My Time Among the Whites
Page 15
At the end of his third week back at work, he was already taking on overtime. He goes in on Saturdays. If he talks to my mom about his pain—if he’s still in pain—I don’t know about it; I live in another state now, and my work has taken me far from home.
* * *
Very shortly after the 2016 election and months into my work with a therapist, I found myself standing in my home office, yelling at my body out of nowhere. The familiar sensations that normally told me I was about to throw up had started happening much more often, when I wasn’t about to do something important. I felt like throwing up at the simplest of tasks, tasks that for so long had served me well enough as productive distractions. This time it was emails. I was angry that I seemed to suddenly be getting worse, not better. Through a clenched jaw I didn’t register until moments later, I told my body that if it kept this up I would end it. I will end you, I spat at my fists, ready to hit myself the way my attacker had hit me, and I meant it so much that I started crying, beating those fists on my thighs and saying, I hate you, I hate you.
Get ahold of yourself, asshole.
In the months since my dad left the hospital, I’d been working slowly to face events that I’d long refused to admit even happened. I was listening to my body in ways I hadn’t in a long time. And then an older, cartoonish version of the you who sometimes snuck out between my retches won the presidency. Americans elected a man who bragged about assaulting women, and their acceptance of his actions sent my body this message: We are not safe. The Crucet Curse stopped being something I could give a cute name. My body’s rebellion against my avoidance escalated dramatically, and would keep escalating if I kept trying to suppress it. My body revolted until I accepted that its unruliness was the very thing that would save me.
For too long, I believed the lies my mind invented, lies originating in popular culture: This was not a big deal, it was your own fault anyway, it didn’t even matter, it doesn’t matter. Your people have gone through worse—your parents left a country behind. Your dad is battling cancer. He almost died. Your pain is nothing. You got off easy. So you throw up sometimes. No one has to know. That’s nothing. Look at how stable you are. Look at the books you’ve made, the worlds you’ve built in your fiction, aren’t they proof that what happened wasn’t so bad? That what happened isn’t even worth telling?
But my body knew better, had for years tried to disrupt this dangerous narrative in the most grotesque way it could. In the wake of the election, my body had made work impossible. It had taken away the best distraction I’d ever had. What, in its absence, could I make?
* * *
When our time in the hospital started, while my dad was still relatively well and before the effects of chemo had floored him entirely, I found myself trying to keep us all entertained with a personality quiz. I’d dubbed myself the activities director on the Cancer Cruise Ship, coming up with annoying shit for my family do every day to keep the TV from becoming everything. Reading from the list of questions, I asked my father what three things he was better at than most people.
His first, immediate answer: Driving.
After a little thought, he gave us his second answer, “Fixing almost anything.”
“That’s true,” my mom half-whispered, not wanting to interrupt, as it was a rare thing that he was willing to go along with the quiz; he typically dismissed things like this as stupid and would leave the room, except now, he couldn’t. “Remember that time he fixed the dryer after that rat got stuck in the drum?”
His third answer, on the heels of my mom’s comment: “Holding my feelings in—no, keeping my emotions—putting them into work, putting them there.”
My sister and I tried to hide our surprise at how plainly he’d stated this, at the fact that he saw the element of his personality that had kept us most apart as a strength. My mom nodded, not surprised at all. And because much of my profession is devoted to the opposite of this—to using writing to unearth and investigate deeper truths that my dad would rather keep private (and from my sister and me, even secret)—I wrote all of this down as precisely as I could, the way I would come to write down everything that happened over the next few weeks, pages I continue to write, pages I need to write, pages he should never make himself read.
* * *
Our bodies have a lot to teach us. I’m still learning, week by week, to listen to mine and to accept and trust what it tells me. I haven’t thrown up as a response to stress in a while, though the behavior got worse before it got any better—my therapist warned me this was the case for lots of people. Sometimes the work of therapy asks me to write about events that still cause my mouth to fill with spit and send me running to a toilet. I always saw writing as a way of protecting myself from those events, not as a way of teaching my body to accept that those events are in my past. Writing felt too powerful and sacred a tool. I resisted using it until I realized that its power was exactly what my body deserved.
It’s a tool I wish I could loan my father in much the same way I wish he’d read the books I write for him—because through all this work and from everything I’ve come to accept about our relationship, I have also come to accept that my books are in fact for him, and for people like him—people like me. This will always be true, whether he reads them or not: I want each book I write to be a way into something we couldn’t otherwise face.
I’m writing a new novel about a man who calls Miami home, and that’s all I’m okay saying about it for now. I’m protective of my characters. As I write, I see the world he’s building—that I’m building, through him—and it’s a place that pulls me back in each day. I want to see what we’ll make of it. I want us to keep building. I don’t yet know what to hope for. So far, the character is like no one I’ve ever met, and yet I know him. I’m eager to see what the story might, in time, show us all.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to my extraordinary agent, Adam Eaglin, whose guidance and resilience I am grateful for every single day. Thanks to everyone at the Cheney Agency, especially Isabel Mendía, for their tireless work.
My immense gratitude to Anna deVries, whose expert editorial vision and brilliance made this book so much stronger (and whose daughter has the best name). Thanks, too, to Stephen M. Morrison, James Meader, Sara DeLozier, Darin Keesler, Kolt Beringer, Cecilia Molinari, and the whole Picador team for their enthusiasm, hard work, and support. A special thank you to Byron Echeverria for willing this book into existence (and for his friendship), and to Caroline Casey for helping all things grow.
My eternal thanks to Rachel Dry, my editor at The New York Times, for emailing me out of the blue in 2015 and thus inadvertently getting this whole project started. I am forever indebted to you for your persistence, your patience, and your faith in my voice: Thank you for always finding what I meant to say. A debt of gratitude also to Roxane Gay for publishing my nonfiction in Medium and Gay Magazine (and for her encouragement to fight for what I wanted); and to Curtis Sittenfeld, for everything, but most recently: for taking notes in St. Louis and giving them to me later with the promise that there was a book in there somewhere.
Thank you to my colleagues at the University of Nebraska in the Department of English and the Institute for Ethnic Studies for our lively and honest conversations, and for the vital resources—time, space, and support—to complete this book. For “proudly serving misfits since 2011,” thank you to The Bay, where much of this book was drafted and discussed. Thank you to Gina Furr, Maggie Bertsche, Cait Cain: This book would not exist without your help, your talents, and your expertise.
Much gratitude to my writerly siblings, Stacey Waite and Xhenet Aliu, for their generous feedback on the messes that became essays in this book. Thank you to Hope Wabuke, who in her very existence is a reminder of warmer, more loving climates, and whose generosity and care with this manuscript pushed me to live up to her brilliance.
To the students enrolled in our magical Fall 2017 English 352 workshop: Thank you for letting me practice wh
at I preach and for becoming a family. Thanks to Lana Lobsiger Flagtwet, for her example, and to Mary Ryan, for helping me find home. Many thanks, too, to the colleges and universities whose invitations to come speak about Make Your Home Among Strangers with their students provoked my thinking about questions that led to more questions, which eventually led to these essays.
Mil gracias to Margarita and Fabio Nodarse, for giving me a piece of your heart, for feeding me in more ways than one, and for taking me in.
Thank you to my wonderful parents, Maria and Rey (I promise the next book so far doesn’t have any parents in it at all); to my sister and her husband, Kathy and Jorge Villavicencio; and to my amazing niece, Paloma, aka the Great Gertrude aka Bistec Palomilla aka Lil PP aka our future volcanologist/sandhill crane expert. I can’t wait to see what names you will someday reject and embrace.
And finally, to Alejandro Nodarse, my favorite human on the planet, for lovingly bringing me back to the page again and again. This book—like the others, before I could even know—is for you.
ALSO BY JENNINE CAPÓ CRUCET
Make Your Home Among Strangers
How to Leave Hialeah
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JENNINE CAPÓ CRUCET is the author of two previous books and is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. Her novel, Make Your Home Among Strangers, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice book, the winner of the 2016 International Latino Book Award, and was cited as a best book of the year by NBC Latino, The Guardian, and the Miami Herald; it has been adopted as an all-campus read at more than thirty American universities. Her short stories have been honored with the Iowa Short Fiction Award and the O. Henry Prize, among other awards. Raised in Miami, Florida, Crucet is an associate professor in the department of English and the Institute for Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
DEDICATION
I: EARLY ENCOUNTERS
What We Pack
¡Nothing Is Impossible in America!
Magic Kingdoms
II: VARIOUS IMMERSIONS
Say I Do
Going Cowboy
The Country We Now Call Home
III: RESISTANCE IN ACTION
Ease of Exit
Imagine Me Here, or How I Became a Professor
A Prognosis
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ALSO BY JENNINE CAPÓ CRUCET
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
This is a work of nonfiction. The names and identifying characteristics of some persons described in this book have been changed, as have dates, places, and other details of events in the book.
MY TIME AMONG THE WHITES. Copyright © 2019 by Jennine Capó Crucet. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 120 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10271.
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Portions of the essays in this collection originally appeared, in different form, in the following publications: “A Prognosis” in Medium and Gay Magazine; “What We Pack,” “Say I Do,” “Going Cowboy,” “A Prognosis,” “Ease of Exit,” and “The Country We Now Call Home” in The New York Times.
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ISBN 978-1-250-29943-7 (trade paperback) | ISBN 978-1-250-29944-4 (ebook)
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First Edition: September 2019