Gidget moans and barks and puts on a good show, begging to join us. We always feel terrible. But one day Sam says with a serious face, “It’s a cover.”

  “How do you mean?” I ask.

  “She’s pretending to be upset, but as soon as we leave, all the dogs from the neighborhood come over through these invisible secret agent tubes that are attached to our house. They’re doing it now.”

  “Yeah,” Ada chimes in. “She just doesn’t want us to suspect anything.”

  “Well, how do you know about the tubes?” I ask.

  “I think I saw one coming out of the ceiling she forgot to close,” Sam says.

  “Gidgie uses a special gadget,” Ada says.

  Sam begins to sing, as if on cue, “Gidget’s got gadgets.” Ada and I pick up the tune and join in. We repeat the refrain over and over again, then Sam sings at the top of his lungs, “The pet store is really an agency.” Ada and I repeat, “Gidget’s got gadgets, Gidget’s got gadgets” and then we all sing loudly the pet store line, perfect harmony.

  Retrogression 36:

  September 15, 2007, 7:01 p.m.

  I hold on to the cart tightly, as though it could stabilize me, save me, protect my chi
ldren, change things.

  Chapter 36:

  Preaching to the Choir

  My children join the Sharks swim team near our home. Samuel has just mastered the crawl; Ada is racing freestyle and backstroke and winning second- and third-place ribbons. I’m so proud of them. At the pool there’s a woman named Lily who has tons of energy and unofficially runs the swim meets. Somehow she manages to organize hundreds of parents and children and make everything go smoothly. I am always in awe. She is short and vocal and wears a shark fin on her head. During practice, she often tells late swimmers to arrive on time. “My daughters look up to you,” she says to them. “Don’t let them down.”

  Lily and I talk about her job, her partner and their two daughters, religion, and the Obama administration as our children enjoy themselves in the pool. At a certain point in our conversation, my son runs by. I touch his head. “Hey, my little flower,” I say and smile.

  When Sam was a baby, his eyes were so shiny and animated they seemed to pop out of his face. My husband called him button eyes, but for me his eyes held joy and beauty and I called him flower.

  When Samuel hit preschool, this name continued to represent my son for me, but when I said it, often parents would frown. “You’ve got to stop calling him that,” they would say. “He’ll get a lot of grief one day for that name.” I would try to explain why Sam to me was a flower, but most of my comments fell on deaf ears.

  When Lily hears me call Samuel a flower, she kneels close to him and says, “Did I just hear your mom call you a flower?”