The Best American Magazine Writing 2020

by Sid Holt

  “He looks more like himself than he did yesterday,” she said.

  The rest of Jerry’s children arrived, along with other family and Jay Sumner and his friend David. A hospice nurse came to pronounce the death. Looking tired but stoic, Janet brought down fresh clothes: his best pair of dark Levis, a rust-colored corduroy shirt, a vest, and his sun hat. We washed and dressed him, wrestling his stiffened arms through the sleeves.

  From the kitchen came the hiss of bacon and the smell of coffee as Duncan cooked breakfast. The whole house seemed to exhale as we gathered around the kitchen table and ate. Jerry had built this table, a sturdy oval of blond pine, as a Christmas present for Janet a few years after they married. If you look closely, you can see the wood is streaked blue and pitted with small tunnels, the handiwork of the beetles that killed the tree. Jerry filled each beetle tunnel with resin; he layered epoxy on the table’s surface, sanded it, and then layered again. The job required immense perseverance.

  More than thirty years later, the table remains the heart of the home. Hilly grew up around it, canning vegetables in summer, butchering venison in the fall, debating with her father over dinner and learning to distinguish herself from him. At family gatherings, the table was always laden with food—garden salads, Janet’s braided cardamom bread, wild geese, and elk steaks fried in tamari, garlic, and thyme. Now the family crowded around it once more and filled their plates, allowing this small relief to precede our impending grief.

  * * *

  We carried his body out to the casket and laid him on a bed of sugar maple leaves inside. Somehow his expression had shifted. He looked chagrined when we washed him, and contemplative when we dressed him. Now a faint smile had crept into his lips. He looked peaceful and a little bemused, maybe even proud.

  Janet knew he shouldn’t go into the earth alone. She put a bottle of his homebrew into the box, a pair of his hand-dipped beeswax candles, and a stack of their old love letters. David put in a raven’s skull and a bison hoof. Jay Sumner contributed a crumpled dollar bill, a miniature cribbage board, and the game’s best hand: three fives and a jack. Hilly picked a ripe Jocko apple and set it into her father’s palm. Some grandchildren arranged a bouquet of purple asters on his chest. Janet bundled his decades-old, duct-taped parka under his head as a pillow. The casket was now a kind of message-in-a-bottle, a testament to the future of who this man was, and what he loved.

  “Some of the best things in life are in that box,” David said.

  We walked with Jerry to the orchard one last time and slowly lowered him into the earth. Duncan said a prayer. Jana sang a song. Swarms of woolly blue aphids hovered in the air like electric-blue storm clouds. Then, under a gray sky, everyone began filling in the hole, and the most alive person I’ve ever known disappeared into the dirt. Even his trees seemed to kneel.

  * * *

  The following spring, when the crocus bulbs were poking out of the soil again as if by magic, almost-three-year-old Theo asked Hilly and me, “Where’s Grandpa?”

  We were out in Arlee visiting Janet, and just then we were driving past the orchard. Hilly said, “Well, his body’s in the ground, right there.”

  “But not his face?” asked Theo.

  “No, his face too,” Hilly said. “His whole body.”

  After a moment, I said: “I guess the answer is that we don’t know where Grandpa Jerry is. His body is in the ground, but some people believe we have souls and that when we die our bodies stay on earth, but our souls go up to heaven.”

  “Or they become a mountain,” said Hilly.

  “Yeah,” I said, “or they live in that person’s favorite places.”

  Theo considered this. Then he said, “I think he’s an apple.”

  And neither of us could say anything for a while.

  Coda

  One May morning, the year before he died, Jerry took me fishing. He wanted to show me a hole that held a big brown trout. He knew this because he had caught and released it, twice, in successive years. It was a twenty-three-inch hen, with a rounded nose, that he called Big Mama.

  Jerry wasn’t a trophy sportsman. In his eyes, if a bull elk or a lunker trout outwitted the world long enough to become this grand, it earned a pass. He felt lucky just to see such creatures, and when he did, he savored them.

  We left his Subaru on the side of the road and waded through a field of waist-high grass and wild rose toward the river. Jerry walked as though some unseen hand was on the small of his back, thrusting him forward. Forty-one years his junior, I had to quicken my pace to keep up. The morning was bright and the yellowthroat warblers called wichity wichity from the riverbank. A trio of deer sprang away from us in bounding arcs, their tails waving like white flags behind them.

  As we navigated a patch of thistles, Jerry slowed long enough to turn back and say, “You know you’re excited when part of you is almost afraid to get there.”

  Jerry grew up fishing the Yellowstone River and the spring creeks of Paradise Valley. Now, he still fished like a kid, in a pair of Levis and sneakers. He used an old fiberglass rod that he rigged with a leader knotted together from scraps of monofilament. Ever since I lost his lure in Mexico I had made sure to tie him an ample supply of flies. (He liked woolly buggers best.) I didn’t have to tie many, because he hardly ever changed flies, even after fish had mangled them beyond recognition.

  The poverty of his equipment didn’t impair his results. He usually fished alone, but I saw enough to know that he cast his rod like a wand, jigging his fly through the current in just the right seams at just the right speeds to solicit the swirling flash of a striking trout. I was eager to watch him catch Big Mama.

  At last we came to the river’s edge, and Jerry showed me the hole. It wasn’t much to look at, just a sunken log on the far bank where a fast riffle had carved out a pocket that was a promising shade of pewter. The pool was the size of a stovetop.

  Jerry held his rod behind his back. “Go for it,” he told me.

  “What? No, this is your hole,” I said. “This is your fish. You try.”

  He insisted, so I waded out to my knees and dropped my fly upstream of the log. I let it sink and felt the current pull it quickly through the deep water. I picked up my line and cast again. I could sense Jerry’s anticipation behind me, and I wanted to catch this fish for his sake as much as mine. I cast again and again but never got a strike. Either I couldn’t catch Big Mama, or she was gone.

  Jerry didn’t seem disappointed. We continued fishing downstream and caught a rainbow apiece, which we kept for dinner.

  It was late afternoon by the time he turned his Subaru down the driveway to the cabin on the river bottom. Janet and Hilly were there, and we all cooked dinner together. Janet poached the fish in soy, onions, and curly garlic scapes. I cooked pasta with peppers. Jerry cut some fresh asparagus, and Hilly made a chimichurri sauce with cilantro and parsley from the garden.

  Finally, we sat down to eat at the picnic table in the back yard where Janet and Jerry and then Hilly and I had married, thirty-one years apart. The food in front of us was fresh and green and vital, and the warming spring sunshine filtered down through the leaves with the promise of growth and goodness to come.

  We sat around the table, enchanted. I watched Jerry raise his fork to his mouth. He was wringing the glory out of every second. His face tilted like a flower’s toward the sun, his eyes were closed, and he chewed his food slowly, as if it were altogether too precious to swallow.

  Rebecca Traister

  Elizabeth Warren’s Classroom Strategy

  New York

  FINALIST—PROFILE WRITING

  Published in August 2019—when there were, as Rebecca Traister noted at the time, “a historic number of female candidates in contention for the Democratic nomination”—this profile of Elizabeth Warren examined her candidacy in the context of her work as a teacher. “In doing so,” said the National Magazine Award judges, “Traister explores the politics of gender while illuminating the challeng
es powerful women confront as they strive to communicate on the campaign trail.” The nomination of “Elizabeth Warren’s Classroom Strategy” was Traister’s fourth in the last six years. Nominated in Columns and Commentary for her work for the New Republic in 2015 and in Feature Writing for New York in 2017, Traister won the award for Columns and Commentary for New York in 2018 for her columns on #MeToo. Under the leadership of Adam Moss and now David Haskell, New York is one of the most celebrated magazines of our time, this year alone earning nine Ellie nominations.

  The story of Elizabeth Warren’s career in education—at least in legal education—begins with one word: assumpsit. It is literally the first word of the first case she had to read for the first class she ever took as a twenty-four-year-old law student at Rutgers University in 1973. She has recalled, in vivid detail, the fear and confusion she’d felt as a young mother, former public-school teacher, and unlikely law student when her first law professor walked into the room and called on a student whose name began with A, asking her, “Ms. Aaronson, what is ‘assumpsit’?” Ms. Aaronson had not known, and neither had the next several students he called on after her. Ms. Warren also had not known what assumpsit meant, despite having done the reading for the day.

  Since her last name was at the end of the alphabet, Warren was spared public humiliation, but she left her first law-school class badly shaken, with a degree of clarity about how she must move forward: “Read all the words and look up what you don’t know.”

  In the following years, Warren became a law-school professor: first teaching night classes at Rutgers and eventually landing at Harvard, where she worked for sixteen years before becoming a U.S. senator from Massachusetts in 2013.

  In 1999, more than twenty years after Warren attended her first law class at Rutgers, Jay O’Keeffe, who now works as a consumer-protection lawyer in Roanoke, Virginia, attended his first law class at Harvard. It was taught by Warren. “She did not say anything like ‘Hello’ or ‘I’m Liz Warren, and welcome to Contracts,’ ” O’Keeffe recalled. “Instead, she put her books down, looked over her glasses at her seating chart, and said, ‘Mr. Szeliga, what’s ‘assumpsit’?’ ”

  Assumpsit—which, Warren told me, “means that the action is in contract rather than in tort”—became Professor Warren’s calling card, though she says no matter how widely advance warnings spread, 96 percent of new law students would walk in unprepared for it. When Joseph Kennedy III introduced Warren at the Democratic National Convention three summers ago, the Massachusetts representative and grandson of Robert Kennedy recalled his “first day of law school, my very first class” in 2006, during which he had been the unlucky mark: “Mr. Kennedy, do you own a dictionary? That’s what people do when they don’t know what a word means; they look it up,” he recalled her saying during his public immolation. “I never showed up unprepared for Professor Elizabeth Warren ever again.”

  “Yes, I do to my students what my teacher did to me,” Warren said gleefully, as she drank tea on her Cambridge sunporch in July. She spoke in the present tense, as she often does, about her teaching career, even though it’s been more than eight years since she has commanded a classroom.

  So much of Warren’s approach to pedagogy can be understood via the assumpsit gambit: With it, she establishes direct communication and affirms that she’s not going to be doing all the talking or all the thinking; she’s going to be hearing from everyone in the room. By starting with a question that so many get wrong but wind up learning the answer to, she’s also telegraphing that not knowing is part of the process of learning.

  Warren’s work as a teacher—the profession she dreamed of from the time she was in second grade—remains a crucial part of her identity, self-presentation, and communicative style. Her 2014 book, A Fighting Chance, opens with these sentences: “I’m Elizabeth Warren. I’m a wife, a mother, and a grandmother. For nearly all my life, I would have said I’m a teacher, but I guess I really can’t say that anymore.”

  But just because she’s not in the classroom these days doesn’t mean that those she’s talking to can’t smell it on her from a mile away. Leading up to the first round of debates, the Onion ran a headline reading, “Elizabeth Warren Spends Evenings Tutoring Underperforming Candidates.” And during a June episode of Desus & Mero, the two Bronx hosts did a riff on how Warren “definitely gives you teacher swag, but the teacher-that-cares-a-lot swag,” imagining her being the kind of teacher who comes to your house to tell your mom you have potential. “You came all the way to the Bronx for this? Wow … that blanquita cares.”

  Warren has won multiple teaching awards, and when I first profiled her in 2011, early in her Senate run and during what would be her last semester of teaching at Harvard, I spoke to students who were so over the moon about her that my editors decided I could not use many of their quotes because they were simply too laudatory. Many former students I interviewed for this story spoke in similarly soaring terms. One, Jonas Blank, described her as “patient and plainspoken, like an elementary-school teacher is expected to be, but also intense and sharp the way a law professor is supposed to be.” Several former students who are now (and were then) Republicans declined to talk to me on the record precisely because they liked her so much and did not want to contribute to furthering her political prospects by speaking warmly of her.

  Yet it remains an open question whether the work Warren does so very well—the profession about which she is passionate and that informs her approach to politics—will work for her on the presidential-campaign trail.

  Plenty of our former presidents have been teachers. Some of them, including William Howard Taft and Barack Obama, taught law; some, including Millard Fillmore, primary school. Warren has been both law professor and primary-school teacher, and as a person who ran for office for the first time in her sixties, her four decades as a teacher define her in a way Obama’s stint as an instructor in constitutional law never did. Here, as in all else, it matters that she’s a woman. Teaching is a profession that, in postagrarian America, was explicitly meant to be filled by women. That means teachers historically were some of the only women to wield certain kinds of public power: They could evaluate and punish, and so it was easy to resent them.

  In 2019, we have a historic number of female candidates in contention for the Democratic nomination. But many of them have approached politics via traditionally male paths: Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar were prosecutors, Kirsten Gillibrand worked at a white-shoe law firm, Tulsi Gabbard was in the military. Elite law schools were historically the domain of powerful men, but on the campaign trail, Warren is determined to establish herself not simply as an educator of the elite but also (with an anecdote she trots out often) as a kid who used to line up her dolls and pretend to assign them homework. The candidate’s presentation of her teaching career—from kids with disabilities at a New Jersey public school to fifth-grade Sunday-schoolers in Texas to Kennedys in Cambridge—as key to her identity means she is hurtling toward the White House as a specific kind of feminized archetype.

  It’s a risk. Schoolmarm, after all, is a derogatory descriptor, one that was deployed against Hillary Clinton, also a former law professor, and one that flicks at the well-worn stereotype of the stern lady who can force you to recite your times table. The phrase has already been used to critique Warren’s political demeanor, perhaps most memorably by Boston Democratic consultant Dan Payne. In 2012, Payne wrote a radio segment quoting women complaining about Warren’s “hectoring, know-it-all style”; he claimed she treated delegates to the Democratic convention “as if [they] were her pupils” and advised her to “stop the finger-wagging; it adds to her strict schoolmarm appearance and bossy manner.” Back in 2005, when Warren was testifying in front of the Senate on bankruptcy reform, challenging then-senator Joe Biden on stripping protections from families, Biden dismissed her with a slick, back-row smirk: “Okay, okay, I got it; you’re very good, professor.” More recently, Democratic adviser David Axelrod observed to the New York Tim
es Magazine’s Emily Bazelon that one of Warren’s drawbacks is that “she’s lecturing … people feel like she’s talking down to them.”

  Much of this is uncut, misogynistic claptrap, but Axelrod’s swipe edges toward a legitimate concern: If the election of our current president makes anything clear, it’s that many Americans do not want high-minded talk from their leaders. There is fair reason to worry that a candidate who is literally a professor runs the risk of alienating rather than energizing voters. In the primary field, Warren polls far higher with college-educated voters than she does with voters without a college degree.

  And that doesn’t begin to touch on what would happen should she get out of the primary: In February, Donald Trump Jr. offered a preview of how his father will likely frame a fight against an educator, telling the young conservatives at one of his father’s rallies, “You don’t have to be indoctrinated by these loser teachers.” It’s obviously a broader Republican line of argument. In July, former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker tweeted about “left-wing college professors” embracing socialism and showing “disdain for America.” Of course, Walker lost his 2018 gubernatorial reelection bid to former public-school teacher and administrator Tony Evers, in the same election cycle that Jahana Hayes, once named Teacher of the Year by Barack Obama, became the first black woman to represent Connecticut in the House of Representatives.

  In fact, with waves of teachers’ strikes politicizing voters in many states, it seems possible that 2020 could easily be framed as a contest between teachers coming for Republicans and Republicans eager to vilify teachers. The role our current president would play in such a setup takes no imagination: He is the ultimate back-of-the-class bully, mocking and menacing the woman with the answers standing at the front. We have seen this before.