The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017

by Sarah Vowell

  The first time I uttered the phrase, it was because it was a bad day for me, my eyes still red and swollen when I entered the grain-seller’s store to buy a half kilogram of flour. After I asked for the flour, the woman nodded, looked hard at me like an all-knowing mother. “You xin shi,” I said, and she seemed to accept that.

  “This poor foreigner,” I heard her say to her husband, shaking her head, as I was heading out of the door. But that was the last time she’d refer to me as foreigner. I’d always be one, but the next time I came in to buy something, she called me Luo Yi Lin, the name I’d been given by a Mandarin tutor just after I’d arrived to China.

  Not surprisingly, being with other people could sometimes distract me from my breakup. But I preferred to hang out with my friends one-on-one rather than be in the crowd. My favorite thing to do that spring was to sit on my stoop late into the evening with my Chinese tutor at the time, Zhao Xin (or “Maggie,” as she sometimes called herself), drinking cheap beer and talking. Maggie had slowly become my closest friend in Shanxi. She was less demure than most of the Chinese women I knew—she cursed and played badminton and got angry at her boyfriend a lot. With the formal hour of the Chinese lesson long past, our conversations tended to get crasser and crasser as the night went on. These sessions, I maintain, are how I finally got conversational in Mandarin.

  Maggie showed up at my house one spring night, appearing like a ghost on the dirt path leading up to my porch. She was coming from her graduate program’s class party. “I had dry white wine,” she kept saying, over and over, in English. Something was off about the translation: there was no dry white wine, at least the kind made from grapes, anywhere in town. Maggie only spoke English to me when she was drunk; it was her secret code to let you know what she’d been up to.

  She had missed the dorm curfew, so she stayed with me. We shared my double bed, talking loudly and rudely for a while, scaring off the mice. She kept asking me, in English, with a strange British accent I’d never heard, if I had any beer in the kitchen. I didn’t.

  Far away, we heard the train pass, its timbre now more muddled than what I remembered in the colder months. Why was that so? We lay on our backs next to one another, our shoulders just barely touching. The ends of her black hair crossed onto my pillow. I could smell her shampoo. The room felt still, big around us. What was this? It was a closeness I hadn’t felt in a long time.

  I was thinking about what could happen, what would not happen between us. We got quiet. I wanted to know what she was thinking. Finally, she rolled toward me and reached across my arm. I held my breath and froze.

  In a teasing, nonsexual way, she grabbed the hem of my shirt and tried to tickle me on my stomach, the way my sisters would do when we were kids. She stopped suddenly, with the heel of her hand just below my ribs.

  “It’s strong here!” she said, jubilant and surprised, pointing to my upper abdomen. “I like it.”

  When I exhaled, it came out as a laugh. She rolled back onto her back. A thin sliver of moonlight was wedging its way through the bedroom curtains. Our chattering thinned out, and the room went still again. I heard her breathing shift toward sleep. Our shoulders were still touching.

  Language-wise, I finally gained the confidence to spend a good chunk of that first summer traveling alone. On a warm night in June, I stood beside the railroad tracks outside Taigu Railway Station, balancing my backpack across my feet. Alongside me was a small group of students with tiny suitcases, farmers with burlap bundles across their backs, and a handful of men and women who carried nothing except poker cards and the sunflower seeds and pears they would snack on. When the train to Beijing approached, a red light and a low honking in the dark, it slowed only long enough for the twenty or so of us to climb on: not from a platform but directly from the dusty ground. A train attendant reached her hand out to grab mine.

  From Taigu to Beijing, a trip I’d made many times, took nearly eleven hours, meaning we’d wake up just before the train pulled into Beijing Station. And then it was another twenty-four hours to Inner Mongolia, the first new place on my journey, where I’d end up, for several nights, sleeping in a yurt, under quilts and on the floor. A hole at the top of the tent showed the pollution-free, star-spangled sky.

  On that train to Inner Mongolia, we passed through a dry mountain range that eventually leveled out against the grasslands: a kind of lush prairie filled with long shadows, the sky enormous and flat and blue. The herds wandered in the distance, a scatter of white coordinates. I sat on a foldout seat by window, talking to strangers for hours. “Are you yi ge ren?” they would ask me, surprised, wanting to know if I was really traveling by myself.

  I was, I said. And I wasn’t, in another sense. At night, in my train compartment, I slept on the high bunk with my backpack nestled under my head. There were two strangers on the bunks below me, and three more against the opposite wall. We were together, if only for tonight. A man across the way snored rhythmically, precise. I could still feel my grief from the past year close to the surface, but it felt good not to be alone as I drifted into an on-and-off sleep. The six of us jostled across the terrain, passing towns and villages in the dark. Occasionally, I woke to the train’s deceleration and the thunk of a new rider being hoisted aboard.

  Back in Taigu, I had finally gotten over the showers at the swimming pool. Because my American co-fellows were men, they couldn’t help me with this. I faced my fear by always entering the shower surrounded by my women friends. This is what all the women did; I don’t know why it took so long for me to figure out that it was my aloneness, not just my foreign body, that made people stare.

  After a long afternoon in the pool, with our hands turned as wrinkly as Shanxi’s jujubes, we climbed out of the water and slipped into our plastic slippers, careful not to fall as we headed into the tile corridor. We passed the open toilet stalls, the stench pricking my nose, just before the perfumed smell of the shower room took over. We peeled ourselves out of our suits and wrung them out with our hands. I could feel my breasts swaying a little as I stepped over the tile ledge, the cold air grabbing my bare skin. As I crossed into the foggy threshold, I heard, in English: “Teacher!”

  I had finally run into a group of my students. They were undergraduate freshmen, English majors. I had only seen most of them when they were wearing their glasses, so I hardly recognized them at first. Luo An, who introduced herself as “Annie” in my class, looked at me in a dreamy, blurry sort of way. She was one of her class’s leaders and the most forthright in English, talkative and clear.

  “Do you come here often to have a shower?” she wanted to know immediately. “And are you by yourself?”

  “I usually shower at my house,” I told her. I motioned to my friends in front of me. “We are together today.”

  The smallest student, who called herself Stella, nodded at me demurely, her wet bangs and bob still hanging in a perfect square around her face. She was less than five feet tall. Undressed, her body seemed to be solely composed of bones and skin, barely pubescent. Her chest was almost completely flat. At this point, I remembered my own shame, that I was also naked. They must all be looking at the weirdness that is my body, I thought to myself: my red bush, sturdy thighs, and sizeable butt. I could feel my face growing hot, despite the cold air.

  But I resisted the urge to turn away. There is nothing weird here, I told myself. I was twenty-three years old. The students were nineteen: barely even women yet, but still women, nonetheless. Toward the end of my conversation with my students, it hit me that they were treating me in much the same way they had at the times we’d run into each other in the marketplace, fully clothed. Seeing their teacher out in public was seeing their teacher out in public, regardless of the circumstances.

  I slipped further into the steam, the showers’ whooshing noise, the clamoring of female voices, their exact words getting lost in the larger din. I placed my plastic caddy at the edge of the room, with the dozens of others, what seemed like hundred of bottles of
shampoo and body wash crammed inside, washcloths draped over the handles. By now I had run out of all of my preferred Western toiletries—my last holdout from my former day-to-day life in the United States— so it was next to impossible to tell my basket from the others.

  On the one wall where there were no showerheads, I saw a dozen undressed women lean against the tile, as if poised for a series of painful tattoos. Instead, their friends vigorously scrubbed their backs. The scrubbers wore hand-shaped loofahs, what looked like textured oven mitts, and rubbed so hard—more like scoured—that the top layers of skin began visibly pilling in some places. Of course, I had no loofah mitt of my own, but Wang Hui Fang insisted that she use hers on me. “You first,” she said. “Then me.”

  Eventually I turned, putting my hands on the tile wall. I glanced over my shoulder. There had been a handful of women staring at me since I entered the shower room, but once they realized that I was with friends, they went back to their showering, seemingly losing interest.

  The scrub hurt almost as much as I imagined it would. Wang Hui Fang worked in long, shoulder-to-butt strokes, the friction so fierce that it felt like my skin was lit. At first I thought this force was unnecessary, but then I remembered the swimming pool’s chemicals and what the bottoms of my feet looked like: almost black in the dry, dead parts at the edges of my heel, and the ball of my foot its own dingy plateau. I had made the mistake of trying to go barefoot in my apartment a few times, earlier in the year, and I had paid the price. I couldn’t seem to get all the Shanxi dust off my body, no matter how hard I tried under my tiny home showerhead, no matter how many times I mopped my apartment.

  Pronouncing me done, Wang Hui Fang handed me the fluorescent pink mitt, and I looked for an open showerhead to wash it out and rinse myself. There were none. “Just push your way through,” she suggested. I edged slowly into the crowd, waiting and waiting, my backside getting cold, until finally a woman stepped out from under the spray, and I got my clearance. I rinsed the mitt off first and then myself. The water was hot, and the pressure was good, much better than the lukewarm trickle of the sad shower in my apartment. I was not alone. I was so close to the stranger next to me that when I bent forward, my shoulder brushed hers. The woman and I turned to look at one another at the same time, both of us sort of smiling in acknowledgment. The collision was inevitable; the room was very full. Neither one of us felt the need to apologize.

  LOUISE ERDRICH

  ■

  How to Stop a Black Snake

  FROM The New York Times

  Near Cannon Ball, ND—Last Sunday, the Oceti Sakowin camp at Standing Rock in North Dakota was slick with icy, packed-down snow. The mud was glass. Veterans poured in, having traveled all night to support the people protecting their water from the Dakota Access Pipeline.

  I linked arms with Loretta Bad Heart Bull, and we teetered up to the central prayer circle with Art Zimiga, an Oglala Hunkpapa Vietnam veteran who had just been gifted a pair of crampons. The sun was still warm, the air scented with burning cedar.

  The sudden announcement that an easement to cross the Missouri River had been denied by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, dealing the pipeline an apparent setback, sent roars of joy, waves of song, disbelief, joy again, all through the camp.

  Dancers swirled, women gave high-pitched Lakota trills, people roared “Mni Wiconi,” water is life. Some wept, sank to their knees, waved wands of smoking sage. Loretta grabbed my arm and tugged me closer to the circle, into the crowd. She is a no-nonsense, funny, sharply dressed woman. Everybody let her through.

  I crushed up next to Vermae Taylor, from Fort Peck, Montana, who had been back and forth to the camp since August. She told me that this moment was the happiest she’d been in all of her 75 years. Mary Lyons, an Ojibwe elder from Leech Lake, beamed and held my arm. She was there for her great-grandchildren.

  This was supposed to be it, the end of months of desperation. In spite of the tribe’s strenuous objections, Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the pipeline, had chosen a route that could threaten water that the tribe, as well as farmers and ranchers, depend on. As the pipeline neared, water protectors committed to peaceful action chained themselves to drilling equipment and tried to pray on a butte where Sitting Bull walked.

  While the victory strengthens the tribe’s position, most people around me were aware that the struggle was not over. Energy Transfer Partners had called the denial of the easement a “political action” and said it was committed to finishing the pipeline. People were not breaking camp, but digging in.

  My family has been taking turns at Standing Rock, and last weekend was mine, so I drove from Minneapolis. I have poor cold-weather-camping skills, and the Prairie Knights Casino and Resort was bursting, with people slumped asleep in lobby chairs. I felt lucky to be able to stay in Loretta’s home, snug on a windy hill, overlooking Barren Butte. Her house is a tidy haven, often filled with visitors. We got home late, collapsed. I drank glass after glass of water.

  It was delicious water. That’s what this is all about, said Loretta. She was drying traditional chokecherry cakes in an electric food dryer. The day, with its huge range of emotions over the surprise decision, seemed endless. I had actually come to talk to the veterans, who were still arriving as we left. More than 2,000 had signed on and more were expected along with snow.

  Like many Standing Rock Lakota, Loretta is from several generations of veterans. Her father, Joseph Grey Day, was awarded a medal as a code talker. The night before, I had been at the first veterans’ gathering at Sitting Bull tribal college. There, I met Duane Vermillion, a local Marine and Vietnam veteran who was unsurprised that so many veterans were arriving. “If a call is put out to ask for help, our friends will answer,” he said. Duane’s grandfather George Sleeps From Home was also a code talker, and Duane’s father served in Korea.

  Native Americans have always maintained an outsize presence in the military, serving on a per-capita basis in higher numbers than any other ethnic group. American Indians fought in the Civil War and World War I before we even had citizenship. Many Native Americans volunteered to serve in World War II and Korea before they were included in the Voting Rights Act, and in Vietnam before the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978.

  That’s right. In a country founded on religious freedom, Native Americans were not granted the right to legally practice our own religions until 1978.

  Since then, indigenous spirituality has become a powerful uniting force. Each tribal nation has its own rituals and observances, but we hold in common the conviction that our earth is a living mystery upon whose tolerance we depend.

  In the Missouri Breaks, you feel that presence acutely. But the flat aqua expanse of Lake Oahe in view of the Oceti Sakowin camp is another story. The lake isn’t natural, and was forced on tribal people when the Army Corps flooded the fertile bottomlands of the Missouri River. Up north, the project displaced the Hidatsa, Mandan, and Arikara people. Down here, the Lakota. After so many other acts of dispossession, it was said that many elders died of broken hearts.

  The Black Snake is what Lakota people call the Dakota Access Pipeline. It will extinguish the world. For a people who have endured the end of their way of life so many times, who can doubt the truth of their vision, which coincides with scientific truth about the relationship of fossil fuels to catastrophic climate change?

  On Monday, I said goodbye to Loretta, who packed me an egg sandwich. I drove home chased by snow. Along I-94 there were the familiar signs, simple black-and-white admonitions, Be Nice, and Be Polite. It could have been the camp motto. So many young nonNative people have been drawn to this cause. I thought about the spindly girl with wild ringlets, smiling as she served me a plate of wontons and strawberries in the food tent. I worried. Did she have wool socks? A subzero sleeping bag? After a blizzard, there is usually deep cold.

  Which was how things felt—a storm of emotion and then the glaring truth of our political reality, in which fossil
fuel interests expect a presidential blessing.

  Still, someday, I hope we look back to Standing Rock as the place where we came to our senses. Where new coalitions formed. Where we became powerful together as we realized that we have to preserve land, water, the precious democracy that is our pride, the freedoms that make up our joy.

  I hope we look back at the images—the blurred features behind the riot-gear-clad men looming over a praying woman, the costumes of intimidation, the armored Humvees confronting young people on horseback, and see how close we came to losing the republic. But we didn’t. We woke up. We understood that the people who had persevered through everything, including Wounded Knee, knew how easily the world could end. So they were fighting for the water of life, for everyone.

  SMITH HENDERSON

  ■

  The Trouble

  FROM American Short Fiction

  The boy dawdled down the road into Tenmile with the practiced nonchalance of a troublemaker, shifting along like a raccoon, miming terrific fascination at the foil wrappers and sun-scalded aluminum cans blown flat into the weeds at the side of the two-lane highway, stopping for items worthy or simply shiny, peering, sometimes picking one up, and then moving on. The sun had eased into the trees of the mountain, and Henry was at the put-in by the river watching the kid cross the bridge into town. Songbirds darted to their final assignations in the bleeding light. The bats pitched themselves at right angles into the mayflies milling above the water. Henry tossed the crust of his sandwich out his pickup window high over the river and watched as bats honed and dove for the morsel. The boy arrived at the town square. Henry started his truck and rolled alongside the boy, who did not look up.