This is my leisure cardigan.
Maybe one day you’ll see me in a more luxurious garment, but not here.
To: Sam Chabot
From: Flora Goldwasser
Subject: Re:
October 2, 9:47 p.m.
Sarcasm is violence, you know.
To: Flora Goldwasser
From: Sam Chabot
Subject: Re:
October 2, 9:47 p.m.
A quiet but deadly violence?
To: Sam Chabot
From: Flora Goldwasser
Subject: Re:
October 2, 9:48 p.m.
Nice riff on our Peace on Earth homework.
To: Flora Goldwasser
From: Sam Chabot
Subject: Re:
October 2, 9:49 p.m.
Don’t act so shocked that I did the reading.
To: Sam Chabot
From: Flora Goldwasser
Subject: Re:
October 2, 9:49 p.m.
I didn’t say I thought you’d actually DONE the reading.
To: Flora Goldwasser
From: Sam Chabot
Subject: Re:
October 2, 9:51 p.m.
Harsh, but fair. Just as a patrician should be.
Allison’s legendary birth email
To: Faculty, staff, and students
From: Allison Longfield
Subject: birth
October 5, 8:44 a.m.
Dear Friends,
As some of you might have heard, I gave birth yesterday afternoon to a healthy and wise child, Olive. Inspired by our dear friend Meghan, who’s in Sudan this year on a Peace Corps mission, I thought I’d share some highlights from my birth with the community.
I was lucky enough to be in my birthing spot—the garden—when my water broke, splashing into the soil and reminding me of my connection to the earth. I squatted right where I was, between the onions and the zucchini, and allowed my body to sink into the ground. I closed my eyes and let the cool breeze tickle across my cheeks.
When I was certain that the contractions were real, I phoned my partner, who triples as my midwife and doula. He arrived in about thirty minutes, by which point the pain had become severe. Over the next hours, as many of you harvested crops around me while offering the occasional shout of encouragement and emotional check-in, I passed both blood and embryonic fluids, as well as a fair amount of fecal matter, into the soil (you’re welcome for the fertilizer, capital-F Friends!). Luckily, my partner was, as always, incredibly attentive—kissing and even stimulating me as necessary to bring my blood pressure down.
When Olive finally arrived outside of my body, my partner snipped the cord that united us with a pair of gardening shears. The placenta, as well as the cord, is in a wooden box in our house; we invite everyone to come meet Olive and interact with the cord, if you’ve never seen one before.
Peace,
Allison
Peace Studies teacher, Quare Academy
BA, Hampshire College
Journal entry, night of October 8
Sam and I were walking back from the garden after shared work when we reached the dining hall. Without any warning whatsoever, he jumped onto a picnic table, swung himself onto the roof of the kitchen, and clambered up so that he was sitting on the tiles. I stared up at him, still dumbfounded.
“Come on up,” he called down to me.
I didn’t exactly want to go up there—climbing has never been my forte—but somehow I managed to pull myself, with a lot of effort and some tugging on Sam’s part, into a seated position beside him. Sam was eating Panda Poop—the most sugary cereal Quare has; they’re little balls of peanut butter and raw sugar—from the box. I have no idea how he got the box or where it came from.
“Welcome to my perch,” Sam said. “I come up here to people watch all the time.”
“But there are no people out,” I said, looking around. It was gray and empty, twenty minutes before dinner, and the campus was deserted.
“You appear to be correct,” he said. “So let’s pretend there are people. Oh wait, there’s Zev, walking across campus like he owns the place.”
“He’s sauntering.”
“SAUNTERING?” Sam whistled. “Great work. A-plus. Gold star. Blue ribbon.”
I started to laugh. “Cream of the crop. Cat’s pajamas. The bee’s knees.”
I got a sudden urge to ask him something I’d wanted to know since the last week. “Can I ask why your analyst thought it would be good for you to leave Montréal for a while?”
Sam squinted into the horizon for a few seconds, eyebrows crinkling over his eyelids. “Sure, you can ask.”
“Well, I’m asking.”
He was silent for a few minutes more.
“You don’t have to tell me,” I said.
“No,” said Sam. “I want to. Just give me a second.”
I waited. I dug my hand into his Panda Poop and grabbed a handful. As soon as I began to crunch down, filling my mouth with alarmingly sugary peanut butter gunk, Sam spoke again.
“I mean, I wasn’t molested by my aunt or whipped with a Gucci belt or orphaned at age ten and sent to live with my evil aunt and uncle,” he said.
“Just because you’re not Charlie Kelmeckis or Harry Potter doesn’t mean your life hasn’t been hard.”
Sam swatted me with the cereal box. “Put a lid on it, Flora. It’s my turn to talk now.”
I swallowed a laugh. “Sorry. I’m trying to be an active listener.”
“Can it,” he said. “Anyway, I had my first anxiety attack when I was seven or eight, I think. We were driving over the Golden Gate Bridge on vacation, and I knew it was going to collapse. I knew it was going to collapse and that we were going to fall into the bay. It didn’t, but we did have to pull over until I calmed down.
“By the time I was twelve, I was a full-blown nervous wreck. I worried about my own death pretty much constantly. I couldn’t ride in cars or take trains or even leave my room very often. When I walked to school—because I couldn’t go in cars, remember—I went the two-mile route, and I took all the back streets to avoid cars. I even wore a bike helmet and kneepads, no shit.”
I nodded my appreciation for the gravity of the situation. I really WAS trying to engage in active listening. Sam didn’t seem to notice. He was still looking at the horizon and the blue-purple-green-red mountains in the distance.
“So my parents took me to the first of many therapists, who put me on some stuff to help with the anxiety, and for about two years afterward I was a calm, happy, blob. I looked like one of those hovering things in a Zoloft ad. I gained about fifty pounds, which was okay, because I was so skinny before, and also I grew about five inches, so there was that.”
“Was it happily ever after?” I asked hopefully.
Sam looked at me scornfully. “In your dreams,” he said. “And I’m not done.”
“Sorry. Go on.”
“So after the Zoloft, I was pretty much your typical kid. The years went on, and I did more normal-kid stuff, like learn to drive, acquire a taste for old movies, and even enter into my very first relationship. Her name was Dorothy, by the way, and we were very much in love. But I’ll save that for another time, because it doesn’t actually have anything to do with this story. You following, Flo-Go?”
I nodded.
“So this is maybe eight months ago, at this point. I woke up one morning to the sound of my mom crying. I ran into the living room assuming that one of my grandparents was dead. But it turned out that it wasn’t one of my grandparents. It was my dad. The police had found his parked car by the side of the bridge, and then they’d found his body on the ice below the bridge. We didn’t even know he was depressed.
My mom says he must have decided to do it very recently, because he’d just been told that his business was going to have to file for bankruptcy.”
Sam swallowed hard. My heart was racing, and I felt like crying and throwing up. I didn’t know what to do or say, so I just grabbed Sam’s cold hand and squeezed.
“After that, I stopped taking the anxiety meds pretty quickly. I felt like they were preventing me from, I don’t know, experiencing my grief to the fullest extent. I don’t know why that’s something I felt I had to experience—an obligation to my dad, I guess. So I began to spiral. And pretty soon, when I couldn’t stand the sadness, I began to obsess over other things. I got really into my music and started writing songs. I wasn’t sleeping at all, or eating, which weirdly gave me superhuman-like energy. This went on for a few weeks, but when you’re not sleeping or eating, that’s enough time for you to pretty much lose it.
“My mom was like, ‘We’re going back to the shrink,’ but I was like, ‘Why? I’m doing great.’ It was like I was caffeinated without ever needing to eat, drink, or sleep. What’s wrong with that? So we made a deal: I’ll go, but first I’m going to perform at this open mic that my cousin Bobby hooked up for me. I was convinced that this was going to be my big break, that some big-shot person was going to be in the audience and see that I was the next Buddy Holly.”
“My God.” I knew where this was going. My palms were even sweating a little bit.
“So the days before the performance, I didn’t sleep—even less than usual, I mean. I practiced nonstop to make the song even more genius than it already is. I got to the place early, like, five hours early, and play some more backstage. My memory of this is pretty blank from here on out, actually, so you’ll have to watch the YouTube video next time you’re on the computer. All I remember is wearing one of my dad’s old suits—which was superbaggy, because of the weight loss—and trying to sing at the same high pitch as Frankie Valli.”
He was silent. I was silent.
“Were all your friends there?” I asked.
“Nope. But it spread pretty quickly around school. Someone filmed it. Obviously. Because it’s on YouTube.”
“Did you watch it?”
“Yeah.”
“So that’s why you’re here.”
“Pretty much. I wrote a heart-wrenching essay to get in here, and I guess they ate it up.”
“But you’re on … stuff?”
He nodded. “Antidepressants twice a day, sleeping pills every night, Xanax when I need it. I try not to use it, even though it feels fucking awesome, because I feel like after other stuff, I can take it from there.”
I nodded. “Thanks for telling me all that stuff. That’s really horrible.”
He shrugged. “It’s a little easier now. But sometimes it hits me, you know?”
“I know.”
“Your turn.”
I shook my head. “My parents divorced recently, which was hard, but hardly traumatic.”
“You’re from a broken home, Flo-Go? No shit. I didn’t realize that about you.”
We sat in contemplative silence for a few minutes, until the dinner bell rang out below us and I jumped about three feet in the air. The sound was amplified because of our position, and we scampered off the roof before anyone could see that we’d been up there. Climbing is encouraged, probably—to explore our hierarchical differences or whatever.
Reader, does it seem obvious what I’m setting up for you here by including these exchanges with and reflections on Sam? At this point, in October, I did have the beginning threads of expectation: despite the fact that I was still blinded by my love for Elijah, I found myself thinking more and more about Sam at times usually punctuated by longing for Elijah: in the shower, before bed, while taking long solitary walks. I wasn’t attracted to Sam, not really, but something about him made my breath turn shallow, if only because I recognized something of myself in him, something I thought only existed outside of Quare.
Postcard from Elijah, maddeningly vague and putzy, decorated with Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #21 (1978)
Flora Goldwasser
Pigeonhole 44
The Quare Academy
2 Quare Road
Main Stream, NY 12497
october 10
dear flora,
hope quare is treating you well / not sure if dec. will happen / but will keep you posted / don’t forget to smile / or just stare intently / cindy sherman self-portraits forever —e
Journal entry, late night of October 12
Got an Elijah postcard. My chest immediately tightened, and my heart felt like it was close to exploding. Of COURSE he sent a Cindy Sherman postcard; he’s always loved her, and the fact that he said Cindy Sherman forever to me makes me feel like he might love ME. My arms and legs are shaking. I love him so freaking much. I’m in the library, reading old Miss Tulip posts and looking for evidence that he does love me HE DOES LOVE ME DOES HE LOVE ME
Miss Tulip blog post from January, printed and annotated on the night of October 13
misstulipblog.com
HOME SEARCH ARCHIVES PRESS CONTACT
GREEN WITH ENVY
Photos c/o Elijah Huck
Click to navigate through photo album
The only redeeming feature of the cold that’s descended onto the city is that it’s finally time to break out the serious winter gear. And there’s nothing Miss Tulip loves more than sweater dresses—preferably tailored to a T (if you don’t have a tailor, find one immediately). Warm knits are perfect for self-expression; on the wintry landscape, they’re sometimes the only things we see. Nobody quite understands the power of a dress like Miss Tulip; I tease her about the fact that she has a different dress for every five degrees Fahrenheit. He did tease me about this, made me feel like one of those women whose husbands love them so much and shower them with jewels and pretend to begrudge them but really love them so much and would be super lost without them.
The gorgeous moss green isn’t even the best part of this hooded wool dress. The magic is in the details. It falls to the mid-lower leg for optimal warmth, and its pale flora-shaped buttons set off the deep hue of the coat. The platform boots Miss T chose to wear on her feet aren’t *technically* from the fifties, but sometimes you’ve got to let the seventies in. Shows that he thinks of me as versatile, admires the fact that I’m not just ONE THING but contain multitudes, just like Walt Whitman said.
Oh, and a word about the setting: New Brighton, Staten Island. They just opened an ice cream shop that has two vegan flavors. If you can brave the crowds of NYU students, you deserve the vegan ice cream of your choice. Miss Tulip met a few friends after attending a demonstration for animal rights at a nearby artisanal grocery store. Always loved that I’m mostly vegan, said so few people actually practice what they preach and that I was refreshing, would thrive at Quare.
THE LOOK: FIFTIES | CASHMERE COCOON SWEATER DRESS (COLOR: MOSS GREEN) | | BLACK STOCKINGS | | PLATFORM ANKLE BOOTS | | VINTAGE PERSIAN WOOL BLACK HAND MUFF–CLUTCH COMBINATION (COURTESY OF GRANDMOTHER TULIP) SETTING: SINGLE-FAMILY HOME | | NEW BRIGHTON, STATEN ISLAND
Attempt 5
Elijah Huck
245 West 107th Street
New York, NY 10025
October 13
Elijah,
WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN, YOU’RE NOT SURE WHETHER OR NOT YOU’LL BE ABLE TO COME IN DECEMBER???
I was thinking about the poem we used to talk about, the Emily Dickinson one about a volcano that’s really about her vagina. And how when you told me that, I didn’t believe you. And how you were like, “You have to pay attention to the language. It’s all figurative.” And how I was like, “You shouldn’t sexualize Emily like that.” But then you told me that she wants us to—that that’s why the innuendo is there in the first place, so we can think of her in that way without her having to explicitly state it: I AM A SEXUAL BEING. Because, you know, she was Emily Dickinson, and she looked kind of like a spinster platypus. Lately I’ve bee
n feeling like Emily, placing innuendos and hints all over the place for you to find, like a scavenger hunt, or something. And you come so close to finding all the pieces, but there’s that one that’s missing, and neither of us really knows what or where it is.
I was thinking about how we were in Margot Patisserie when you said this, probably drinking coffee, and it was probably a Thursday afternoon, and I probably was waiting for you to ask me if I wanted to go for a walk, and I probably would have agreed.
Attempt 6
Elijah Huck
245 West 107th Street
New York, NY 10025
October 13
Dear Elijah,
It’s like that poem, “Along the Sun-Drenched Roadside,” by Rainer Maria Rilke. The poem you said was your favorite poem, and the one that’s now my favorite too. The guy passes by this trough of sparkling cold water, but he can’t drink it in normally. He has to let it seep in through his wrists, because drinking would be “too powerful, too clear.”
And it’s a love poem, really, because the last stanza goes, “Thus, if you came, I could be satisfied / to let my hand rest lightly, for a moment, / lightly, upon your shoulder or your breast.” The message being that the smallest things, the “unhurried gesture[s] of restraint,” are so perfect and satisfying in themselves.
It’s like how when you caught my gaze for a minute—“lightly, for a moment, / lightly”—or brushed your hands against mine, and I got tingles in my underwear up and down my body, it was so, so much more meaningful than if you had just reached down and kissed me, because isn’t the anticipation of the thing always better than
Attempt 7
Elijah Huck
245 West 107th Street
New York, NY 10025
October 13
Everything Must Go Page 10