by Toni Jensen
I know those chairs to be expensive, but no amount of querying makes them remember.
In calling these young men boys, I don’t mean to suggest I have a “boys will be boys” attitude—I don’t. Their lack of responsibility, awareness, care for others or themselves is startling, at times infuriating. I just mean that I feel so much older than they are, that I feel a sense of caretaking. I like to think I would feel this way if they were young women, if they were younger versions of who I was at that age, but I can’t say for sure this is the case.
I don’t have a younger sister but a brother. I’ve grown up knowing he’s my responsibility. I know part of why my mother is so keen on our living arrangement is because she worries about him. If we’re all being honest with ourselves, we’re all here together in this house in large part because my mother worries about my brother drinking too much while he’s away from home. If we’re being honest with ourselves, we’re all here together because my mother is worried about my brother turning into any version of my father.
I know how I feel is gendered, is problematic—I’m just reporting the news of my feelings, not defending them. But, also, whether you feel responsible for someone or not, you will carry the sounds of the police at your door in the middle of the night, shouting, “Get down and stay down,” and then, their hands shaking, saying to someone you know, “I almost shot you. Do you know how close? I almost shot you.” You’ll be able forever to conjure up the shaking hands, the officer’s voice, the sound of the boy’s voice, raised in apology.
This visit—those voices in the night, my flight down those stairs and to the front door—is why I downplay the second visit, the one Susie generates. It’s a good part of why I don’t perhaps see the danger, why I don’t care very much about Susie’s attempts toward trouble. Comparatively, the morning visit is nothing, is a mere irritation, is just a Wednesday morning.
VI.
Two years later, on a regular Wednesday afternoon, I’m sitting in my graduate nonfiction workshop in West Texas, waiting for class to start, when my brother sends me a text. After two years of living on Sargent Avenue, I left the Twin Cities for graduate school; living with all those tenants, all those boys, really became, in the end, after all, like another job, another gig, another side hustle.
“Have you seen this?” the text reads. He’s sent a picture of a headline and the start of a story. “Holy crap. Is that our neighbor?”
It is.
It’s September 2003. That Monday morning, Susie takes her antique revolver to the Hennepin County Government Center, where a court hearing has been scheduled. Susie is trying to get a restraining order against her cousin Shelley Joseph-Kordell, who had been helping Susie’s parents get legal distance from their daughter before the father died in July 2002. After, Susie accuses everyone, including her cousin, of trying to steal her parents’ savings, which were not extensive. A judge already has denied the restraining order. The Associated Press reports, “Court documents tell the tale of a power struggle between Berkovitz and the rest of her family over who should be the conservator of her father’s estate,” which totals $170,000.
That day, having bought the pistol in the summer, having practiced with it at a shooting range, or so she says, Susie brings the antique pistol in her purse to the government center building, one of the last such buildings in a major city to not have metal detectors. Susie follows her cousin Shelley to the restroom. Shelley knew there were no metal detectors in the building, and reportedly was afraid of her cousin. So she asked for a guard to accompany her.
First, Susie shoots and injures Richard Hendrickson, a lawyer involved with the case. Next, Shelley’s guard, who is unarmed, hears the shots and goes to call the police. They arrive quickly but also too late. Susie shoots Shelley four times, and she dies from her injuries. Hendrickson will recover from the gunshot wound to his neck, in what everyone says is a miraculous recovery.
Though I never met Shelley Joseph-Kordell, she’s the victim, and it’s important to tell a little of who she was, of who she might have been. In her 2016 article in City Pages, writer Susan Du threads together stories of Twin Cities residents whose lives were cut short through loopholes in gun laws or flaws in safety measures.
Of Shelley Joseph-Kordell, Du writes that her “purpose in life was to comfort the elderly.” Shelley started a business in the 1980s called Rent a Daughter, and Du reports, “It was one of the only geriatric care firms in Minnesota. Shelley kept it contained to a handful of clients, whom she adored. But it would eventually evolve into Pathfinder, a renowned name in senior care.”
In her work on behalf of her uncle, Susie’s father, Shelley tried to build a bridge between Susie and her home, her family members, and she was killed for her trying, for her kindness.
In an interview with City Pages, Shelley’s niece Rachael Joseph says Shelley’s daughter was pregnant at the time of the trial. “It’s just something my family will never get over, having her ripped out of our life like that,” Rachael says. “There’s a hole where she belongs.”
Women, of course, are not the common perpetrators of gun violence; they’re far more commonly the casualties. If Shelley is rare for her goodwill, her kindness, Susie, then, is uncommon, is rare in her violence. After her arrest, Susie tells police, “Shelley brought on her own death.”
With these and other statements, with a whole life’s history of erratic behavior, the conventional wisdom could be that this is a story about mental illness. But Susie resisted diagnosis and then any possibility of treatment. She had the presence of mind and the planning capacity to buy a gun, to train to use it, to conceal it on the day of the crime.
Though many question her mental stability and at times her mental capacity, Susie’s statements to law enforcement are clear: “Shelley brought on her own death.” Susie was not diagnosed with any particular mental illness, and an insanity defense was not used at trial. In a jury trial, she was found guilty of first-degree premeditated murder and attempted first-degree premeditated murder.
Before Amy Klobuchar becomes a senator and then later a presidential candidate, she’s the Hennepin County prosecutor who tries the case against Susie, who gets the conviction.
This election season, before she leaves the race, Klobuchar is my mother’s favorite of the presidential candidates. Perhaps the only thing Klobuchar and Susan Berkovitz have in common other than the trial is the tendency of the world to declare them difficult. It’s a word used often for both, and I highlight it because its use represents more about how women are viewed than it does about the women toward whom the term is lobbed.
When the former owners of my house next to Susie’s told me she was difficult, I was sure I could handle the situation in large part because the word—difficult—is used so carelessly and with such gendered connotation that it has, for me, lost its shape or definition. More often than not, if someone describes a woman to me as difficult, I find that woman to be delightful or unusual or unorthodox. It’s a word most often used to censure women who live unconventional lives.
I was wrong to ignore the warnings about Susie—but also everyone was wrong in labeling her only difficult. She was dangerous, and after the murder, neighbor upon neighbor, including the women from whom I’d bought my house, came forward to say they were not surprised. One article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune even starts with the line: “If anyone got along with Susan Rae Berkovitz, there’s little evidence of it.” Yes, she was difficult, and yet I did get along with her for most of the time I lived next door to her.
I’m interested in the narratives we tell about women we’ve labeled difficult. The label seems plain enough on the face of it, as most labels do. But I’m suggesting once a woman’s labeled difficult, she’s put on a shelf, untouchable—and not in the Madonna/whore sort of way. Rather, she’s put up on a high shelf, rendered literally untouchable, as in—don’t touch, do
n’t speak to, don’t vote for—ignore, ignore, ignore at all costs.
I met Susie’s sister once, after the parents had moved out and Susie had as well, but before the horror at the court building. Her sister was there, next door on Sargent Avenue, sleeves rolled up, cleaning out the house, throwing into a rented dumpster decades of receipts, papers, old food, and other assorted possessions—the stuff that makes up a life.
We had a conversation about her parents, about her sister. What I remember most from it is how kind her eyes were, how hard she was working. What I remember, too, is the overwhelming feeling of shame, that I’d believed Susie about her, even if only a little bit.
VII.
What does it mean to make a home, to be at home? What does it mean to be made to leave it?
During the years on Sargent Avenue, I have college friends who live nearby, and for the first time in my life, I have only one job and it’s a job with regular hours. After five P.M., we go to dinner, to the movies, to the bar, out dancing. I read books and walk the dogs. My friends play in bands or love live music, and I go listen to their bands.
If this seems regular, everyday, not worth commentary, I understand. But it’s the one time in my life where I’m not going from one job to the other job, where no one emails after five P.M. to want my work-related time. The two years are bathed in the light of this—of time and regular hours and the ability to participate in leisure.
I walk around lakes, meet friends for shared sandwiches at Como Park, spend weekends browsing book stacks at Native-owned bookstores, drinking coffee at a Native-owned coffee shop. There are Dakota and Anishinaabe and Métis and all manner of other Native people everywhere. There are Native people in everyday urban life, in everyday urban America. I love this more than I can properly explain.
It seems deeply improbable now that anyone, including me, would have thought my living arrangements in that house were a good idea. It seems deeply improbable I would have heard about “the neighbor” and thought fine, no problem, when can we all move in? But I was twenty-nine years old the year I moved there, and I had been working since always.
I had been working for wages since I was ten years old, in jobs including: babysitting (ages 10–14), detasseling corn (ages 15–18), waitressing (ages 16–24), bartending (ages 22–24), newspaper reporting and editing (ages 18–23), telemarketing (age 20), public relations (ages 28–29), technical writing (ages 29–31), and teaching (ages 21–29; 31–present day). At sixteen with the waitressing job, then, I began the two-job hustle. It’s no surprise I have nostalgia for the two years I set the hustle down.
I was so swayed by the idea of less work, of leisure, of comfort. I was swayed by the built-in drawers in the dining room, the shine of the wood. I wanted, even if only for a brief moment, to have what was considered good in regular, middle-class, everyday America.
In particular, in that first year in the Cities, though, I had one job and one job only. I recreated. I leisured. And I lived next door to a woman who would very shortly become a murderer.
But this is America. Everywhere we live, our neighbors may commit gun violence. Everywhere we live, the police may commit gun violence on us or on our neighbors. To think otherwise is to participate in a dangerous sort of nostalgia that leaves us too comfortable in an imaginary past place, in an imaginary past time.
I felt at home, in part, on Sargent Avenue, because and not in spite of Susie’s presence next door. Everyone in the neighborhood loathed her. Everyone avoided her. I have to consider that my belonging happened partly because Susie did not belong. My house, then, even overstuffed with boys, even filled with our parties and noise, with the occasional police presence at our door, was not ever going to be the house most hated, most vilified.
I don’t have nostalgia for my hometown or my home state or my country. But I have a complicated nostalgia for those two years in the Cities, for the two years I lived next door to a woman who was plotting a murder.
VIII.
If it’s true I see those years through the lens of nostalgia, I also think of that time as anomalous or as the in-between years. The years I lived in Minnesota are the only non-teaching years in my adult life, the only ones spent pushing against the schedule of semesters, of fall meaning back to school and spring meaning graduation. They are then also the only years free from summer meaning working two and three jobs, so there’s enough money for the next year, so the cycle can start all over again.
There are times I grow nostalgic for the moments of leisure but am also glad to be back in familiar rhythms.
I never saw the Minnesota state bird, the common loon, though I heard many people imitate its cry and argue over whose imitation was best. From loon.org’s “Loon Behavior Fact Sheet,” I learn, “If you approach too near a nesting loon or a loon with chicks it might give a ‘tremolo’ alarm call that sounds like crazy laughter. If the loon is very agitated it may rear up and thrash about in the water. If you are close to a loon that is calling or displaying, please move away!” Also, I learn that loons “use mud, grass, moss, pine needles and/or clumps of mud and vegetation collected from the lake bottom to build a nest.”
The seriousness of the language is of course also comic, but there’s something to be said for sounding the alarm bell through something that sounds like crazy laughter, there’s something to be said for building a home from the bottom up, from what’s already there in the first place.
IX.
That fall of 2003, just after the news of the shooting, I go for the first time to Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge outside Muleshoe, Texas, to see the arrival of the sandhill cranes who winter there. About seventy thousand of them arrive in the early fall and stay through March on the saline lakes that pepper the 6,440 acres of the refuge’s short-grass prairie.
Though the landscape may seem barren at first glance, a virtual no-man’s-land, the cranes share their wintering ground with Swainson’s hawks and other raptors, with black-tailed prairie dogs, badgers, and rattlesnakes.
I bring with me that day two bottles of water, a few granola bars, and an overpowering feeling both of déjà vu and of unease and uncertainty about leaving Minnesota, about being absent during a time of turmoil and grief. I suppose it’s odd to have survivor’s guilt, but that is probably the closest to what I feel or the closest to what I know how to name.
When the sandhill cranes take flight or when they come in en masse to land, the sound of their wings is thunderous. Before they draw close enough, though, when they’re still high in the sky, they trill to each other, a lovely sound that clearly is meant as communication from one crane to the next.
According to ecologist Christine Hass, “Sandhill Cranes use at least 20 different vocalizations, including soft purring sounds for maintaining contact among family groups, loud squawking flight calls for coordinating groups in flight and on the ground, and trumpeting alarm and unison calls (and many variations of each type).”
This fall day, the purring gives way to squawking and then settles back into purring once they’ve landed. They seem to tiptoe on their stilt legs along the sandy soil, their long, slender necks stretched up, still alert. Their elegant heads swivel so that the red patches around their eyes seem on display.
I fall into the rhythm of watching them, of listening to their language. It’s clear after a little while has passed that they’re familiar with the place, that this for them is one version of home.
Late that night, back in Lubbock, back in town, I read a little more about the cranes. I learn the small pools of water I saw at the refuge outside Muleshoe are shallow saline lakes attractive to the same cranes that migrate through the Sandhills of Nebraska near where I lived in Valentine.
Webster’s secondary definition for verge is the verb definition: “1a of the sun: to move or tend toward the horizon: SINK, 1b: to move or extend in some direction or toward so
me condition, 2: to be in transition or change.”
In other words, like the birds, in many ways, I’ve come a long way to see a place much like one I already know—I’ve come a long way to find another version of home.
The Worry Line
I.
When my daughter is born, I make the nurse say it twice—“Girl, it’s a girl.” We had not wanted to know the gender, or more precisely, my mother had not wanted to know. My boyfriend mostly agreed with her on the not knowing. He and I had known each other for three years but had been dating only five months when we learned I was pregnant. On the baby’s gender, I didn’t really care about either of their opinions, which were much stronger than my own. I didn’t care either way because I was certain I already knew. Though I hedged all bets, said repeatedly there was no way to be sure, I had been. I was certain I was carrying a boy.
It’s the winter of 2006, and boys are being shot all over America. Pittsburgh, where we live, provides ample illustration. We’re years before the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue, well before Pittsburghers will take to the streets to protest police officer Michael Rosfeld’s fatal shooting of unarmed teenager Antwon Rose II.
Still, in 2006, fifty-six people are murdered in Pittsburgh and 1,593 assaulted. Men and boys are shooting and being shot, and they’re leaving behind grandmothers and sisters, wives and mothers.
Overall, today, as I write in 2020, though crime is lower than it was when we lived there, Pittsburgh’s violent crime rate is 109 percent higher than the average for Pennsylvania and is 71 percent higher than the national average.