The Best American Essays 2017

by Leslie Jamison

  I looked at his brown eyes, soft as a llama’s. “Hit me.”

  He wasn’t wearing a bra under his pale green, somewhat misshapen polo. His arms were bone-smooth, but not shaved—he was seventy years old now, simply too old for arm hair.

  I drove him around the postcard-perfect town, sliding by my house without saying a word, showing him all the churches, taking him past the college, wondering what it had been like for him since the stroke, no longer being able to shave his legs or put on lipstick. In front of the English department building, he put his hand on the door handle. He insisted on seeing my office and meeting my colleagues.

  “I’d rather not,” I said flatly. “I’m supposed to be working.”

  “No,” he said. “Let’s do that.” He wanted to meet my colleagues, talk to students.

  “No,” I said. “It’s not a good time.”

  A group of students, prim in polar fleece vests and pressed jeans, walked their bicycles down the sidewalk. I pointed to the library and the chapel, a great Gothic ship stranded on the lawn, and he pleaded with me to go inside. I ignored his pulling on my arm and, perky addled tour guide, I explained when things were built, and who built these buildings, and why. Blinded by my migraine, I wanted desperately to get an espresso, but I dared not stop. I could not risk my father unleashed. It wasn’t just the women’s clothes, I realized, that had made it so hard to be in public, my public, with Fred. It was his radical impulsive striding, his need to talk and touch and point and engage, with person, with pillar, parishioner, dog, cashier—he’d say anything to anyone. He was capable of touching a woman’s bottom in any situation, or a breast. I’d seen him touch his fingers to a waitress’s crotch at a Chinese restaurant.

  My father pulled at the car door. “Let’s go meet them. I want to hear what they have to say about you!”

  “They’re not there now,” I said. I paused in the loading zone in front of my building.

  Students came pouring out the front doors.

  “Are too!” He spoke in the chiding tones of someone who would not be fooled. He grabbed my shoulder. “Come on now.” He was puzzled, hurt, insistent.

  I pressed my head to the steering wheel. He sucked back another little mini gin, produced from where I did not know—his diaper? He was tapping on the passenger window glass. “They’re huge,” he said. “These gals are huge. The Dutch. They look Dutch.” He seemed astonished, impressed, fascinated. “Look at that one! Look at her. Enormous! Look at the size of the buttocks on that one.” He gaped in genuine astonishment. “The thighs alone could take out a sober man.”

  So strong was my desire to please my father, to show him how far I’d come, and to impersonate a normal-daughter life, that I was on the verge of walking around my car, letting him out, taking him into the English department. Walking him down the halls, showing him my office, where I had his photo framed and posed beside the one of my beloved corgi, Cubby. I imagined walking down the hall, holding my father’s hand so he wouldn’t barge into colleagues’ offices, introducing him to my department chair, a slender man who would be dwarfed by my father, who’d never met anyone like my father, never even conceived of personhood taking such a form. Could we do it?

  Kathy Vanderveen, the medievalist, walked past my car, and waved, looking curious.

  “We just can’t, sweetie,” I whispered. “Please.” I felt the migraine pulsing into my cells.

  “Why not?” His mouth was open. He had his palms pressed on the window. “I want to see it.”

  As a girl, I’d been so focused on the strangeness of his appearance, I hadn’t realized how hard it was just to be around my father.

  We had dinner, just the two of us, at Russ’s Diner, where the special was split pea soup, patty melts, and pumpkin pie. Afterward, I drove him to my house. We stood in the driveway together. I was, in this moment, under the fading blue Michigan sky, extremely happy to be next to my father, showing him the house I bought all on my own. He pointed, listed, and as I held his arm, he talked about the pitch of the gables, the impressive thickness of the original timber. We looked in the basement windows. In the backyard, he smoked. I thought about the day he’d taken me to his house in Florida, proud of his purchase, low and damp and dark.

  I drove him back to the Days Inn. I refused to stay at the motel with my dad, and he could not stay in my house. Ruthie was pissed. The two of them squabbled while I stood in the doorway trying to think of how to leave. By the time I left the room, my father was not speaking to me or to his sister.

  That night, the headache worsened. The room spun. I couldn’t see properly. I vomited onto the floor.

  In the morning, I took my father to breakfast, just the two of us. He was obsessed with pointing out how the Dutch people were so extremely Dutch-looking in their largeness, and in their plainness. He acted as though he wasn’t in a Bob Evans but in a zoo. I felt as if I was with a developmentally disabled adult—then, eating bacon, I realized: I was.

  After breakfast, I drove him up Highway 31 to see the blueberry fields. He told me stories about being young, working as an accountant in the next town up—driving this exact stretch of road.

  “You were here? In Michigan?”

  “You knew that.”

  “No. You never told me.”

  “Well, I did, too.”

  I looked at the man next to me in the car, my father. I’d never thought much about him as a man in his late twenties, building a career, running around the lakeshore. Who was he then? Did he have true friends? Bizarre behavior? A thing for women’s panties? Did he have affairs with men? When did the cross-dressing begin? Was it cross-dressing? How did he think about it? But I didn’t ask. Some years before, I’d asked my mother when it had started. There was a long pause. She didn’t look upset, just surprised, as though I’d found something she hadn’t seen in a long, long time and brought it to her.

  I never thought we would ever in a million years have this conversation, she said. How did you know?

  I found her response so unnerving—how did I know?—and her subsequent revelations about their intimate life so dark and so shocking, I backed out of the conversation in a blur of confusion and regret.

  Now, as we drove up the empty highway, past the blue-red fields, I thought it might be the last time I ever saw him. I wanted to tell him, Dad, it’s been so hard. You haven’t tried to blend in at all. I could never have people over. You haven’t tried. But it felt both mean to say that and also like speaking in a language he didn’t know—what was the point?

  We pulled into the Lake Shore Antiques mall, where he lit up with excitement. We trolled up and down the aisles. Nearly every object spoke to him and there was a story; he knew even the strangest tools and old farm implements.

  People wedged past us, me and this wild-looking, loud-voiced man smelling of gin, clothes stained, gait permanently damaged by cerebral hemorrhage and years of pickling. I didn’t care about the stares. My father and I fit in here, perfectly, in this giant pole barn crammed with stuff ripped from its context and heaped in bizarre vignettes: a birdcage on a settee, draped with a fur coat, surrounded by china and toys and three pitchforks. Here, for maybe the first time ever since I’d known him, Fred looked at home, this great glorious odd bird of a man grabbing objects from a crazy chaotic collection, insisting that I listen. I listened. I thought, He should live here. My father would fit right into this museum of wayward artifacts, items damaged, loved, given away, this wabi-sabi world of things whose purpose was lost to time, but whose beauty and tenderness still somehow shone through. There, in the junk store, at last, my father and I were together out in the world. For the first time, we held hands in public. I was relaxed. He wasn’t pulling me under. I wasn’t willing him to be other than he was. We were happy.

  Once, when I was in high school, we were at the American Legion, and a man fell off his barstool. It was my father, Fred Sellers, who leapt up and helped the man to his feet. I watched that man clock my dad hard on the jaw. My da
d said, reeling, “Just trying to help ya, brother,” as he fell. I helped him up. “I’m mystified,” he said.

  He loved his dogs. He cried when his girlfriends came over and screamed at him for forgetting to show up for their date, or for having another woman in the house. He seemed sincerely puzzled that life wasn’t going his way, and terrifically overjoyed at the things he loved: Zellwood corn season; the prospect of our making dinner together, him telling me what to do and me doing it and cleaning up; growing roses. He loved roses, most especially, the hybrid called Dolly Parton, those over-the-top huge fragrant copper-red tea roses.

  Fred Sellers. My father.

  Another decade passed. I hired helpers to care for my dad. When he inherited an enormous sum from his father, a real estate tycoon, he gave the helpers gobs of his money and unscrupulous folks took the rest. I asked him to think about me. But since I’d stayed away, at arm’s length from my father, I felt I didn’t have much claim and in the end he gave me nothing.

  When he was at the end of his life—lung cancer—I went to see him often. Sober, with dementia, he lit up when I came around the corner, beamed over to me in his scooter, and never failed to ask a pertinent question about some recent topic of conversation: Did I go with the ceramic tile or the slate in my bathroom renovation? Did the guy put in heaters so my gutters wouldn’t ice over? Why not? How much had that driveway repair cost? What about Obama, what did I think of that man? What books was I teaching? Anything he’d read? Was I teaching Mark Twain? What about Mencken? Then he’d launch into a well-memorized section of one of Twain’s works—how could I have a PhD in English, he’d complain, and not know this material by heart? He’d shake his head in disappointment.

  On one of these visits, I found my father asleep in his bed, crookedly arranged. I could see his diaper was twisted. He didn’t have long to live. I wanted to ask everything. I wanted to have no regrets, no unanswered questions.

  My heart was beating so hard, I felt as if a bird were inside me when I leaned over his bed that day.

  “Fred,” I said. “Fred.”

  “Yah,” he said. He smiled. He gripped my hand hard.

  “I want to ask you something.”

  “No,” he said. But since his stroke, no usually meant yes and yes meant no.

  “This is a little difficult.”

  “No,” he said, in an encouraging way.

  “Why did you wear women’s clothes? What was that about for you?” I imagined I was a kind reporter. Just asking questions.

  He looked away, up at the ceiling. He took his hand back. There was a long pause. His roommate’s television blared a game show. And then my father, looking me in the eye with his usual curiosity, said, softly, in a tone I’d never heard before, “You knew about that?”

  ANDREA STUART

  Travels in Pornland

  FROM Granta

  I can easily recall my first brush with porn, I was seven. My brother and I had set off to see a friend, a boy around our age. When we arrived he asked if we wanted to “see something.” We knew it would be good because he was whispering even though his parents were outside, talking over next door’s fence. We followed him to his parents’ room and watched as he pulled up a chair in front of his father’s wardrobe. He had to stand on tiptoe to reach the top shelf. When he clambered down he presented us with a magazine with a pair of bunny ears stenciled upon the cover. It fell open to the center, and there before us was a technicolor image of a topless woman, her strawberry-blond hair flowing in the wind, with large pinky-brown nipples. My brother and I looked at one another. We knew that being naked was naughty; but we had also seen our mother’s breasts so we weren’t quite sure why this picture was worth all this secrecy and effort. But we stared attentively nonetheless.

  Of course as a child I didn’t understand this image as pornography any more than our friend did. Nor did I know anything about Hugh Hefner’s infamous magazine, created in 1953, long before I was born. We hid the magazine and dispatched it from our minds, dismissing it as yet another one of those mysteries that belong to the adult world.

  A decade or so later as a teenager in the late 1970s and ’80s, porn seemed the province of sad old men in raincoats who visited barred and grubby shops in London’s seedy Soho. Or it was the stuff that boys at my brother’s school hid under their mattresses. But attitudes toward sex were changing: intellectual people like my parents proudly kept a copy of Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex on their shelves, which taught a new generation how to have a good time.

  Inevitably of course this loosening of mores meant that representations of the nude body and sex were more commonplace. But it was only at university several years later that erotica, such as Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus or Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden, became part of my friends’ reading repertoire. But porn per se, in magazines or films, had little or no place in my life.

  The new libertarianism, however, was having a profound influence on the representation of sex, even if I was too naive to notice it. In the 1970s, the hard-core film Deep Throat, in which a doctor encounters a woman with no gag reflex, became a huge hit. Its success ushered in a golden age of porn and erotic mainstream films, like Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris starring Marlon Brando.

  By the late ’80s, I was working at the feminist magazine Spare Rib. I was delightfully out of my depth, but my consciousness was expanding daily. In our Clerkenwell office loft, I was exposed to the debates about women’s sexuality, and the images made of them, that raged across the women’s movement. Theorists like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, anxious about the misogyny associated with the porn industry, developed a vociferous antiporn narrative embodied by their slogan: “Porn is the theory, rape is the practice.”

  Meanwhile, sex-positive feminists argued that porn was an opportunity for sexual self-expression. It was, they argued, a potentially radical act of self-revelation that allowed many women an independent income, access to an empowering political discourse, and the chance to create a sex-positive identity that would enrich their erotic lives. This conflict became known as the sex (or porn) wars, and divides feminist debates on the subject to this day.

  By the ’90s I was an archetypal third-wave feminist, transfixed by the pleasure-loving, sex-positive model of feminism that the third-wavers espoused. Women, we believed, deserved stimulating material and new sexual narratives. Erotic images circulated around the office, some of them evolving from the material disseminated by American sex educators like Susie Bright and Tristan Taormino. On Our Backs, the first erotic magazine created for women by women, was published in San Francisco. Lulu Belliveau, its art director, was surprised at the furor that broke out as a result of its queer-chic images. “I just wanted to make images that I found hot.” Soon On Our Backs and its British counterpart Quim were a must-read for cool queer girls, and one of my friends was featured, bare-breasted and dressed as an angel, with white widely spread wings.

  Feminist erotica was a growing industry, and it became de rigueur to be cool about it. In the mid-’90s a friend suggested we get together and watch a film by Candida Royale, a feminist pornographer who aspired to make porn for couples to enjoy. The screening was held at my flat. I bought some wine and nibbles. The invitees arrived and we settled down to watch the video. The event was not a success. The couple on the screen were white, heterosexual, and conventional looking, a cast that in no way represented my multicultural group of friends. The director’s approach to sex was so predictable and PC that it seemed almost antiseptic. So it was no surprise that before anyone had a chance to get even a bit aroused the evening fell apart. My partner felt that it excluded lesbian sexuality and stormed off to the bedroom. The black girls felt invisible, the straight girls were embarrassed, and all of us were disappointed. I don’t know what would have happened if we had had a chance to watch the whole thing; but I do remember thinking at the time that the sexiest thing about the event was not the film, but the clandestine nature of the gathering.

>   In those days my feelings about pornography remained largely indifferent, and I watched it only coincidentally, for example dancing in a lesbian club in New York’s Meatpacking District, where X-rated images of leather-clad dykes playing with fire and wax flickered around the room, or in my television job, watching clips of Suburban Dykes, in which a rakish butch teaches heterosexual women how to do lesbian sex. It was so funny and sexy that I had to rethink porn.

  By the noughties, Madonna, with her perpetual play on the motifs of paid sex and porno images, was my generation’s mascot. We blithely believed in a new sexual dawn. And we were all flirting with porn. My then lover presented me with a copy of Madonna’s coffee-table book, Sex, for my birthday. (It is still the fastest-selling coffee table of all time.) In retrospect, the book was a case of style over substance; but I can still remember the excitement of tearing open the silver Mylar sheath that covered the huge book. As I turned its heavy pages I felt cool and edgy. The pictures, taken by the fashion photographer Steven Meisel, were achingly fashionable; if not at all sexy—it was essentially soft-core porn that simulated S and M, bondage, and anilingus. As a gesture toward authenticity it also featured real-life porn stars like Joey Stefano, as well as mainstream actresses like Isabella Rossellini and lesser luminaries like the rapper Vanilla Ice.

  Not long after this I was commissioned to write a piece about Annie Sprinkle, one of the great doyennes of U.S. porn, who had come over to England to present her new show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. I was excited to meet her: she engaged with feminist issues, and to make the evening more interesting still, there had been a controversy about part of her act. In New York, members of the audience were allowed, if they so chose, to examine her cervix through a speculum, but the British establishment banned this, deeming it obscene. The inevitable controversy that followed about censorship, obscenity, and art reverberated through the cultural community and the event sold out.