Muskegon is, in fact, an old logging hub, a mill town once known as the Lumber Queen of the World. It’s tempting to see in such gestures evidence of the hinterland becoming conscious, an entire region rising up to lay claim to its roots. It would be easier to believe this if the coveted look in Brooklyn Magazine, about ten years ago, were not called “the lumberjack.”
There are places in the Midwest that are considered oases—cities that lie within the coordinates of the region but do not technically belong there. The model in this mode is Madison, Wisconsin, the so-called Berkeley of the Midwest. The comparison stems from the 1960s, when students stormed the campus to protest the Vietnam War. The campus mall is still guarded by foreboding Brutalist structures that were built during that era as an intimidation tactic. I taught in one of these buildings when I was in graduate school. The other TAs complained about them, claiming they got headaches from the lack of sunlight and the maze of asymmetrical halls. I found them beautiful, despite their politics. During my first day of class, I would walk my students outside to show them the exterior. I noted how the walls canted away from the street, evoking a fortress. I pointed out the narrow windows, impossible to smash with rocks. “Buildings,” I told them, “can be arguments. Everything you see is an argument.” The students were first-semester freshmen, bright and bashful farm kids who had come to this great metropolis—this Athens of the prairie—with the wholesome desire to learn.
Those buildings, like all the old buildings in town, were constantly under threat of demolition. Many of the heavy masonry structures had already been torn down to make way for condo high-rises, built to house the young employees of Epic—a health-care software company that bills itself as the “Google of the Midwest.” The corporate headquarters, located just outside town, was a legendary place that boasted all the hallmarks of Menlo Park excess: a gourmet cafeteria with chefs poached from five-star restaurants, an entire wing decorated to resemble Hogwarts. During the years I lived in Madison, the city was flush with new money. A rash of artisanal shops and restaurants broke out across town, each of them channeling the spirit of the prairie and its hardworking, industrial ethos. The old warehouses were refurbished into posh restaurants whose names evoked the surrounding countryside (Graze, Harvest). They were the kinds of places where ryes were served on bars made of reclaimed barn wood, and veal was cooked by chefs whose forearms were tattooed with Holsteins. Most of the factories in town had been turned into breweries, or the kind of coffee shops that resembled an eighteenth-century workshop—all the baristas in butcher aprons and engaged in what appeared to be chemistry experiments with espresso.
Meanwhile, the actual industry, unhidden in the middle of the downtown, looked as though it had never been used. There were gleaming aluminum silos and emissionless brick chimneys. In the prairie stockyards near my apartment, blue railroad cars were lined up like children’s toys. Beyond the fences, giant coils of yellow industrial hose glimmered in the early morning light, as beautiful as Monet’s haystacks. I doubt that any visitor would see in such artifacts the signs of progress, but when you live for any period in the Midwest, you become sensitive to the subtle process by which industry gives way to commerce, and utility to aesthetics.
Each spring arrived with the effulgent bloom of the farmers’ market. The sidewalks around the capitol became flush with white flowers, heirloom eggs, and little pots of honey, and all the city came out in linen and distressed denim. There were food carts parked on the sidewalk, and a string quartet playing “Don’t Stop Believin’,” and my husband and I, newly in love, smoking on the steps of the capitol. We kept our distance from the crowds, preferring to watch from afar. He pointed out that the Amish men selling cherry pies were indistinguishable from the students busking in straw hats and suspenders. It was strange, all these paeans to the pastoral. In the coastal cities, throwbacks of this sort are regarded as a romantic reaction against the sterile exigencies of urban life. But Madison was smack in the middle of the heartland. You could, in theory, drive five miles out of town and find yourself in the great oblivion of corn.
In the early days of our relationship, we were always driving out to those parts, spurred by some vague desire to see the limits of the land—or perhaps to distinguish the simulacrum from the real. We would download albums from our teen years—Night on the Sun, Either/Or—and drive east on the expressway until the sprawl of subdivisions gave way to open land. If there was a storm in the forecast, we’d head out to the farmland of Black Earth, flying through the cropfields with all the windows down, the backseat fluttering with unread newspapers as lightning forked across the horizon.
Madison was utopia for a certain kind of Midwesterner: the Baptist boy who grew up reading Wittgenstein, the farm lass who secretly dreamed about the girl next door. It should have been such a place for me as well. Instead, I came to find the live bluegrass outside the co-op insufferable. I developed a physical allergy to NPR. Sitting in a bakery one morning, I heard the opening theme of Morning Edition drift in from the kitchen and started scratching my arms as though contracting a rash. My husband tried to get me to articulate what it was that bothered me, but I could never come up with the right adjective. Self-satisfied? Self-congratulatory? I could never get past aesthetics. On the way home from teaching my night class, I would unwind by listening to a fundamentalist preacher who delivered exegeses on the Pentateuch and occasionally lapsed into fire and brimstone. The drive was long, and I would slip into something like a trance state, failing to register the import of the message but calmed nonetheless by the familiar rhythm of conviction.
Over time, I came to dread the parties and potlucks. Most of the people we knew had spent time on the coasts, or had come from there, or were frequently traveling from one to the other, and the conversation was always about what was happening elsewhere: what people were listening to in Williamsburg, or what everyone was wearing at Coachella. A sizable portion of the evening was devoted to the plots of premium TV dramas. Occasionally there were long arguments about actual ideas, but they always crumbled into semantics. What do you mean by “duty”? someone would say. Or: It all depends on your definition of “morality.” At the end of these nights, I would get into the car with the first throb of a migraine, saying that we didn’t have any business discussing anything until we could, all of us, articulate a coherent ideology. It seemed to me then that we suffered from the fundamental delusion that we had elevated ourselves above the rubble of hinterland ignorance—that fair-trade coffee and Orange You Glad It’s Vegan? cake had somehow redeemed us of our sins. All of us had, like the man in the parable, built our houses on sand.
A couple of weeks ago, there was a mass baptism in Lake Michigan. There is one at the end of each summer, though I haven’t attended one in years. It was a warm night, and so my husband and I walked down to watch, along with my mother and my sister and her two-year-old daughter. The haze was thick that evening, and it wasn’t until we were nearly upon the crowd that we could see it in its entirety: hundreds of people standing along the shore, barefoot like refugees in the sand. Out in the water, a pastor stood waist-deep with a line of congregants waiting their turn in the shallows. Farther down, there was another pastor standing in the lake with another line of congregants, and even farther down, near the rocks of the channel, a third stood with yet another line of people. The water was so gray and still, the evening air so windless, that you could hear the pastors’ voices as they recited the sacramental formula: “Buried with Christ in baptism, raised to walk in the fullness of life.” Whenever someone emerged from the water, everyone on the beach cheered and clapped as the congregant waded back through the mist like a ghost, his clothes suddenly thin and weighed down with water.
My mother saw someone she knew in the crowd and walked over to say hello. A small drone flew over the water, hovering over each of the pastors, and then darted along the shoreline. My sister pointed it out. “It must be filming,” we decided. The beach was clean from a recent storm, empty e
xcept for some stray pieces of driftwood, bleached white and hewn smooth as whale bones. The seagulls were circling in frantic patterns, as though trying to warn us. Usually they glide over the beach in elegant arabesques, but there was no wind on this night, and they flapped like bats, trying to stay afloat.
The whole scene seemed to me like a Bruegel painting, a sweeping portrait of community life already distilled by time. I imagined scholars examining it many years in the future, trying to decipher its rituals and iconography. There was something beautiful in how the pastor laid his hands over each congregant’s face, covering her hand with his own, something beautiful in the bewildered look on the congregant’s face when she emerged from the water. Although I no longer espouse this faith, it’s hard to deny the mark it has left on me. It is a conviction that lies beneath the doctrine and theology, a kind of bone-marrow knowledge that the Lord is coming; that He has always been coming, which is the same as saying that He will never come; that each of us must find a way to live with this absence and our own, earthly limitations.
The crowd erupted again in cheers. I was watching my niece run through the surf, watching my sister pretend to chase her. Each time the crowd cheered, she threw her hands above her head, as though it were for her. The drone made its way toward us, descended and hovered there, just above the water.
“That’s unsettling,” I said. The machine was idling above the water, appearing to stare us down. It was close enough that I could see the lens of its camera, a red light going on and off, as though winking at us.
“It knows we’re not believers,” my husband whispered.
“Let’s go,” I said. We made our way into the crowd, hoping to disappear within it. Everyone was dressed in brightly colored shirts and smelled of damp cotton. We passed my mother, who was laughing. The voices of the pastors carried irregularly across the water, and once we were deep in the crowd, their incantations seemed to overlap, as though it were one voice, rippling in a series of echoes. “Buried with Christ . . . Raised to walk in the fullness . . .” Things were ending and beginning again, just as everything is always ending and always beginning, and standing there amid the sea of people, I was reminded that it might not go on like this forever. We made our way to the shore, where the crowd thinned out and the sand was firm with water, and beyond the fog there appeared, on the horizon, the faintest trace of a sunset.
KAREN PALMER
The Reader Is the Protagonist
FROM The Virginia Quarterly Review
The summer of 1989, shortly after my second husband and I married, we buckled my two daughters, who were seven and three, into the rear seat of a used car purchased for cash. We’d already sold most of our belongings and walked away from the rest, and packed the car’s trunk with what remained: clothing and toys, pillows and blankets, four place settings, one pot, one pan. We told no one where we were going. We meant to disappear. Driving east out of California, we decided on our new names. If we hadn’t been so shell-shocked, it might have been fun, the idea of starting over, starting fresh, in a place where we were unknown. But this was do-it-yourself witness protection. Hidden under the driver’s seat was a book on how to create new identities, but it couldn’t tell us who we’d be.
We stopped in Boulder, Colorado. My new husband had once spent a day in the town, and he remembered it as a friendly place. We drove around for a while. The brick downtown seemed quaint, the neighborhoods leafy and safe. A park with a fast-running creek appealed to the girls. I liked the idea of living near a university, with a tranquil campus, the prospect of lectures and music, young people everywhere.
From a phone booth outside a supermarket, we called a number we found in a real estate magazine. My new husband spoke to the realtor on duty, and within minutes he’d arranged a trade: a month’s rent for painting a condo that was for sale. We were worried about money, about making what we had last. The realtor met us at the property. He opened up the garage, which was empty but for a few rollers and pans on a shelf, and five-gallon buckets of paint. The condo had two bedrooms, two baths. A concrete patio on the other side of sliding glass doors. The high-ceilinged living room echoed. Such a melancholy sound. The realtor handed over the key.
For a week it rained every day. The storms kept us inside, but also, we were afraid to go out much, afraid to be seen. My new husband and I rolled white paint onto the walls. The girls colored or watched television on a black-and-white set we’d picked up at Goodwill.
My three-year-old tugged at my legs. She had her blanket over her shoulders and a book in her arms: she wanted a story. For more than a year now, the demands of everyday life had required all my attention. I’d trusted only what I could touch, what I could see or hear or feel. I had two daughters to protect, and things I’d once believed essential had fallen away. Books were among the abandoned; one day, halfway through a beloved novel, I set it facedown, and that was the end of that. I couldn’t read nonfiction, either, or newspapers, or magazines; that is, nothing meant for adults. My little daughter leaned against my legs. The older girl had joined us, her anticipation charging the air. Reading to my children—that, I could manage.
My mother read to me a lot when I was young. Our family life was often fraught: my father uncommunicative, physically absent, and emotionally cool; Mom either at his throat or steeped in hostile despair. Reading was her lifelong escape. One effect this had on me was that I believed that books were alive, not just the tales within them but the objects themselves. When I was seated in my mother’s lap with a story, the stiffness of the cover told me what it was to have a spine. The words in their regular rows were like heartbeats; the pages, turning, fluttered like wings.
The story my daughters wanted was Jon Stone’s The Monster at the End of This Book.
Grover, one of the characters from Sesame Street, is the narrator. Frightened by the monster that he imagines awaits him on the last page, he speaks directly to the reader: “Listen, I have an idea. If you do not turn any pages, we will never get to the end of this book.”
Grinning, my daughters turned the page.
Grover ties the next page down with a rope. Turn. “You do not know what you are doing to me!” Turn. He nails the next page into place. He builds a brick wall. Turn, turn.
By the end the girls were giggling, breathless from the tension. It didn’t matter that they’d heard this story so many times. Fall. Winter. Spring. “Please do not turn the page,” Grover pleads. “Please please please.”
Turn.
On the last page Grover cries: “Well, look at that! The only one here is . . . ME. I . . . am the Monster at the end of this book.”
The real protagonist of the story is, of course, the reader. The subject is existential dread. Who is the monster, and what does it want, and how will it end?
In the living room, we sat cross-legged on the floor and watched rain fall onto the concrete patio. After a while, the clouds blew away, and we ventured out for a walk to a nearby drugstore. The sun dropped into the Rockies, bats flew through the tops of cottonwood trees. The wet grass looked electrified.
Longs Drugs, hunkered at the corner of Iris and Twenty-Eighth, was a beacon, cheerful, full of color and light. You could live out of that store, if you had to; it sold anything you might want in one place. We wandered the aisles. The girls played with makeup samples and inspected the display of discounted summer gear: boogie boards, sand pails and shovels, aluminum beach chairs.
For what beach? I wondered. The ocean was twelve hundred miles away. So was my ex-husband, my daughters’ father. He was the reason we ran. I’d fallen in love with another man and left him, and he went off the rails. He stalked and threatened us. Months after the separation, he kidnapped our younger child.
California was still a year away from passing the nation’s first antistalking law, written after a series of high-profile murders, including those of four women in Orange County who were killed by former lovers or former husbands or aspiring suitors. The new law would go beyond the
limits of a temporary restraining order to prohibit persistent following and harassment, the threats of bodily harm that sometimes precede devastating violence. By 1993, all fifty states would have such statutes on the books.
But during the period it took to finalize my divorce, the authorities could do nothing to help. Even if they had, my ex-husband was unafraid of cops or courts, and I believe now, as I did then, that the threat of jail time would not have deterred him but rather inflamed his desire for revenge. I got my daughter back only by promising to give up someone else I loved, the man for whom I’d left him. That promise was a lie.
At Longs, my new husband parked himself by the magazines, a newspaper rolled under one arm. I stared down the rows of paperbacks. Romances, westerns, science fiction. A rack of New York Times best sellers. Oh, I thought. Books. Since childhood, they’d seen me through everything, been my teachers and companions, my family. Standing there, I felt the shape of their absence, but I was unmoved.
By the end of that first week in Boulder, I’d secured an interview for a position as a proofreader. The company was an “independent publisher,” unnamed in the classified ad. I didn’t recognize what a rarity the listing was. Colorado had just come out of a recession and the jobs section of the local paper was thin, most of the ads for food service and minimum-wage retail. In my former life I’d worked as a typesetter, or a secretary, and I felt qualified to proofread, but I was worried about being asked for references. On the phone, however, all I had to say was “English major,” and the interviewer cut things short and requested that I come in.
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