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Recovering from a traumatic brain injury How stress affects the way we eat

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE

FEMINIST

Why do we fear the label?

MFC% OC@ @JJL< + A8EL8IP )'(+

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Help, I Need a Cookie

small talk by PAYAL MARATHE

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Sky Gutters

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Not Our Town

small talk by ANDREA JANUTA

crit by MATTHEW LLOYD-THOMAS

I CAN SAY MY NAME observer by Eddy Wang

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THE SLEUTHS WILL SEE YOU NOW

An Escape from the Four Walls profile by ABIGAIL BESSLER

Jenna fiction by MEREDITH REDICK

feature by JENNIFER GERSTEN

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At the Core personal essay by MILLICENT CRIPE

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Knicks and Knacks

photo essay by BRIANNA LOO

The F-Word cover story by AMELIA EARNEST

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Trace

personal essay by LUCY FLEMING

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE Editors Sarah Maslin Joy Shan Managing Editors Abigail Carney Alec Joyner Photography Editor Henry Ehrenberg Design Editors Jennifer Lu Daniel Roza Mohan Yin Associate Editors Jennifer Gersten Andrea Januta Claire Mufson

Copy Editors Adrian Chiem Ian Gonzalez Elizabeth Malchione Douglas Plume Design Staff Renee Bollier Marisa Lowe Anna Smilow Editor in Chief Julia Zorthian Publisher Julie Leong Cover photograph by Henry Ehrenberg

by Will Adams

I

f you find yourself underwater with long toenails, how fortunate that you have the Book of Sports, or, Man of Spirit’s Companion (London, J. Bailey, 1819), which contains illustrated guides for “The Proper Way to Cut One’s Toenails Underwater,” “A Correct Abstract of the Acts of Parliament relative to Angling,” and a complicated wrestling maneuver known as “the Cornish Hug.” It also includes advice for removing “a companion that disturbs your mirth.” To be rid of him, “with your left hand take hold of his collar behind, and with your right put between his legs as far as his codpiece, and lift him up easily, and thrust him out of the room...” This sage recommendation, however, is tempered by caution: “If you lift him too hard, you will throw him on his nose.”

REAL TALK

KINARI WEBB

Founder and president of Health in Harmony, an organization that works with communities in Indonesia to develop programs that provide affordable healthcare. These programs lessen Indonesians’ reliance on environmentally destructive practices (such as logging), leading to a healthier and more sustainable future.

Excerpts from a Jan. 14, 2014 Branford College Master’s Tea

ON VISITING INDONESIA FOR THE FIRST TIME “I fell in love with Indonesia. But I had no idea what poverty meant until I went to Indonesia. What it means to have no healthcare whatsoever.”

ON FEELING HOPELESS “It doesn’t matter whether I have hope or not. I just have to give my whole soul to the world.”

ON LOGGING “If your child is going to die today, you will cut down the forest to pay for their healthcare. And that’s the right choice to make, actually. But it’s a problem.”

ON LISTENING “The local people will tell you exactly what the

issues are and how to solve them.”

ON AN EXCITED CHILD “He came running … and he’s like, ‘I just have to tell you, I’m so excited, our village has gone green this month!’”

ON HAVING TO SPEND TWO YEARS IN BED AFTER BEING STUNG BY A BOX JELLYFISH “It was an amazing experience … One of the things that was so wonderful was to watch my team take over.”

ON THE FUTURE OF FOREST PRESERVATION EFFORTS “Circles of compassion are expanding. It’s not perfect, it’s not there yet, but it is getting better.”

4 | Vol. XLI, No. 3 | December 2013

LAUGHING MATTER

FROM THE BEINECKE

Man’s Best Friend

by Eve Houghton

Mental Floss recently published an article about what would have happened if certain historical events hadn’t occurred. Due to space constraints, some had to be left out.

They are listed below.

WHAT IF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS HAD ACTUALLY REACHED WHAT IS NOW INDIA INSTEAD OF WHAT IS NOW AMERICA? Effect: Owen Wilson doesn’t have that weird thing that’s going on with his nose.

WHAT IF SOCRATES HADN’T BEEN POISONED WITH HEMLOCK? Effect: Algeria declares independence from France on July 6, 1962 instead of July 5, 1962.

WHAT IF THE MILWAUKEE BREWERS HAD WON THE 1982 WORLD SERIES INSTEAD OF THE ST. LOUIS CARDINALS? Effect: The apocalypse. The streets are flooded with rivers of blood.

WHAT IF AL GORE HAD WON THE 2000 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION INSTEAD OF GEORGE W. BUSH? Effect: The apocalypse. The streets are flooded with rivers of Mrs. Butterworth’s maple syrup.

WHAT IF ALBERT EINSTEIN HAD NEVER DEVELOPED THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY? Effect: In 2007, Adolf Hitler rises from the dead and gets his own reality show on E! that’s pretty good for the first two seasons but after that kinda overstays its welcome.

WHAT IF BEYONCÉ KNOWLES HADN’T RELEASED HER WIDELY ACCLAIMED SELF-TITLED ALBUM IN 2013?

Effect: No effect.

John Bull and His Friends

I

n 1900, Fred Rose created “John Bull and his Friends: A Serio-Comic Map of Europe.” According to the reference key on the cartoon political map, “Russia, in spite of the Tzar’s noble effort to impress her with his own peaceful image, is but an Octopus still. Far and wide her tentacles are reaching. Poland and Finland already know the painful process of absorption. China feels the power of her suckers, and two of her tentacles are invidiously creeping towards Persia and Afghanistan … ” Meanwhile, in Great Britain, the two wild cats of Transvaal and the Orange Free State attack John Bull. At his feet, a letter from Uncle Sam reads, “We wish you success. P.S. But we hope ye’ll get likked.”

E

mma was walking to a funeral. She believed in dressing up for God and the Devil at dying parties. She’d stolen the red-soled shoes. That had been easy.

You’re only what people expect of you and no one expected that of her. Though it was winter, the air smelled like drugstore lilac perfume and gasoline. The last time she’d seen Johanna here it was warm. They’d held hands then, a coy gesture reminiscent of their childhood, before the fire. Johanna had said, “I hope you’re past it.” Emma had said, “Of course.” Johanna had been Emma’s all, past growing up, past the salami sandwiches cut into neat triangles and the asphalt baseball field, past the drugs, the nights swollen with heat. Then there was the fire and Johanna got scared. She left Emma for Wisconsin and a man who liked golf. Emma waited at least a hundred moons, but then once she decided, it was easy to fly to Wisconsin. Simple to tell Johanna that she loved her and give her the belladonna wine and hold her hand. Six days later, she walked to Johanna’s funeral, in Johanna’s shoes.

BIT LIT

MAP OF THE MONTH

by Abigail Carney

DESKSIDE WITH HENRY HARUTUNIAN

HEAD COACH OF YALE VARSITY FENCING

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1 Family photos Multimeter for

1

2 testing foils and epees

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3 Poster of fencing stamps

4 Articles on Yale fencing

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5

5 Yale fencing roster

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( 2 ( ( (

The Sleuths Will See You Now feature

The New Haven Insect Inquiry Office figures out what’s bugging us

L

ike the décor of my old pediatrician’s waiting room, the design of the Insect Inquiry Office at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station (CAES) kindly informs you of everything you could have done to avoid making the visit in the first place. Flyers on the front desk begging “DON’T MOVE FIREWOOD” lie adjacent to a file holder stuffed with chirpy self-help brochures, which make up a rogues gallery of the most recent pests to plague the state. In apoplectic red, a poster urging “KEEP CALM and BED BUGS BEGONE” hangs beside a pink bed bug plushie nailed to the wall.

The morning’s first client was an elderly man dressed in black, clutching 6 | Vol. XLI, No. 4 | January 2014

by Jennifer Gersten photography by Victor Kang

a Ziploc bag in his right fist. Like most visitors, he had arrived without an appointment. Dr. Gale Ridge, a slender redheaded Brit who became the director of the Insect Inquiry Office in 2008, rose to greet him and motioned to the lone seat across from the front desk. The man sat gingerly, eyeing the holiday tinsel on the table — festooned not with Christmas baubles, but shimmering, plastic dragonflies.

He’d been bitten, he said, rubbing a rosy patch on his neck. Ridge pushed the bag under a microscope. A brown mash filled the nearby computer screen.

Ridge fiddled with the knobs, and a tangle of legs came into focus.

“Yeah — you crushed it, but it’s just

a small spider,” she said cheerfully, peering at the mash. She handed him a clipboard and pen to write up a report.

“It really hung on there,” the man added weakly, his hand still anchored to his neck.

“Well, most of these critters have claws, and they hang on in a state of total terror,” she said, “ You would, too.

It’s like you have a boat, sinking — well, what do you do? You hang onto the boat!” Ridge laughed, pretending to grip some imaginary vessel for dear life.

She inspected the spider bite. “Have you got any red? Mm, just a little irritated,” she pronounced. “Given our size, spiders are only going to bite in situations of dire peril.” Sheepishly, the

feature man replied he might have grabbed it a tad hard. Standing up straighter and looking relieved, he left the office. Ridge turned to me with her hands on her lap, smiling — another case closed.

The office came into existence in 1901, after an increase in reports of the gypsy moth and other pests across Connecticut prompted the governor to fund a state entomology department.

It is the only government office in the state that will, free of charge, identify the many-legged, pincered, and hairy arthropods brought in by befuddled civilians. Yale Pest Elimination brings students’ pest reports to the office for analysis, and residents, farmers, and business owners all rely on the office for bug-related advice.

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rom 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Mondays through Fridays, there are at most three people at work in the office: Ridge, and lab assistants Katherine Dugas and Rose Hiskes.

During certain months, the sleuthing is easier. Sometimes the office can predict when they’ll receive reports of one bug or another, like the cicadas this past July

and August or the termites after the first rain of spring.

But the team can’t predict everything.

Ridge recalled a man who had trapped a beetle in his cup of iced coffee. The bug, after taking a few sips, scrabbled against the plastic in a sugar-fueled frenzy before falling to the bottom, twitching as though exorcised. Ridge had to run the beetle under cold water before it calmed down enough for her to view it properly.

“Remember the photocopy?” Dugas chimed in, referring to a couple who had smashed the insect under the glass of a photocopier, hit “print,” and emailed her an image of the monster mash for her to puzzle over. Once, in the mail, Ridge even received an insect squished to a pulp, the legs of which she had to reconstruct before issuing a call. Because certain species lose characteristic colors and features when they die, Ridge also occasionally performs insect CPR — warming the insects up, then blowing vigorously from tail to head — to revive specimens that are near death.

This summer will mark Ridge’s 15th year with the CAES, and she says

the office hasn’t been wrong about an insect since she’s been in charge.

Among Dugas, Hiskes, and herself, Ridge said, the three have a working knowledge of every living arthropod, so there’s slim chance citizens’ inquiries won’t be answered. The problem for the office isn’t figuring those answers out. In recent years, the problem has been dealing with the people who wish they’d never asked for the bugs in the first place.

T

he word “bug” shares the etymology of the word “bogeyman.” Both derive from the Middle English word bugge or bogge, for something that provokes fright.

An adult human, on average, is 70 times the height of a spider, yet the human is usually the one who shrieks when his two eyes meet the spider’s eight. Ridge discourages her clients from killing the insects outright: If your sympathies aren’t swayed by their crispy shells and bulbous eyes, then consider that our longtime attitude of “what should I spray?” has unintentionally generated large populations of hyper-

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feature resistant superbugs. To civilians who contemplate more creative methods of pest elimination — pouring gasoline into yellow jacket hives and lighting them on fire, for instance — Dugas responds with an emphatic “no.”

We are a society of swatters, giants that crumble before bodies the size of our fingernails. These days, the bug arousing the most abject panic for the office’s clients is about the size of an apple seed. It is Cimex lectularius — the bed bug.

Scientists aren’t sure why the bed bug returned in the late 1990s after 40 years of dormancy.

However the critters got here, they’re settling in just fine: Today, bed bugs comprise 25 percent of the office’s caseload, and reports are on the rise.

For all the species’ prosperity, Ridge said the bugs could scarcely have picked a worse choice of host than the flighty, nervous human.

Bed bugs, reclusive and shy by nature, are constantly on the lookout for a blood meal before they can scuttle into a crevasse for safety. Humans, huge and fidgety, seem like poor choices for a leisurely nosh.

But the quick-moving bugs are diligent feeders, so they adapt to our behavior, waiting until we are the most vulnerable and least suspecting before they bite, leaving welts and irritation but causing no medical harm. They might cling to our clothes, or latch onto the elderly and sedentary when they’re dozing in their chairs.

Like unwanted lovers, they sneak into our beds when we are resting. This is, perhaps, the bugs’ most terrifying attribute: For everything humans are capable of knowing, something so bold as to infiltrate our very person could still escape our detection.

“There’s a social stigma,” Ridge continued, “that you’re a dirty person if you have the bugs, that it’s your fault for bringing them in. So people don’t communicate, and they don’t cooperate.

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By our inaction and lack of reporting, we are actually aiding the bed bug. The human conversation regarding bed bugs must change if there is to be any progress.”

“Most people who come to me are in a complete state of panic, crying over the phone, crying here,” Ridge added. “People take it very personally.”

One young woman, momentarily triumphant when Ridge confirmed that her bagged specimen was indeed a bed bug, suddenly became catatonic with

said. The staff avoids the word “bed bug” — they’ll speak in code, calling out “Cimex!” instead, which gives them a chance to prepare the Kleenex if the client seems particularly unwieldy.

The office sleuths give clients a few minutes to collect themselves before offering advice. Dugas likens a patient’s recovery from the news of bed bugs to the five stages of grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, and depression before muted acceptance of the facts.

It’s knowledge — a few calmly delivered methods of recourse — that finally makes people simmer down.

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fear. She sat at the front desk for nearly an hour before coming to her wits. “She was gone, completely brain fried,” Ridge recalled. “Shame, disgust, depression, stress — all the negative aspects of our existence show up when this insect shows up.”

Children brought along to the office stare as their parents bawl and shake over the news of bed bugs. Ridge, a single mother to three children, often acts like a parent at the office. “You’re the authority, but you have to bring yourself down to their level,” Ridge

ugas isn’t free of fear herself.

She’s an arachnophobe, she admits, who will yelp if presented with a spider.

“We’re all human here,” she says, without a trace of defensiveness.

But she’s trained her intellect to kick in faster than most. “I’ll start referring to [the spider] as a he or she, which gets people really disarmed, and then they’re curious as opposed to afraid.”

But some civilians won’t — and can’t — calm down. On an almost weekly basis, the office receives clients with Ekbom syndrome, or delusory parasitosis (DP): the belief that one is being inhabited by arthropods or other organisms. DP sufferers often report unremitting itchiness or the sensation of being bitten on their hands, in their throats, and all over their bodies, terrified that they have become the site of an insect siege. Some clients bring in slight wounds and scars inflicted by bona fide bugs, but DP sufferers have been known to wound themselves, clawing mercilessly at their own skin to expunge the swarms from their bodies. A DP client once approached the office staff convinced her hair had become home to head lice. On another day, a client arrived with stories of insects he had unconsciously invented, delivering a panicked, elaborate description of these fictive insects’ biology and behavior.

feature DP clients come to the office from all over the state in search of validation, Ridge said, hoping for assurance that the sensations that plague them are genuine and not indications of a fraying mind.

“We’ll never use the ‘c-word’ on them — ‘crazy,’” Dugas said. “We’re never going to say they’re not really itchy.

They assume you’ve passed judgment on them, and then there’s no way we can help.” Dugas joked that Ridge should have a degree in psychology by now, but the office staff is licensed to work with bugs only. Lacking the proper training, they are obligated to suggest, gently but firmly, that the client see a medical doctor. Interacting with DP clients is “draining,” according to Dugas. “Once we go out the door, we try not to take it home,” she said. “But my roommates can tell how busy of a day it’s been based on how stupid I am off duty.”

Currently, Ridge leads the effort to get people calm-and-carrying-on about bed bugs. As the chair of the

Connecticut Coalition Against Bed Bugs, the state’s hub for bed bugrelated issues, she publishes fact sheets and travels around the state delivering lectures and holding forums on bed bug management. Her latest project is legislation to foster cooperation between tenants and landlords when reporting and exterminating pests. She hopes that, given time, the bugs will be less of a problem as humans are more willing to work together in search of solutions.

“With the bed bugs, that’s social work right there,” she said.

R

idge has a picture of a bed bug set as her computer wallpaper.

Hidden behind the front desk is the terrarium, which, upon first glance, seems to only contain a few rolls of toilet paper tubes. Dugas, grinning mischievously, shows me later that the tubes are teeming with termites.

“I have to carry two masters,” Ridge explained: her fascination with bugs, and the necessity of advising clients

on how best to dispose of them.

Health Department officials think they hear reverence in her tone when she discusses bugs, but it’s more of a healthy respect: Life, after all, wouldn’t exist without the stunningly adaptable arthropod, who in diversity outranks any other living fauna. They comprise about 80 percent of all creatures on the planet. For aid in feeding, pollination, organic decomposition, everything alive owes arthropods a well-deserved thanks — or, in the case of more troublesome pests, at least a grudging acknowledgement.

The office sleuths speak, said Dugas, on the bugs’ behalf. But the sleuths are really there for us, as biped allies who will hear us out when the polypeds teem irascibly at our doors.

“We want to see people walking away feeling ‘I know what I need to do,’” Dugas said. “Some people send donations and thank-you notes. That’s not our goal, but to me that says we did a good job. For me, that’s definitely brownie points.”

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small talk

HELP, I need a cookie

BY PAYAL MARATHE

ILLUSTRATION BY ANNELISA LEINBACH

A

t 11 a.m. on the first Friday of the semester, Commons Dining Hall was filling up for lunch.

Weary-eyed students trudged through the door. Some complained to their friends about shopping period. Others sat silently with their laptops and surfed Yale BlueBook. Most had big plates of food — salad, a lot of pizza, Yale’s creamy mac and cheese, vegetables soaked in oil, French fries.

Margaret Read, a research associate at Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity, met me outside the dining hall.

We walked in, set our winter jackets down, and headed to the servery. We hit desserts first. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to grab a chocolate-chip blondie (or maybe two). It had been a long week, and I was too tired to maintain my New Year’s resolution of healthy eating. Turns out there may be a scientific cause for my craving.

A psychologist would say I was “egodepleted.”

Recent research in psychology and behavioral economics points to ego depletion as a major factor in why people have trouble exercising selfcontrol when it comes to food. We go to bed intent on eating healthily the next day. We wake up motivated to cook a simple breakfast and swap a burger for salad at lunch. But, after a stressful day of classes, at dinner we give in. Willpower is an exhaustible resource. And the more we dedicate to studying — the more we resist the urge to procrastinate, sleep in, or watch TV — the less we have left when we choose our food.

I asked Read to explain my latemorning craving for dessert. I was a college student drained by the first week of classes, she said. In a few weeks, I’d be a college student drained by midterms.

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“Whether or not you have a tendency towards stress eating is irrelevant,” Read said. As the semester gets busier, she continued, “You’re going to spend less time and mental energy on food.”

Experts who study decision-making claim that ego depletion has been supported by studies in the lab as well.

Yale School of Management professor Ravi Dhar explained that even simple tasks can take a toll on willpower.

In one study, subjects were asked to memorize either an eight-digit number or a three-digit number. The five extra digits made a difference: Subjects in the eight-digit group were more likely to choose indulgent food over healthy food because they had exerted more of a strain on their working memory.

“When you pass around a plate of cookies early in the day, people can resist, but if you pass the plate around at 5 p.m. after school and work, everyone grabs one,” Dhar said.

Near the desserts in Commons is the pizza station. Read pointed out that pizza is appealing because it’s already a full meal in itself: there’s nothing that needs to be spread, tossed, or put together. “When you’re in a time crunch, you’re not going to scan the whole area,” Read said. “You’re also not going to spend time making a sandwich or creating an interesting salad.”

As we continued through the servery, Read noticed several aspects of the dining hall’s set-up that could help nudge students in a healthier direction.

At the salad bar, she pointed out that the numerous fixings — the greens, the carrots, the cucumbers, the tofu — were easily reachable from both sides.

A second salad bar was just ahead, past two buckets of bananas. Multiple stations give people multiple chances to eat healthily, Read said, as does putting

healthy food in convenient places.

At the deli station at the end of the servery, Read was impressed by the signs showing ingredient lists and nutrition facts. Also displayed on a plate was the sandwich of the day: chickpeas, spinach, and tomatoes on a whole-wheat pita. It wasn’t your average college lunch staple, but Read appreciated that the dining hall was trying to offer new combinations. “You might not think of chickpea and spinach together, and adding that variety is important to a healthy diet,” she said.

Displayed meals also save students the time of having to think up a creative combination themselves.

Overall, Read said, there are a number of things that the dining hall is doing well to nudge people in healthier directions. The bottom line, she added, is that unhealthy food options are always going to be there, and stress is always going to be a part of life. We’re always going to find frosted cupcakes appetizing, and there will never be a time when we can reserve all of our willpower for healthy eating. To a certain extent, we’re always egodepleted.

The dining hall was much busier when we left. Whether we’re at the beginning, middle, or end of the semester, Commons is always going to be full of sleep-deprived, ego-depleted students who don’t think twice about that second blondie. Instead of giving in, Read suggests that we tune into our bodies before entering a dining hall. She advises us to ask, “What am I craving?”

Walk a different path so that you bypass the desserts completely. And keep in mind that even though healthy eating might not seem like a priority during midterm week, it might just be your depleted ego talking.

small talk

SKY GUTTERS

BY ANDREA JANUTA PHOTO BY ALEXANDRA SCHMELING

I

arrived on campus just before the autumn breezes. As I hauled boxes up stairwells and skimmed course books, sweat dampened my T-shirt and beaded across my nose.

It was my last time moving into a dorm, my first time moving into Berkeley. On those muggy September nights, I lay awake in my new bedroom, surrounded by half-unpacked boxes and a building full of strangers. Fall, with its relaxing temperatures and comforting routines, had yet to arrive.

In those final summer days, open casement windows jutted out from the rough granite dormitories overlooking Cross Campus. Evening carried the crickets’ voices and delivered cool relief to our bedrooms. For those of us on the highest floor, evening also brought the temptation to break the rules and step out into the gutters.

When I first tucked my legs and ducked my neck through a fourth-floor window, the temperature dropped several degrees and the stuffy, insistent lights were replaced by forgiving darkness. The stone of the two-footwide trench chilled my toes, and the shin-high Gothic parapets provided cover. Crouching down, I peered through the gaps in the battlement to spy on students in the opposite building.

These rocky hiding places used to

be balconies. In the ’70s, my mother and her classmates ventured here to drink, smoke, and debate life’s mysteries. In the ’80s, delinquent students caused a stir when they hurled rocks at pedestrians below. But in 1999, amid worries of plugged drains, structural strains, and precariously balanced undergraduates, the Berkeley dormitories were remodeled and the balconies were turned into gutters.

The original terracotta tiling was lost beneath poured concrete and the floor receded into a narrow channel with steeply canted sides. One design goal was to promote drainage; another was to keep students indoors by rendering the space uncomfortable and uninviting. The balconies are now off-limits. Administrators warm their warnings with jokes about “billy goat wannabes,” but their message is clear: Roof and gutter climbing are regarded as trespassing in “restricted areas.”

Guilty as I feel, I know I’m not the only curious goat. Graduates have smiled knowingly upon their mention.

One late night, I watched silhouettes across the way pass a lawn-chair and a grill through their window like shadowy burglars.

For some, exploring upward is a way to redirect conventional onward momentum. Above the line of sight,

deadlines and existential worries slip away like water through gutters. A cramped ledge becomes an escape from campus, and an explorer becomes an invisible observer of the scene below.

Passers-by rarely look up; they look forward, always forward. Saturday night library-goers, drunken carousers, kissing couples, the lone traveler whizzing by on a bike: None gives a thought to the worlds above them.

Once, for an entire year, an illicitly installed hot tub sat unnoticed on a Cross Campus roof. Vertical distance can be greater than horizontal distance.

The distance you feel when staring from the ledge above is only heightened by its prohibition. For that reason, a trip to the gutters is never prolonged — the length of a Lucky Strike as it smolders near pursed lips, or the span of a conversation between nestled lovers before they collect their thoughts and belongings and clamber inside.

As the seasons changed, I began to see my breath outside; I made new friends. The temptations of the gutters faded. But once in a while, I find myself needing space, so I crack my window and scramble out. When crouching above to watch passers-by below becomes uncomfortable and uninviting, I straighten my legs out, lie flat in the gutter, and stare up into the sky.

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NOT OUR TOWN

Seven years later, the Cheshire murders are still haunting the state of Connecticut

BY MATTHEW LLOYD-THOMAS

D

eath row. Two tiers. Eight men on the top, two on the bottom, surrounding a room with three small circular tables bolted to the ground. The light green walls are cold and sterile. The doors closing the men into their cells for 23 hours every day are thick and impenetrable. Only small slivers allow the guard — who check on each inmate every 15 minutes — to pass food into the cells.

These 10 men are still here, nearly two years after Connecticut abolished the death penalty, because of the crime of two: Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky. Their crime — a brutal murder of three women in the peaceful suburbs of Connecticut — played an outsized role in the state’s reckoning over whether it was within its right to put a human being to death.

I had come to Northern Correctional Institution — the home of the state’s death row, nestled in the woods of 12 | Vol. XLI, No. 4 | January 2014

Somers, Conn. — to learn more about the ramifications of the crime nearly seven years later, and to get a sense of how the two men who uprooted suburbia’s sense of security live.

T

he series of events that brought me to Northern began on July 23, 2007 in the quiet town of Cheshire, Conn. Situated in the middle of the state, Cheshire is a town of 28,000 people and long driveways leading to colonial homes. Parents walk their children to intersections, where they hop on buses driving to good schools. They take walks through Sleeping Giant State Park and bike along the Farmington Canal Trail.

On July 23, as evening set in, Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her daughter shopped for groceries at a local market. Unbeknownst to them, two men — Hayes and his friend Joshua Komisarjevsky — were following them.

When the two women left the market,

Hayes and Komisarjevsky followed them to their home at 300 Sorghum Mill Drive, a colonial house on a winding street tucked in the trees. A few hours later, in the dead of night, the two men returned.

William Petit, a local endocrinologist and the husband of Jennifer, had fallen asleep on the porch and was dozing peacefully. Hayes and Komisarjevsky smashed his head with a baseball bat and tied him to a pole in the basement.

They climbed the stairs to the bedrooms where Jennifer and her two daughters, 11-year-old Michaela and 17-year-old Hayley, were sleeping. The two men woke them by holding their hands over their mouths so they couldn’t scream, then tied them to their beds.

Over the next several hours, Hayes and Komisarjevsky drank beer out of the Petits’ fridge and waited for the sun to come up. When night turned into a rainy morning, Hayes brought Jennifer to a

crit local Bank of America and forced her to withdraw $15,000. While doing so, she slipped the teller a note begging for help.

The bank employees let her walk back to the car with Hayes.

Back at the Petits’, Hayes and Komisarjevksy turned the house into a nightmare. In the course of 30 minutes, Jennifer was strangled and raped. Both daughters were sexually assaulted. The two men poured gasoline throughout the house. One of them lit a match.

The flames singed the leaves of the trees around the house.

“I

t was just one of these crimes that seemed so out of character with this quiet town.”

Thirty miles away and two years older than Michaela, I lived in Westport, a town not unlike many other Connecticut towns — Madison, Guilford, Fairfield, Newtown, Cheshire. Like many parents — including, perhaps, the Petits — mine moved to Westport so their children could go to good schools and play on quiet streets at dusk without fear.

The houses on my street did not look dissimilar from those on Sorghum Mill Drive.

The current state of these towns, such as Westport and Cheshire, came out of a mid-century rush for security and stability in the lands beyond the cities.

Murders don’t happen in places like Westport or Cheshire. The last murder in Westport, I recall a policeman named “Officer Friendly” telling my fifth-grade class, happened a generation ago.

We had nothing to worry about, or so we who grew up and lived in the suburbs thought. Then Cheshire happened.

“I

was coming home from the Adirondacks … and driving without a care in the world in my convertible,” said Thomas Ullmann, the Chief Public Defender for the City of New Haven. The date was July 24, 2007. “I got a call from a lawyer in my office and she said, ‘Did you hear what happened in Cheshire?’”

He was pale by the time he hung up

the phone. He knew that prosecutors would seek the ultimate punishment: the death penalty. And as not only the public defender for the New Haven Judicial District — which, since it includes Cheshire, made him responsible for defending Hayes — but also a longtime advocate against the death penalty, he knew it would be up to him to stop the decision.

Ullmann works in an office at the end of a dimly lit hallway in the New Haven County Courthouse. His papers are piled two, sometimes three feet high on his desk and the floor. Cheshire, he said, was “one of those cases that tweaked everybody.”

I asked him why. Why, I wondered, did my mother remember this murder so vividly, when there have been hundreds of murders in cities such as New Haven, Bridgeport, and Hartford since? My mother, for instance — and for that note just about anyone in the “towns” — has never heard of Qhayshaun, Jaqueeta and Wanda Roberson — 8, 21, and 42, respectively — who were killed in a New Haven arson in 2011.

“Most of the time crime doesn’t affect people in our suburban communities,” Ullmann said. “You don’t have these kinds of personal, physical crimes.”

Those crimes only happen in the cities, or so the upper and middle classes expected when they fled. That is why, Ullmann said, the death penalty was brought to bear. Of the 13 murders in New Haven in 2007, and the 94 between then and the abolition of the death penalty in April 2012, none resulted in the death penalty. Ullman’s beliefs suggest that, had Jennifer, Michaela, and Hayley been three of those 107 — had they lived in a two-bedroom apartment in New Haven instead of a colonial in Cheshire, had Hayley not gone to a prestigious preparatory school and been planning to go to community college instead of Dartmouth, had they been black and poor instead of upwardly mobile and white — the punishment might have been different. It is hard to disagree with him.

I

n the three years after the murders, Ullmann fought vainly — against the state of Connecticut, against William Petit, who miraculously hobbled out of the burning house and survived, and at times against Hayes himself — to save Hayes from Northern Correctional Institution’s death row.

The death penalty was not the only choice. Ullmann and his team offered guilty plea after guilty plea on Hayes’s behalf. Had the prosecution accepted the pleas, Hayes would have been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of release, which in Connecticut means that the inmate can never, under any circumstances, go free. Hayes would have been sent to Northern Correctional Institution within weeks of the crime, where he would have stayed, far away from Cheshire, for the rest of his life. His presence on the cover of the Hartford Courant and, as a result, on the doorsteps of Cheshire households, would have been minimal. The trauma endured by neighbors, friends, and the town as a whole would not have been reiterated over, and over, and over again.

But the prosecution would not budge.

Death, to them and to Connecticut, where 74 percent of residents polled in a 2011 survey said they wanted Hayes executed, was the only punishment severe enough.

In late January 2010, Hayes tried to kill himself by overdosing on Thorazine, an anti-psychotic medication.

“Even though I was his lawyer, I was kind of rooting for him because he was controlling his situation,” Ullmann recalled.

But death by his own hand was not acceptable. That privilege the state reserved for itself. Prison guards rushed Hayes to the intensive care unit at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington. After barely surviving, Hayes was returned to death row. A month later, the state of Connecticut resumed the trial which sought to put him to death. The irony was not lost on Ullmann or on myself.

On Dec. 1, 2010, 12 jurors condemned

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 13

crit Hayes to death.

“Today, when the court sentences Steven Hayes to death,” Ullmann told the court, “everyone one of us becomes a killer. We all become Steven Hayes.”

T

hroughout Steven Hayes’s trial and sentencing, the question of the death penalty was playing out across the state. In 2009, the state legislature voted to abolish the punishment, but the measure failed to gain Governor Jodi Rell’s signature.

When she vetoed the bill, Rell cited William Petit, who had become a forceful death penalty advocate after surviving the home invasion.

In November, I called the Petit Family Foundation — created in memory of Jennifer, Michaela, and Hayley — seeking to talk to Petit, who has continued to advocate for the death penalty in the six years since the murders. But while demanding two men’s deaths, he has

also rediscovered life. He remarried, to a younger woman he got to know through the foundation. They recently had a son. In October, he announced he was contemplating a run for Congress against Elizabeth Esty, an anti-death penalty Democrat. Support for the death penalty would be the central plank of his platform.

Two weeks and a series of emails later, I received a note from an assistant at the foundation, strangely enough also named Hayley, reading, “Hi Matthew, Below, please find an article that Dr. Petit asked me to forward over to you.”

The article was titled “The Death Penalty: Do Innocents Matter,” by Dudley Sharp, who is, in his own estimation, “the most active pro-death penalty person in the country.” The article pointed out that “living murderers are, infinitely, more likely to harm and murder, again, than are executed murderers — a truism.”

It’s this kind of security, Sharp says, that leads an overwhelming proportion of Connecticut residents to support the death penalty.

I

n 2012, the Democrat-controlled legislature voted again to repeal the death penalty. This time, a different governor, Dannel Malloy, signed the bill.

But it did not change anything for Hayes and Komisarjevsky — who were sentenced to death in 2010 and 2011, respectively— or the eight other men on death row. The law only applies to those who commit capital offenses after the date of Malloy’s signature: April 25, 2012. In keeping the death penalty for the 10, Ullmann says, Connecticut merely sought a way to put Hayes and Komisarjevsky in an execution chamber.

“This prospective bill passed solely to avoid the issue of the Cheshire guys,” Ullman says. “They’ll try to kill the other guys to get to the Cheshire guys.”

// THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Surrounded by his family, Dr. William Petit Jr. speaks to the press after Komisarjevsky’s conviction.

14 | Vol. XLI, No. 4 | January 2014

crit One person cannot be sentenced for the crime of another. But the Connecticut legislature, it seems, did just that.

F

or now, though, Hayes and the other death row inmates are in stasis. Few think Hayes will die by the hand of the state. His own hand or nature will likely bring an end to his life. Multiple times, Hayes has tried to drop his appeals and be executed, the same way Michael Ross — the only man executed in Connecticut since 1960 — died in 2005. But the state of Connecticut, both the public appellate lawyers and the state attorney’s office, won’t let him. To let Hayes have any agency in his death would be to give him too much control.

Or so the reasoning goes.

From his office on the second floor of the prison, Warden Edward Maldonado can see the row, just like any other part of the prison, through a television screen on the wall opposite his desk. The other walls are covered with photos of his daughter.

I asked him what he thought about the death penalty. His job is not political, he reminded me. He just does what the law tells him to do.

“Yes, the death penalty has been abolished,” said Deputy Warden Karen Martucci, who sat on a gray upholstered chair in Maldonado’s office. “But as far as the Department of Corrections is concerned, it hasn’t.”

Every day, Maldonado walks through death row, knowing that one day he might play a role in one of their executions. Usually, few words are exchanged.

“The inmates on death row,” Maldonado said, “are pretty quiet.”

A

fter leaving the prison, I drove not to New Haven, but to Cheshire.

Off of Route 10, I turned left onto Mountain Road and then, a mile later, came to the intersection with Sorghum Mill Drive. The street first winds left and then right, climbing up a small hill by colonial homes neither small nor

large, but rather what we might hope a prosperous and peaceful life would provide.

Number 300 stands on a corner at the top. The house is gone, replaced now by a memorial that could be easily mistaken for any other suburban garden. There’s a wooden archway in the middle, a glass wheelbarrow, a disordered array of plants, and three birdhouses. A stone in the ground inscribed with “Three Angels” is the only indication three women died here. The memorial makes it easy to forget.

Maybe wanting to forget, though, is the problem. In suburbia, we want to forget what happened at 300 Sorghum Mill Drive not only because it is painful, but because it trampled the notion that a place only a couple of miles away from the inner city — perhaps, like Hamden to New Haven or Fairfield to Bridgeport — can be removed from all that is bad. It is

that mindset that, as Ullmann said, leads to more outrage over a suburban death than an urban death. It is that mindset that justifies — by way of shock, trauma, and fear — the ultimate punishment that is, as Ullmann called it, “the mark of a barbaric society.” It is that mindset that will lead a state to kill eight in order to kill two.

Standing in the garden, I tried to overcome the barrier that I had grown up with, to consider that the suburbs were not immune from sickness or from violence. I tried to imagine the flames licking the leaves.

I couldn’t. July 23, 2007 was a long time ago, and those things just don’t happen here.

Photo by Doug Kerr

JUNE I am always pausing in front of windows sunlit places of reflection of unclear inevitable memory and speaking to people I thought I had forgotten I wear my solitude like a summer dress its faded blue folds sit patiently on my skin like a question unasked I want to stop souls on the street hold their hands in my sweaty palms and tell perfect stories exchange our losses like river stones the kind we used to rest on our chapped lips in the still heat of childhood I want to rest my fingers on the backs of strangers the sighing of leaves the opening of a cafe door the dying flutter of a moth on the windowsill the humming of a lonely child these are the anthems I live by I will tell you the poetry of necessary life begins in the empty spaces.

–Hayun Cho yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 15

profile

An Escape From the Four Walls

by Abigail Bessler

E

very day at 8:00 a.m., Gus Cuomo shuffles up three steps, enters the front door of the Atwater Senior Center, and switches on the lights. He heads toward his office, eyes adjusting under thick bifocals.

Mr. Gus, as I’m told to call him, is 84 but doesn’t need a cane. Grabbing printed signup sheets, he passes beneath an American flag mural whose slogan wishes him, as it does every morning, health and happiness. To get ready for the seniors who arrive at 8:30 a.m., he makes coffee and turns on the television.

Mr. Gus then greets Filomena Fiondella, the center’s 42-year-old director, who has worked with him at 26 Atwater St. for over a decade.

Filomena is paid; Mr. Gus is not. He doesn’t mind. He’s been at the Atwater Senior Center for 18 years and its president for 14, and he has no plans to step down. The members of the center that prides itself on being a “Home Away From Home” for New Haven elderly have become his family.

“Besides,” he considers with a chuckle, “who would run against me?”

A

ugustine William Cuomo was born in Brooklyn on April 5, 1929, nine years after his parents emigrated from Italy and six months before the Stock Market Crash. When he was a year old, the family moved to New Haven because his dad got a job at Sargent, a manufacturing plant. His mother worked at a sewing factory and baked her own bread to save money. He was one of 14 children.

At age 7, Mr. Gus helped support his family

16 | Vol. XLI, No. 4 | January 2014

profile as a shoeshine boy. When he was 9, he set up pins at the bowling alley.

When he was 11, he worked as a dishwasher, sold Yale and Harvard football letters, and saved $1,400 to help his mom buy a house. At 16, he dropped out of school to join the navy. “I wanted to be a doctor when I was young, but I wasn’t that smart,” he says, a grin emerging beneath his bristly gray mustache. “But I always thought, you keep doing things until you find what you like.”

He’s been a railroad worker, a Seaman Second Class, and a shortorder cook at the Hotel Taft. Mr. Gus once worked simultaneously as a cutter at a corset factory and as a builder for a casket company just downstairs. During the casket stint, he came up with a contraption for drilling coffin handles, but the company sent the foreman to New York to present the invention instead of him. “He got the credit, and I got laid off!” he says, his Brooklyn accent growing stronger as he gets excited.

At age 34, Mr. Gus met Margaret Buchanan, a Scottish-American from West Virginia, on a blind date on New Year’s Eve, 1963. He fell for her immediately and bought an engagement ring nine months later.

He didn’t mind that she was 44 and a widow, and already had four kids and a grandchild. “I told her, ‘Age don’t mean nothing,’” Mr. Gus says before proudly telling me that he now has 12 grandchildren and 17 great-grandchildren.

T

he Atwater Senior Center is a two-story brick building with mismatched windowpanes and a painted plywood sign. Until 1964, the property contained a school for kids needing support not offered in the public schools. When the city created the senior center, it didn’t bother to remodel the building.

The main space, once a gymnasium, still has padded brown

walls and basketball hoops. Under the gym’s large fluorescent lights, Mr. Gus mingles with seniors sitting in folding chairs. On one gym wall hangs a WPA mural painted in 1935, the thing Mr. Gus loves most about the center. It’s all nursery rhymes — Humpty Dumpty, the Pied Piper, Pinocchio. In front sits an artificial Christmas tree that stays up yearround because someone accidentally threw out the box. Mr. Gus decorates it with ghosts for Halloween, hearts for Valentine’s Day. Off to the side of the gym are other rooms: the 12-table dining room where Mr. Gus leads bingo on Wednesdays; the card room, whose walls are covered in super-glued puzzles, the Blue Room, where Mr. Gus hands out food every Friday. On the craft room wall, opposite a photo of Mr. Gus at a party in a disco suit and a rainbow Afro, is a display of more than fifty yellowing obituaries labeled “Loving Memory.”

When Mr. Gus first came to Atwater in 1995, it was one of 12 senior centers in New Haven. Six years later, a dip in the city’s budget reduced the number of centers to six.

When the 2008 economic downturn hit, Mayor DeStefano’s cost-cutting budget pared down funding for senior centers even further.

Now, with over 13,000 seniors living in New Haven, Atwater is one of three centers that remain. Mr. Gus says it’s the largest in the city; he calls it the United Nations for the diversity of its members.

The people who keep Atwater running are mainly seniors themselves. In 2011, when federal cuts scaled back the meal program to four lunches a week, a senior named George rallied volunteers from Trinity Church to cook the extra meal. Another member, Nella, is in her 90s, can’t see well, but still teaches seniors how to weave rugs. Filomena taught herself Spanish to better serve

the center’s Hispanic population, and once a month, Mr. Gus takes seniors to Foxwoods Casino.

Three years ago, he and Filomena organized a fashion show to raise money. Six elderly women strutted down Atwater’s gymnasium in clothes on loan from Dressbarn.

Eighty-five people bought tickets.

Mr. Gus’s grandson, a manager of a North Haven Subway, donated $200 worth of sandwiches. 6 feet turkey, 6 feet Italian.

Filomena interjects her boisterous voice into our conversation every so often.

Filomena: “Gus, did you tell her you’re a Knight of Columbus?”

Mr. Gus: “Yeah, I showed her the picture, Fil.” Filomena: “Did you tell her about your surgeries? It’s a miracle you’re even walking!”

[He hadn’t. They were extensive.]

Filomena: “Gus, did you tell her you’re a gigolo? He gets all the women!”

Mr. Gus, raising his hands in mock offense: “All the Spanish women are after me!”

A

t 11:30 a.m., Mr. Gus’s cowbell clangs through the building, the Pinochle player with the highest score at the time wins, and the seniors line up for lunch. It reminds Mr. Gus of his childhood.

“We were always hanging around outside,” he says, “At 12 o’clock every day my father would whistle and all 14 of us would run up the stairs for lunch. The neighbors would say, ‘There go the Cuomos!’”

In the dining hall, Mr. Gus always sits at a middle table at the end chair, two seniors to his left and two to his right — card players only. He prefers eating in silence. “Growing up, when we sat at the table to eat, no one said a word,” he says. “My father always said if you talked while you’re eating, you’re fighting with death.” I ask

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 17

profile what his father meant, and he explains by relating a time he saved a senior who’d choked on a chicken bone while gabbing with her friends. “I did that new technique,” he says, “You know, the one where you hug ’em.”

After lunch, Mr. Gus tells me he came to the center at the suggestion of a friend after his wife died in 1995. “She passed away in May and I joined in July,” he says. “I decided to volunteer because, what else was I going to do? I didn’t want to stay home in the four walls, worrying and, you know, brewing and everything.” He moves his hand to rest on his knee and adds, “I didn’t want to be alone.”

Mr. Gus had eight sisters, five brothers. Now, he’s one of seven left. In 1996, just a year after his wife’s death, his only son passed away. He shows me a picture of his family standing outside his daughter Eileen’s house at Hammonasset Park. He reads off the names from right to left and tells me his grandchildren live out of town, so he sees them mostly around the holidays.

That’s fine, he says, because he has a family here, too.

Mr. Gus calls Filomena his granddaughter, and to her amusement and partial dismay, people believe him. His favorite story about Atwater is the one about Brice. “One of the children calls me Grandpa. His name’s Brice and his grandmother Bernice, rest her soul, passed away this year,” he says. “One time Filomena was working with his grandmother and I was in the gym, and he comes running in there.

‘Grandpa! Grandpa!’ They all looked, 18 | Vol. XLI, No. 4 | January 2014

like calling him Grandpa, too.

I

‘cause he’s African American. And I said, ‘Yeah that’s my grandson. I’m everybody’s grandpa.’”

Seven years ago, Mr. Gus went to an elementary school dressed as Santa Claus. Sitting in front of a painted cardboard fireplace, he asked 300-some children what they wanted for Christmas (including a kid who pulled down the fake Santa beard and asked why there was a black mustache underneath, to which Mr. Gus replied, “That’s for the summer!”). He tells me he still has a Christmas card his wife gave him years ago — she wrote that he was her Santa Claus all year long.

From his desk he pulls out a bag of toys he keeps ready for when kids visit. When he sees me smiling at them, he gives me a small troll doll with electric pink hair to take back to my dorm room. I’ve talked to Mr. Gus for just a few hours, but I already feel

n the craft room, four middle-aged women are trading secrets to living a long life. One suggests exercise. Filomena tells them she knew a 109-yearold who told her he’d lived so long because he read a lot, never smoked, never drank, didn’t watch television, and ate liver and onions twice a week. The women squeal and scrunch their noses.

Mr. Gus leads me past the women to the obituary board, where he points out a few memories. “This is Marie,” he says, his fingers reaching toward a 2009 obituary that ends, “You will always be in our hearts.” He says he used to sing Dean Martin’s song “Oh Marie” to her, until her nephew took her to get treatment for something or other in Virginia, where she passed away. “She was crying when she left. She didn’t want to leave the center,” he says. “She loved the center. Rest her soul.”

I can’t help noticing how many of Mr. Gus’s stories end with that line.

Mr. Gus says he and Filomena go to all of the wakes. He says it’s hard because it reminds him of his wife, but he goes anyway to respect the families. “Sometimes you do get close to people, and I feel bad when they go,” he says. “I had a lung operation once and there was a friend of mine next to me who had cancer in his stomach. I went home on the weekend and when I got back he had passed away. I felt real bad. I started crying.”

Mr. Gus turns away from the obituary board and walks on.

In the coffee room, a newspaperboy hat and a two-of-hearts playing

profile card are perched on top of a folding chair on an unused pool table, with

This year’s goals: “Remember the names of my kids and grandkids,”

“My father used to say to me, a mother and father can take care of a hundred children, but a hundred children can’t take care of a mother and father.” a sign that reads “Boogie Chair.” The seniors put it together when a beloved card-playing member passed away.

“He always got the two of hearts when he played poker,” Mr. Gus says as we walk by. “That was his hat. Rest his soul.”

F

ilomena tells me she sees a lot of seniors who say they feel “left behind.” I ask her why, and she says she’s not sure. She hands me a four-page elderly services newsletter, telling me it’s published every month by the city. Past January’s lunch menus and a calendar of senior center activities, under a recipe for Date Nut Bread, I find a list titled, “New Year’s Resolutions for Seniors.”

“learn a new game besides Bingo,” “spend more time on the computer than the toilet,” “learn to pronounce the names of all medications I have to take,” and “learn NOT to say ‘In my day…’” Unsure whether to laugh or wince, I arrive at this one: “See my family more than my doctor.”

When Mr. Gus comes back into the office, he’s holding two large knives. There’s a meeting going on, and he has to cut the tart. Filomena, quickly taking the knives from Mr. Gus’s hands, asks him why he thinks seniors feel left behind. He pauses, then says, “My father used to say to me, a mother and father can take care of a hundred children, but a hundred children can’t take care of a mother

and father.”

Mr. Gus might not be able to see his family every day, but he says he’s lucky. Some seniors don’t have family nearby, or they have a family nearby that doesn’t visit. “Depression is a big problem among older adults,” the city’s director of elderly services tells me. “Centers allow people to get out and socialize.”

Mr. Gus’s secret to a long life hasn’t been liver and onions. It’s been staying social and keeping occupied. Mr. Gus has a hundred children, many of them his age. He plays Pinochle with them.

He takes their calls to get picked up at the airport, even at 3 o’clock in the morning. He makes them lunch.

When a Puerto Rican immigrant joined his family, he was the one that brought her to the doctor on Prince Street. And when, just hours after she’d met him, the nurse asked for her next of kin, Mr. Gus was the one she wrote down.

A

t 4 p.m., Mr. Gus goes home.

He turns off the lights in the craft room and then moves to the ones in the hall. We stand in the gym, across from the WPA mural. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if I hadn’t gone here,” he says, “But the man upstairs takes care of me. Every morning he wakes me up and gives me strength to do what I can, to help the people. It’s better than staying in the four walls.”

I ask him for his phone number in case I forgot any questions. He gives me the number, then recites his entire home address, zip code and all. He lives just four blocks from the center. As he turns off the lights, first flicking them on and off to tease Filomena (“Gus, I told you that makes me dizzy!”), he turns to me.

“I’ve got a motto,” he says as we step outside, “Don’t fuss, call Gus!” He winks, and then closes the door.

Photos by Leslie Webb

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 19

observer For more than a year, I met with Dean Loge every weekday in his office from 4 to 4:30. This is how I remember it.

T

he first time I met Dean Loge was in the buffet line at the Timothy Dwight freshman barbecue. He stood in front of me, dressed in a sport coat, a button-down shirt, and earthbrown trousers. Noticing me, he turned and put out his hand.

“Hi, I’m Dean,” he said.

My palms went cold and sweaty. “Hi, I’m Ch-Chen-Eddy,” I replied, “but you can call me just Eddy.”

I had wanted to say “Hi, I’m Eddy” but feared my name would get stuck.

I’ve stuttered my whole life; I can sense when my jaw is about to tighten on a word. My name is the hardest word for me to say.

Growing up, I avoided stuttering at all costs. During every interaction, I used words that were easier on the lips.

“What’s up, dude?” became “What’s up, man?” Other escape routes were hitor-miss. Tapping my foot sometimes got me through. Other times, if I got a running start on the words, I could burst through the block. But not always.

In high school, when it was my turn to introduce myself or read aloud, I would often go to the bathroom and stand in front of the urinal without unbuttoning my pants, then wash my hands extra long with extra soap. After school, I chose activities that excluded speaking: I would study for APs, lay out the school news magazine, and play piano in the school auditorium long after everyone had gone home. I avoided the coveted get-togethers and slumber parties that became topics of conversation the next morning.

One time, I was called on to read in class. Instead of hiding, I decided to power ahead, but at every other word, I stammered violently and my mouth jerked. I could feel everyone’s eyes on me. My face burned. Finally, my teacher said, “Why don’t you let me read?” I sank back. I was never called on again.

At Yale, there was no hiding in the 20 | Vol. XLI, No. 4 | January 2014

I can say my name

Afternoons in Dean Loge’s office bathroom. My high-school self was welcomed to Yale by rap music pounding the suite walls on Thursday nights and whoops of drunken delight serenading me as I tried to sleep next door. At my first YPU event, political parties hissed and applauded Rick Santorum, the former United States Senator. I left

the Extracurricular Bazaar after only five minutes of constant solicitation.

For someone who monitored himself around the clock, I was taken aback by the unapologetic style of living that seemed to come so easily to everyone around me.

A few weeks after school started, I

y e

observer hour every weekday to meet with me.

I

by Eddy Wang photograph by William Freedberg Googled “stuttering therapy” for the first time. I craved the fluency and the spontaneity of my peers. Taking an extra week off after fall break, I left Yale that October for my first stuttering therapy program. Two weeks of eighthour-a-day sessions later, I stepped out of Union Station, my speech improved

but still not cured.

I didn’t give up. My clinicians at the program had recommended finding someone with whom to practice, so I scheduled a meeting with Dean upon my return and floated the idea of practicing my speech with him. Despite his busy schedule, he set aside half an

began by reading aloud from things around Dean’s desk and from his library: picture books, nature poems, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Most days, he would work quietly at his computer while I talked, after politely asking if I minded. But once in a while, he would swing around and lean back in his swivel chair with legs crossed, giving me his full attention.

At first, my face flushed during words that tied up my vocal tract. If I couldn’t say a word, I apologized. He didn’t seem to mind. At the beginning of every appointment, he would ask me, “How are your ‘targets’?” (the therapy program’s term for the speech techniques they taught us). No one had asked me how I felt about stuttering before.

There were good days and bad days, but I would always reply “They’re OK.” I was fearful that I couldn’t sustain the good days or that the bad days would last forever.

Gradually, I began to develop a gut feeling about an alternative technique.

I discovered that I was most fluent when speaking very slowly and softly, at a few seconds per syllable. To read a single-page poem could take me up to 10 minutes, and asking a simple question required sustained concentration. But if I had a question for Dean, I only said “Dean?” After a few seconds, he would reply “Yes?” and turn to face me across the table. We homed in on the meanings of certain words and poems. He talked about his recovery from a car accident in 2010 and learning how to walk again.

Shortly after our appointments began, I received an email from TEDxYale inviting applicants for the Student Speaker Competition. I made a move and decided to audition. If there was an arena to test my fluency, this was it. I drafted a speech centering on my time at therapy. I stood up and successfully rehearsed it in front of Dean. He promised that he would try to make my audition. True to his word, as I stood

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observer alone on the stage of Sudler Hall waiting for the go-ahead, I saw him sneak in the back and take a seat.

My heart beat in anticipation and I felt warm as I finished the speech unscathed in front of the TEDx team.

My muscles were loose and my arms hung to my sides. I mentally rehearsed

of.” I felt that I needed to talk more, to “E-Eddy.” more people, and in more situations, When I later told Dean, he looked and recognized that that would require at me with his half-smile and gleaming more courage on my part. eyes, then said, “You are finding your After finishing, I smiled broadly in voice.” relief. I had done it.

I rode the remainder of freshman wrote a piece on my relationship year on my TEDx high, and then Dean’s with my dad and brought it into the office. Dean told me stories of his own father. I started to be vulnerable in other areas of my life, showing people all my colors and being frank about my condition.

I’ve since done things that would have been impossible in high school: trying out for a play, reading my humor piece in front of my English class, each word, then spoke it, syllable by office was closed to me until August. reading Proust at the 100th anniversary syllable. On words that didn’t come out Away from Dean’s office and the rest of celebration of Swann’s Way, asking immediately, I waited patiently for my the community, I had a partial relapse questions in a lecture class, and more. vocal tract to relax. My heart didn’t skip over the summer.

I brought every experience into Dean’s a beat.

I came back to Yale this fall more office and left every day with a clearer On my way back to TD, I saw Dean determined than ever to speak at my picture of how to live next.

Loge. “That took some courage,” he own pace and live the way I felt right.

My speech has gotten faster and said, grinning as he made his way to his stronger. I can say my name, although apartment. esuming my appointments with often with hesitation. I still stutter, but Dean Loge brought back the I’m not so intent on shedding that part was invited to speak at the TEDxYale feeling of self-acceptance and of me anymore. flagship conference in February. I the desire to be more sociable that had couldn’t sleep one night thinking grown in his office. That fall, I stayed in am sitting at a pastel-colored table about what would happen if my voice the classroom for introductions, waiting outside the Art Gallery when I got blocked during the middle of my patiently until it was my turn. read Dean’s email announcing his speech. I expressed my fears to Dean; “Hi, my name is…” I would begin. My retirement. The sun is out and a latehe convinced me to do what felt right. mouth would silently waver as I tried summer breeze is making itself known.

Without knowing whether I would again and again to say my name. After As I come to the end, my insides clench succeed or fail, I decided to commit a couple of seconds, I’d breathe out and together. When I talk to friends about myself to the conference. say, “Sorry, I’m having trouble on my Dean, there are similar feelings of the Before I knew it, I was walking onto name.” This happened in the classroom, surprisingly easy connection, and the stage of the Shubert Theater in at club meetings, and in the dining hall, the comfort of being with a man who front of hundreds of students, faculty, but it was an honest introduction each understands. Some have only talked and New Haven residents, flanked by time. with him on a few occasions, but the cameras that were live-streaming the I returned each day knowing effect seems to be as immediate and event and photographers that clicked at that Dean’s office was somewhere moving as it is for me. Although the TD every pause.

I could right the ship. I recounted class of 2018 will not know him as Dean, I walked to the center of the stage and each humbling experience to Dean, they will become part of the accepting bared myself to the audience. and our subsequent conversations and welcoming community he helped As I looked out, I felt a strange calm. always seemed to lead me to the same build, where they can feel safe and I spoke about going to speech therapy conclusion: to be myself. discover themselves. and coming back to Yale, and admitted At the end of the term, I found myself I only meet with Dean twice a week that I was still in a stutterer’s mindset: again stuck on my name during an now. Soon we will both be moving on, “I spoke less, feeling out of place, and introduction. Though it took longer he to his cottage by the lake, I to my afraid to produce the disfluent speech than it ever had, I didn’t let the extensive junior year in TD, where Dean’s portrait that I had worked so hard to get rid pause deter me. My name stuttered out: will soon hang in the dining hall.

I couldn’t sleep worrying about what would happen if my voice got blocked during the middle of my speech.

I

22 | Vol. XLI, No. 4 | January 2014

I

R

I

AT THE CORE

A Yale student recovers from a traumatic brain injury

by Millicent Cripe photo by Henry Ehrenberg

A

year ago, on January 23, at around 12:30 a.m., I tripped over the guardrail of a stairwell. I was in Washington D.C. for President Obama’s inaugural ball; I had taken the fall semester off to work for the campaign. I fell 30 feet, landed on my head, and fractured my skull in two places. I collapsed onto my left side, fracturing two of the bones in my shoulder — my humerus and my scapula. A guardrail punctured my calf, leaving a deep wound that took months to heal. I couldn’t shower because the puncture could not get wet, so for months I had to take baths while holding my leg over the edge of the tub. My days on a feeding tube in the intensive care unit (ICU), combined with a knee injury, nausea, vomiting, and severe headaches, left me weak and unsteady. For a while, a wheelchair was my main form of yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 23

personal essay transportation. But I didn’t care about any of my physical injuries. All I cared about was getting back to my old self.

For me, that meant healing my brain.

In my accident, I had sustained a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI).

TBI is the umbrella term for any injury caused by an external force to the head. A TBI is classified as mild, moderate, or severe based on the level of damage to the brain; my injury was rated as severe. I was in and out of consciousness for days after my fall.

When I was responsive, I was unable to tell the doctors where I was, what year it was, or what had happened.

I have both pre- and post-amnesia — I have no memories from eight hours before my fall until eight days afterwards. Any TBI causes shortand long-term changes in cognitive functions like attention, memory, and executive functioning skills, so when I would return to school was uncertain.

When I came back in late August, my doctors told me that it would take two years for my brain to recover fully from my TBI. So for three of my semesters at Yale, my brain won’t be the same.

T

his is a story of identity, and of what happened when the core of my identity was injured. My identity was — and is — tied to my intelligence. I would venture to say that intelligence, more than anything else, is what binds the Yale community together. We have other identities —

After the ICU, I spent two weeks in the Rehabilitation Hospital of Indiana.

On my first day there, a speech therapist evaluated me to determine what my cognitive therapy should be. She gave me a piece of paper with numbers and letters scattered over it, and told me to connect “A” to “1”, “1” to “B”, “B” to “2”, and so on. It made sense when she said it, but then she gave me the sheet, and I didn’t understand anymore. Did a number or a letter come first? What came after “A”? I connected two things together and then I had to hand back the sheet — I was too confused to do more. This occurred nine days after my fall. As I was wheeled out of the evaluation, I remember thinking to myself: I probably did better than they would have expected for someone with my level of brain injury. Even though I couldn’t keep track of numbers and letters, I had to have tested well, right?

That was who I was.

W

ith time, I began to understand the extent of what had happened, and my original, delusional confidence was replaced by fear. I became afraid that my brain would never fully recover, that I’d never be my old self again.

The doctors seemed to have all the answers on how to get my physical health back; in my first week of physical therapy, I couldn’t straighten my left leg or walk more than a few steps, but the physical therapists

What happens when you might not be who you thought you were anymore? athlete, painter, musician, activist — but intelligence underlies them all.

But what happens when you might not be who you thought you were anymore?

24 | Vol. XLI, No. 4 | January 2014

promised me that with time, and with the regimen of exercises they would give me, I’d be able to run again. But there seemed to be no parallel answers for my cognitive health.

The brain injury specialists couldn’t make any promises, let alone agree on what my treatment should be. I saw at least six specialists, and each advised something different. One doctor told me that I needed eight hours of intensive cognitive stimulation every single day. Another doctor told me to avoid any stimulation because I needed complete cognitive rest, similar to the rehabilitation after a concussion, which is a form of TBI. I thought the doctors were supposed to tell me exactly what I had to do to get back to my old self. But much of the time, my cognitive rehabilitation ended up resting on trial-and-error. I was stuck in limbo.

My fear turned to frustration.

I was ready to work hard to get better, but some of what the doctors recommended didn’t seem helpful.

One doctor gave me a packet of brain rehab exercises such as: “Go to a new place, look around for 60 seconds, then write down every detail that you can remember,” “Do this maze,” and “List all the words beginning with ‘L’ that you can in 60 seconds.’” Then I was supposed to do all the exercises — the exact same exercises — again.

And again the next day.

My frustration made me recalcitrant.

I didn’t want to do my brain exercises.

I didn’t want to have to recover from a brain injury. Many times, I was brought to tears by the unfairness of it all. Which is ridiculous: I survived a three-story fall, I was walking, I knew who I was; if the situation was unfair, it was unfair in my favor. But sometimes it got to me.

I

needed to do something more to recover, so in April, my doctors, my parents, and I decided that the best cognitive therapy plan would be to practice the skills that I’d need for school. A local professor tutored me for about four months. He would give me reading assignments, we’d discuss them, and then I’d write an essay.

Foundational skills, like memory and

personal essay reading comprehension, improved first. But when the professor would ask me to apply what I had learned, find connections in the material, form my own opinions, and make arguments, my brain would just get jumbled.

No matter how hard I worked, I couldn’t seem to write a satisfactory essay. I made a lot of progress over those months, but I never felt like my cognitive recovery was going fast enough. I was impatient. I had to trust that time would help my brain heal, but that lack of control scared me.

B

y August, my doctors told me I was ready to go back to school.

After a year away, I wanted and needed to go back. My brain was a lot better, but it hadn’t fully healed.

Cognitive testing from a month before I returned to school showed that I still had measurable deficits in processing speed, executive function, and attention. Yale’s Resource Office on Disabilities offered me all the accommodations I needed to make my transition back to school manageable, like tutors and extra time on tests. I didn’t realize it before my fall, but TBIs like concussions are fairly common in college-aged students, so Yale has experience helping students like me.

Even with the extra help, it was a tiring semester. I chose my classes carefully, making sure that my semester was interesting, but not overwhelming. I’m lucky that I loved my classes, because it took much longer than it used to for me to do readings and assignments. Being a student at Yale naturally breeds feelings of inadequacy, because it seems like everyone else is always doing more. I was doing a lot less than all of my friends, in class and in extracurricular activities, which made my successes less sweet. I knew it was my first semester back after my accident and that making it through the semester would be a victory. But it’s one thing to know a fact, and

another thing to feel it deep down.

Yale is exactly where I need to be.

I chose Yale because of the academic rigor, and that academic rigor is what will rehab my brain. I’ve made huge strides toward getting better during my months back at school. My work ethic is stronger now, which will only help me in the long term. I’m thankful every day, even on the hard days,

that I was able to return, and I feel blessed that I’m recovering.

One evening in November, when my midterms were over but the workload of finals hadn’t yet begun, I spoke to my mom on the phone. I told her that, for the first time, I felt like my old self again. Every day isn’t like that, but I’m getting there.

HOW TO FIGURE IT OUT Go to your Norwegian friend’s house surrounded by geese.

Sit beside her on the couch.

Listen to her stories about Scandinavia.

Try to picture the sisters in those off-white swim caps.

Her mother is alone.

She’s a dancer with veins that show through thin skin on her neck.

When you’re older, think of her when you write art history papers.

She has that big book on sculptures; look it when you get the chance.

The winged woman without the head — made from marble.

Cry when you see the photograph.

Five years later, fly to Düsseldorf. Get on a train and then get off.

Even though it’s July, you will still feel cold.

Stand at the edge of the Baltic Sea and look to the north.

In your hand, hold a cup of fried fish — A seagull will swoop down and steal half of it.

Your cousin will offer what is left of hers.

Let her fingers run through your seaweed hair.

After you leave this corner of the world, you will spend years trying to collect people’s words like those Cape Cod rocks you left at your father’s house in a red solo cup.

But voices, however beautiful, aren’t meant to sit at the bottom of anything plastic.

As you look ahead — all the rocks of all the coasts behind you — remember the loneliness you have known.

Remind again and again that they can leave — one day, they can leave. They might all leave.

But that night in Berlin, lie down and take up the whole bed.

– Adriana Miele yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 25

Jenna

S

unlight. The room is touched with yellow. She rolls over. She is fourteen and her bed is covered in eyelets, a bedspread bought when she was seven. She gets up and puts clothes on. It is a new day, although gravel dust still clings to the soles of her feet.

Downstairs, her mother is making Eggs Benedict. The Hollandaise does not work out, and she makes a pair of lumpy omelets instead. Her mother looks at Jenna’s pants as she walks into the kitchen.

“Are you wearing that to school?”

Jenna is wearing sweatpants, bought on vacation in Madison, that have badger paws on the seat. “Yes,” she says.

Her father, the lawyer, highlights sections of the Gazette every morning to bring up at business meetings. He is sitting in the kitchen, teething at the end of a yellow highlighter and glancing periodically at his chalky omelet. He doesn’t remember her walking through the basement last night. Would he say something if he did? She doubts it. Her parents do not know about the grimy, dirty-shirted, high-voiced boy, the alleyway at night.

Her father drives her to school. She sees him look, befuddled, at her bearpaw pants. One paw per cheek.

When Jenna gets home from school, her mother reminds her about the dinner party tonight. Jenna does not want to attend. She wants to go smoke weed with Margaret and her boyfriend.

She grudgingly helps to cube cheese.

It is a dinner party for five: the family and the Andrews. Her mother blushes slightly when she sees that the Andrews have brought champagne; the dinner isn’t fancy enough for champagne. They sit down. Her mother serves the cheese.

Gouda, because it’s Jenna’s favorite, Camembert, and something Spanish.

The Andrews both pick the Gouda.

26 | Vol. XLI, No. 4 | January 2014

BY MEREDITH REDICK ILLUSTRATIONS BY DANIEL SEMENCIUC

This is an exciting partnership, Mr. Andrews says, leaning back in his chair.

For six years he has worked as a criminal defense attorney, making money. He won’t be making much money in public defense, he says as he looks amiably at her father. Mr. Andrews touches the nape of his wife’s neck. Mr. and Mrs. Andrews look very much in love, Jenna thinks. She adjusts her dress.

Jenna’s mother smiles. She asks Mrs. Andrews if she knows how to make Hollandaise sauce, because she herself has never quite figured it out. Mrs. Andrews does know, but she’s not good at explaining it. Perhaps Mrs. Andrews might share her recipe, Jenna’s mother says. Mrs. Andrews tells her of course and then asks a question about the curtains. The men are debating in low voices about the Packers. Jenna’s mother nods at her, and Jenna gets up to bring the soup.

Mr. Andrews is wearing a tweed suit.

He has a potbelly, the kind that is not noticeable until he takes his jacket off.

He is wearing a white button-down shirt under the jacket, plain. Mrs. Andrews is a skittish salt-and-pepper type wearing a long silk dress. Their house is being fumigated for termites, so they are staying at the Marriott all this week, and it has just destroyed their daily routine, Mrs. Andrews tells them.

Jenna does not eat the brisket. She is a vegetarian. Robert’s idea. He saw a cow being killed once, at his grandparents’ farm, and now meat disgusts him. Jenna has never seen a freshly dead animal, except for her old pet mouse.

Jenna goes to the kitchen to get more napkins. She breathes deeply, thinking of Robert. Mr. Andrews brings in the soup dishes. He looks at her. The skin around his eyes is pink and looks moist, like a baby’s. But his eyes, blue scarred by thin white lines, are sharp. The fabric

of Jenna’s dress slides coolly across her knees. She smiles, a wry half-smile she learned from Margaret.

“Done with the soup?”

“It was good,” Mr. Andrews says, setting the dishes on the counter and resting his elbows on the edge of the sink. He is somewhere in his forties.

His hair is graying, nicely.

“It’s from a can,” she says.

He looks at her. “Telling on your mother, are you?” His eyes crinkle.

She laughs, for the first time tonight.

He looks at her intently and smiles.

“It’ll be our secret.”

L

ater that night, the cockroaches come out. Their presence doesn’t disrupt anything until one of them crawls close to Jenna’s foot. She would let it be, honestly, but it might not be ladylike to let cockroaches crawl around her legs. She pushes it away gently with her foot and resumes rolling the joint with a ripped sliver of newspaper. Robert is out of rolling papers. He usually brings everything.

He pushes his hair back from his face.

He is pale in the sallow light of the lamps.

“Do you want to go into your basement?

It’s kind of cold out here.”

She shakes her head. He pinches the end of the joint.

“My dad and my cat are down there,” she says.

“Or your room?”

“My mom will wake up. She’s a light sleeper.”

He shivers, taking a shallow drag with his bony pianist’s fingers. He locks eyes with hers. He told her he loved her last night when they were both high, exhaling the words into her mouth with burnt breath. They stayed out there all night, in the alleyway between their streets. It is colder tonight, the first week of October. He doesn’t know what to

fiction say.

Her veins are bluish under the lamplight. Robert runs his finger along one of them, down her arm. His hands are moist. The smoke fades quickly into the gray sky.

He looks at her and tosses the roach into the scraggly bushes that stick out from the neighbor’s backyard. “Let’s roll another.”

She picks the clots of weed apart, sifting the seeds out from the pungent curls of black and green. She doesn’t like the taste or the way she hacks after a hit, but she likes it that Robert smokes.

She likes how a joint turns her lips turn faintly gray and how he kisses her on her own lips, the strange, half-pleasant sensation of apotheosis.

She spots another roach creeping out, glistening in the light, from behind the garbage can.

“I read this Goosebumps book when I was ten and there were cockroaches but they weren’t normal cockroaches,” he says.

“What kind of cockroaches were they?”

He shrugs. “Alien cockroaches.”

She frowns, holding the joint with two fingers. He is quiet for a moment.

She motions for him to take the joint.

He shakes his head.

“Listen, I gotta go. I just — my mom and Frank will be home soon, I think.”

He pats the top of her head tenderly, and heaves his backpack over his shoulder. She watches as he hurries off toward his own house, a block away.

The cockroaches shine like baubles beneath the streetlamps.

A light flickers on through the mauve window shades of her mother’s room.

Jenna gets up and walks back through the wooden gate, through the door that leads directly into the basement — the one whose openings and closings her mother cannot hear. Her father is asleep in the basement, in front of the old TV, his mouth open. Drooling slightly.

She walks past him and up the stairs.

The air from the stairway vent teases goosebumps from her skin.

The next day, Jenna sits in the lunchroom during gym. There is a rumor, a couple years old but still circulating, that the gym teacher once watched a girl showering. Jenna paints Margaret’s nails red, two coats. They both skip math, too, more out of inertia than by way of making a statement. But they have to go to biology. There is a report due. That means they have to do the lab, too, Margaret whispers as they set their backpacks down.

The fruit flies must absolutely be virgins, Mr. Wanders says, clasping his hands to his chest. The experiments will come out wrong otherwise. Look for the dark spot on the end of the abdomen, Mr. Wanders says, the skin is so translucent you can see the first excretion. Margaret gags.

Jenna watches one generation of fruit flies, the babies, struggle through the

jelly at the bottom of the jar.

The dead flies, the ones born last month, are arranged across a paper plate. Jenna picks up a dead fly with the tip of her finger. Its eyes are red, bloodcolored.

“Look at it,” she says, holding her finger up to Margaret’s face. Margaret grimaces. “It’s a dead fly. I don’t want to look.”

Jenna ponders the lifeless dot stuck to her fingernail. She pushes it onto the plate and watches the entrails smear.

Brown and pink: those are the colors of its insides.

Margaret’s bony elbows turn yellow with pressure against the tabletop. She weighs eighty-four pounds, or she did this morning when she weighed in at the counselor’s office. She has to weigh in every week on Monday, and she always tells Jenna the number. Last week it was

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 27

fiction paper, and then Mickey, in an Altoids box. Two years later, the neighbor’s dog dug up the tin, and there was Mickey. Nothing left but an exquisite tiny skeleton.

She finishes her lab report. The last class of the day is English.

They’re reading Hamlet.

What a piece of shit is man, Margaret writes on the corner of Jenna’s notebook.

A

eighty-four and a half. Since she started smoking weed, she tells Jenna, she has stayed above eighty, which is good.

There are eighty-six dead flies on the plate. Twenty-four sepia eyes and sixtytwo red eyes, if they count the fly that Jenna squished. These are good results, Mr. Wanders says. What does that say about genes?

Jenna starts her lab report in class.

There is a picture above Mr. Wanders’ desk: two ants kissing under a heartshaped leaf. They aren’t in love. They are drinking nectar from a plant with nectar glands at the base of its leaves. At the next table, boys are flicking flies at each other. They are the popular boys, but Jenna doesn’t like them. Still, she pulls down her dress a little as she walks by them to throw away her paper plate.

The pet mouse that she had in the third grade died of its own accord after two weeks. It was a feeder mouse, not meant to live long. She named him Mickey. It died, curled up in the sawdust.

Jenna delicately picked up the mouse.

The body was warm, or maybe she imagined that. She placed some tissue 28 | Vol. XLI, No. 4 | January 2014

fter school, Jenna and Margaret meet with Robert and Grant to smoke in the pine grove next to the student parking lot. Margaret got Jenna started on the weed, last year after she met Grant. Afterwards, Jenna goes to get ice cream with Margaret. That is what they do, Elmo’s every Monday after school. Margaret talks about Grant.

“I forgot how smart he is. He’s like way fucking smarter than me,” she says. She chews on the straw of her Diet Coke.

She likes ice cream, although she never actually gets her own. Her knuckles are pale, translucent. She is wearing a mint shirt with peplum. The diet coke is silvery, cylindrical, in her hand.

They go to Jenna’s house for dinner; Margaret eats a third of her brown rice but none of the tofu. Then they fill an empty Tostitos dip jar with her mother’s amaretto and drink it in the basement while they watch a movie.

The amaretto tastes like salsa. Margaret tells Jenna that Grant might be cheating on her. She doesn’t care, she says. Has Jenna let Robert take her clothes off yet?

Jenna shakes her head. Too much gravel, she says. Margaret half-smiles. She and Grant have sex in rooms, she says.

J

enna and Robert meet that night.

He has made peanut butter sandwiches with THC in them.

His baggy t-shirt smells of weed. “I have to take a piss,” he says, and kisses her before walking behind the neighbor’s garage. He walks with an unsure step, as if he doesn’t know how far his body stretches out into space. Jenna tastes the peanut butter.

He comes back and they sing Maroon 5 in the alleyway, softly, to each other.

He feeds her gritty peanut butter with his fingers and tells her about the time when he was nine and at an Easter egg hunt, how he got stung by a bee and went into anaphylactic shock. The scariest thing that ever happened to him, he says, peering up at her through his eyelashes.

H

e has kissed her almost every night since they first smoked a joint, skipping English class, in the brown-tiled men’s bathroom on the second floor. It was her idea to come to the alleyway. She likes it because it’s dark and they can smoke; he seems to like it because it’s dark and so, she suspects, it feels less real to make out with someone. And more real. At school, they are whole people, wearing clothes and sneaking gum from their pockets during class. Jenna is the one with the dark blonde hair and the slightly bushy eyebrows. Smart. Robert is the one with charming dark-fringed eyes and sagging pants, the one who pretends not to care.

They agree that Hamlet is an asshole, but at least he is a poetic asshole.

Robert doesn’t come on Monday night. She sits in the dark with an eighth of an ounce tightly wrapped in a Ziploc, a present for Robert, the first time she has ever gone to a dealer. She is thinking about the smoothness between her legs and what they might do, for the first time, on this first frosty night of the year.

She waits for an hour and finally sends a text message, even though part of the alleyway is that it happens without too much talking.

She is finally beginning to understand, she thinks as she picks her nails, how two people can stand to stay together for so long, how the chalky omelets and the highlighters, the tweed jacket

fiction and the potbelly, can be a celebration of the strangeness of life rather than a disappointment. She can, for the first time, imagine her parents as young people. How terrifying it is to think that your life passes, that there will be nothing left except a cockroach in your eye sockets. The beauty of a cockroach, of a mouse’s skull. She shivers. Robert doesn’t come.

O

n Tuesday, Robert is hunched over his locker with two of his friends when she walks by after lunch. One of his friends sees Jenna and elbows Robert in the back. The two friends leave. Robert smiles distractedly.

His fingers are wrapped around his electric blue combination lock, like he’s trying to pull it off. He has forgotten the combination again, she thinks.

“What’s up?” she says.

He looks up through his eyelashes at her. “Oh. Hey. What’s up?” She can tell that he is chewing a green-apple Jolly Rancher, because of the smell.

She shrugs. “Can I have a Jolly Rancher?” She doesn’t mention the alleyway.

He looks surprised for a moment and then laughs. “Totally.” He opens his backpack and flicks a red one at her.

His phone vibrates. “Shit. Just saw your text,” he says, without looking at his phone.

“It’s okay,” she says.

He looks at her. “I was super tired last night.” He rubs his eyes. “My mom’s just been having a lot of trouble sleeping, and I might not be able to get out.” He fumbles with his lock. It comes open.

He grabs his battered English notebook and, smiling, pats her on the head before heading down the hall. She feels odd until he turns around and smiles at her again. She walks down the hallway in her dress, the warm flavor of red Jolly Rancher in her mouth.

M

r. Andrews comes over on Tuesday while Mrs. Andrews and Jenna’s mother are at a computer literacy class. Mr. Andrews is

here to talk business over wine, he says, scraping a bug off his shoe as he enters the house. He has brought red. He and Jenna’s father start off reading briefs, but two glasses in, Mr. Andrews starts to quote Shakespeare. Sonnets, mostly.

The summer’s flower is to the world sweet, though to itself it only lives and dies, he says. Jenna is wearing her bear paw sweats, sitting in the kitchen and doing her homework. Mrs. Andrews and Jenna’s mother show up. Mrs. Andrews decides to stay and drink. Mr. Andrews has had three glasses of wine; he saw a good documentary on Netflix the other day, he says. On wild African cats. They should watch it, he says. Mrs. Andrews rolls her eyes and smiles. Lilies that fester smell worse than weeds, Mr. Andrews says, finishing his sonnet.

Jenna steps beyond the wooden gate, holding her jacket against the wind. The trees are beginning to change colors, and in the pale lamplight the dead leaves are lit, streaks of warmth against a deep background. Her toes are cold. She is wearing flip-flops, and she shouldn’t be.

The roaches crawl nimbly past her feet.

They have lives, she realizes. She stares at the purpling sky.

S

he returns to her room fortyfive minutes later, numb inside.

She spreads moisturizer on her arms. The flesh feels tight. She tries on the green skull t-shirt she took last week from the mall. Mouse bones are small, she learned when she found the Altoid box dug up in the yard last year.

Surprisingly so.

She goes downstairs, through the kitchen. They are playing a drinking game to the African cats documentary.

Her father waves Jenna over. “Do you want the rest of the guacamole?” he asks.

“Come watch the lion section with us!”

Jenna shakes her head. Mrs. Andrews needs to go to the bathroom, and Jenna points her towards the downstairs halfbath, unless she wants to use the nicer one upstairs. Jenna says good night to the adults. Mr. Andrews looks at her.

Jenna starts back up the stairs; they

creak slightly. She wants to text Robert, to say ‘you fucking asshole.’ She takes off her badger-paw pants. In the bathroom, she starts to brush her teeth, but stops, and stands with only the vanity mirror lit. She lifts her shirt a little and peers at herself in the full-length mirror. She looks at the downy loose flesh on her stomach and the translucent blisters in the creases of her toes.

T

here is a sound at the door, someone jiggling the handle. She is about to open it, when Mr. Andrews pushes it open. “Oops,” he says unsteadily. A little too loudly. “Is this the restroom?” She stands there, barefoot, wearing only her skull t-shirt. He holds onto the door, smiling at her. She is thinking of Robert’s eyes.

Mr. Andrews fumbles for a moment, looking pink and brave. He unbuckles his belt and unzips his fly.

She has never seen one before. It is mauve and rope-veined. She feels dizzy.

She is frightened for a split second, until she looks into his eyes and sees a dead intensity in them. She is fascinated.

She feels the smoothness between her legs, the tightness of the flesh on her arms. Everything seems softer and more malleable to her, like the white of a cooked egg — firm and delicate and rotund all at the same time.

She steps forward and puts her mouth on his, aggressively. He clearly was not expecting this. She does not know what he was expecting. He smells like motel hand lotion. She stays for a moment even when he grasps her shoulders with dry hands, pushing her away. Then she closes her mouth and steps away, frightened. But something is roiling inside her, something black and fungal and too much alive. Their eyes meet, briefly. His eyes, pale, focus on her, and she can see the moonlight coming through the frosted window reflected in them. Her eyes are hard. She runs her tongue around the acrid new sweetness in her mouth. She half-smiles.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 29

personal essay

by Lucy Fleming illustration by Madeleine Witt

I

’m staring at my skull. Or, more accurately, my jaw: lower left molars glow in one black-andwhite snapshot, upper left molars in another, teeth foreign yet familiar in their eerie greenish cast. The side view, the front view. The gem of the collection: the full-mouth panorama, taken only once every five years. It’s hard to avoid, projected in stunning accuracy on a computer screen a few feet from my face.

Teeth tell a story, we learned in anthropology last semester. Wear and tear, breakage, size, texture.

The skulls lined the lab tables, resting on foam, labeled with index cards that stated sex, species.

We ran our fingers over the blond-bleached jaws of hominins long dead, felt the bulge of healed fractures, the tiny irregularities in color. While everyone made notes on the presence or absence of sagittal crests, I sat with the skulls, brushing my fingertips over the old, old teeth.

Now, sitting here in the dentist’s chair, I try to make out my story from the glowing teeth on the screen. They seem fairly ordinary. Better, if you

30 | Vol. XLI, No. 4 | January 2014

personal essay count the orthodonture. Worse, if you count the missing tooth. They seem to hang in space, broad knobs sliding to curving roots. Around the outside, the delicate trace of a ghostly jaw.

Someday, if my skull sits on a lab table, its index card will read, Female, Homo sapiens. There it will sit, on white foam, a trace of a life. Manmade dental sealants on top and bottom molars; missing left lower canine; one cavity, filled.

T

he dentist’s office, from the outside, resembles a shellcolored strip mall. Step inside the glass doors, and you’re in the jungle: a long corridor of palm trees, ferns, leafy warm plants breathing in moist, heavy air. The intensity of the green swallows your footfalls across the cement indoor sidewalk that leads to your dentist, your orthodontist, your anesthesiologist, rheumatologist, gynecologist, oncologist, physical therapist, therapist. A professional park, it’s called. The plants, I assume, are there to dilute the -ology. This building bursts with human beings’ knowledge of human beings: our brains, lungs, reproductive organs, cancers, bones. We know ourselves so well. We have named every one of our teeth.

even the ten-foot-tall toothbrush statue in the lobby.

My family’s fine, I assure her.

A friend of mine told me last year that he hasn’t been to the dentist in five years. Your teeth look fine, I said.

He just laughed. No health insurance.

I try to remind myself of my privilege as I lie here on Dr. Isaacson’s blue leather chair. I know I’m lucky to lie here every six months, to have grown accustomed to the bright plasticcovered light hovering above my head, to the red panels of the Mondrian print that hangs in the hallway outside.

There was no dental care for most of human history, I tell myself. I visualize the skulls in the anthropology lab, dirty and broken, the chipped and missing teeth. I’m so lucky to have been born in this century, lucky to receive expensive care, lucky to be able, miraculously, to see every tooth’s flaw in sharp black and white on a screen. But I do not know my luck the way I know what comes next — the small pinpricks of pain from the sharp dental tools that Dot, the hygienist, holds gracefully in one manicured hand. That is a different knowledge. I still flinch.

For years, I dreaded my cleaning appointments, just as I dreaded vaccines, green leafy vegetables,

I know I’m lucky to lie here every six months. There was no dental care for most of human history.

“Just take a swish of this mouthwash, hon,” says Dot. She is busily arranging the sharp dental implements on their tray, asking me about my family, asking me about school. I’ve come to this dentist’s office since I was three years old. Nothing about it surprises me any more, not

therapists, gym class, and other features of the privileged world. Most of all, I dreaded cavities.

For years I brushed my teeth every day, moving the toothbrush in small, exact circles, as the hygienist instructed, to prevent the buildup of evil plaque. And for years I waited

nervously at the conclusion of my dental check-up, as Dr. Isaacson leaned back on his blue-leather stool, sharp instrument in hand. His lips were always slightly wet, as if he was concentrating on something deep in his brain that made him forget to dry them. There was a lot of information deep in his brain. He knew everything about teeth. Everything there was to know. Otherwise, I reasoned, he wouldn’t be a dentist.

“Did you find anything?” I would ask.

“No cavities,” he would smile, and nod me out of the hygienist’s room to get my sticker at the front desk.

They found one when I was eight.

A cavity. They found it, they filled it.

I don’t even remember which tooth it was on. But it’s there, some mark of imperfection, of the frightening permanence of bone.

A

s a child, during cleanings, all I could think about was the buzzing of brush against tooth, the pluck of floss, the taste of blood, the light scrapes of metal against enamel. Now, I daydream. As Dot prepares the electric toothbrush, I close my eyes. Where to go, where to go? My mind ricochets a while, and I find myself in anthropology lab again, staring at skulls lined on a table; some anthropology lab far in the future, and the skull on the table is mine.

Strange, the anthropology student is bound to remark. Missing lower left canine.

“Did you find anything?” the teaching fellow asks.

“Well, there’s evidence of orthodonture,” the student replies.

What evidence, I don’t know. Tiny spots, perhaps, where the metal buds clung to incisor and premolar, holding tight the clear plastic wires that drew the teeth together, month after month, in some inverted tug of war. I got braces after the surgery, to fill the space where my missing tooth would have been. But he can’t know that.

“Good,” says the TF. “Anything

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 31

personal essay else?”

“Well, the left lower canine is simply gone.”

“Gone?”

“It’s not there. Look.” He holds up the skull so that the TF can see.

“Interesting,” says the TF. She moves on.

“D

id you find anything?” I asked, five years ago, at the end of my check-up.

“I’m more concerned with what I can’t find,” said Dr. Isaacson. “Your left lower canine is simply gone.”

“Gone?”

“It’s not there. Look.” He points to the space between my incisor and premolar on the whitish print of the X-ray.

“Where is it?”

It was there last time I had X-rays. I was positive. We were looking at two sets of images. In the older print, the canine in question hibernated snugly under my baby tooth. Now, the baby tooth was gone, and nothing slept beneath it. Just dark space.

“I don’t know,” said Dr. Isaacson.

“W

hat happened to her tooth?” the student asks. He’s beckoned the TF over again.

It’s evening, and the TF wants section to be over so she can go home and feed her terrier. “I don’t know,” she says. “Genetic, maybe.”

“How do we know?”

“We can’t.”

I

can hear the buzzing as Dot scoops up some of the grainy mint toothpaste. Long ago, there was a selection of flavors — cherry, strawberry, bubblegum. For adults, there’s only mint. The rapidly rotating brush tickles my tongue.

“All set,” she says, replacing the brush in its holder. “Time to floss. Do you floss regularly?”

I don’t floss as much as I should, but “regularly” is pretty vague. I say, “Yes.” 32 | Vol. XLI, No. 4 | January 2014

“And you wear your retainer?”

I nod.

“That’s great. I can tell,” she approves. “Your teeth are still so

Dr. Isaacson comes in. “Hello,” he says in his wet-lipped way. He palpitates my lymph nodes, clinks the metal instruments around my mouth.

“I’m more concerned with what I can’t find. Your left lower canine is simply gone.” aligned. It’s amazing, they covered that whole thing up so well. That crazy thing with your canine, I mean.” She readjusts her facemask, sawing delicately between my teeth.

She speaks about Dr. Nicosizis, down the hall. He was the orthodontist in charge of realigning my teeth after the surgery. “Who would have guessed?”

Who would have guessed, that it was there the whole time?

The X-ray from five years ago is on that screen, too. The panorama, taken only every five years. It’s the one where you have to stand in the hallway with your teeth biting around a plastic grip as the camera — or whatever it is that takes X-rays — zooms around your head.

I don’t know how X-rays work, I realize, just as I don’t know the names for all of my teeth, or how to fit braces, or if one of the skulls on the lab table belonged to an ancestor of mine. I don’t know much about anthropology, or any -ology. I don’t know where I will be in two years. I don’t know why my lower left canine turned downward, buried itself in my chin, or why it lay there for two years, encased in bone, until we spotted it on my panorama, five years ago, a tiny white dot in the milky smoke of my X-rayed jaw. It took a wrong turn.

Dot is finishing the flossing. “Dr. Isaacson will be in shortly,” she smiles, and takes my file out of the room. She leans back in to add that I can read People magazine if I want.

I’m okay, I say. I stare at the ceiling instead.

He always jokes about my missing tooth. “Who would have guessed?” He feels the scar tissue from the surgery that removed it. “Anything hurt?”

I shake my head. The surgical wounds have long healed. I have the tooth, small and bloodied, in a Ziploc bag somewhere at home.

Dr. Isaacson wishes me luck this semester. I thank him. He floats out.

Lying here, I can almost make out the small wrinkles of consternation on the face of the anthropology student.

He puzzles over the missing tooth.

Perhaps his name is Mark. I wonder how my skull came to rest on his lab table. He wonders how my skull came to be rest on his lab table. Traces of orthodonture. High cheekbones.

Small chin. Female, Homo sapiens. He wonders about the color of my eyes.

“And it looks like you’re due for some X-rays,” says Dot.

P

erhaps later, he will find the cavity. Turning the skull in the yellow light of the lab, as footsteps in the hall fade across linoleum. The TF will be clicking off the lab lamps, one by one. Female, Homo sapiens. One missing tooth, one cavity. He will know which tooth it was on; he will feel the filling, the tiny bump against his thumbnail as his fingers trace the old, old teeth. Didn’t brush every night, did she? But only one cavity; she learned her lesson.

And there — on her chin, below the missing canine, the slightest trace of a scar.

Knicks & Knacks

K

nit and Katahdin, two shops on Whitney Avenue, fly under the radar despite their vibrant interiors. Katahdin boasts an impressive collection of international trinkets, and you can stop by Knit on Tuesday evenings for their “Stitch ‘n Bitch” classes. BRIANNA LOO reports.

BY AMELIA EARNEST

G

rowing up in rural Virginia, I didn’t think much about feminism. To me, feminists were plump women with coiffed hair and suffragette sashes, women from a bygone era depicted in sepia photographs in history books.

I didn’t meet a real live feminist until I was 16.

The cosmopolitan center of my childhood was Richmond, a city whose social traditions remain wistfully stuck in the past. Starting in middle school, my classmates and I carpooled into the city for cotillion. Donning lipstick smiles and too short suit pants, we learned to ballroom dance.

The dance caller, a chain-smoker in cowboy boots, stood in the center of concentric circles of fidgety prepubescents. His raspy voice echoed off the ballroom’s ornate ceiling: “Forward right, back left, forward right. Now turn the girl!”

“The girl.” That meant me.

I loved dancing, but the caller’s instructions frustrated me. They were always and only

cover directed at the boy. I had to fit my actions around what I knew my partner would do, either translating the steps into their inverse meanings or giving up on learning entirely, allowing my partner to lead me about the floor like a particularly lifelike mannequin.

But I was no Scarlett O’Hara. I loved skinning my knees on the softball field and shouting my opinions in class. My mom was the breadwinner, the chef, and the CEO of our household, and at my high school I was fifth in a succession of female valedictorians and the first student ever to get into an Ivy League university. Walking across the stage at graduation, I was a bundle of female empowerment neatly packaged into a starchy white dress, nude-colored panty hose, and matching heels — as mandated by my high school’s virginal dress code.

Getting into Yale was a future I had never expected, and one that I wasn’t sure I deserved. My grandmother left college weeks into her freshman year, opting for a more practical option: secretarial school. Fifty years later, my opportunities greatly surpassed hers.

After learning about the women’s rights movement in high school, I knew that feminism had made my future possible, yet something about the word rubbed me like the stiff heel of a new shoe.

Why? For one thing, feminism’s definition confused me. I knew today’s feminists didn’t fight for the same causes as the women in the sepia photographs, but in high school, I had heard conflicting things about what opinions made someone a feminist. I had also heard about feminism’s so-called “war on men,” and though I didn’t fully understand the accusation, I wondered why some factions of the women’s progress movement didn’t see men the way I did: as allies. Most importantly, I feared that feminism would put my gender at the forefront of my identity.

I wanted to be defined by other things that I felt were more reflective of who I was as a person.

Here I was, a small-town girl who had made it to the academic big leagues — to Yale, alma mater of feminist demigod 36 | Vol. XLI, No. 4 | January 2014

Hillary Clinton. I was sure nearly all women at Yale would be feminists. As move-in weekend grew closer, I feared having to explain why I didn’t count myself as one of them. I feared having to admit that I didn’t know.

But on move-in day, no pitchforkwielding mob awaited me on Old Campus. Midterms came and went without anyone exposing me as a traitor to womankind. I was relieved to discover that nobody really seemed to talk about feminism. I went along, more than happy to adopt the policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

O

n a chilly October night my freshman fall, a dozen or so Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity pledges — boozed up and blindfolded — stood on Old Campus shouting a misogynistic chant loud enough that I could hear it from my bedroom window. The words would remain forever tattooed onto Yale’s discourse on feminism: “No means yes; yes means anal.”

In the months following the controversy, my questions about feminism returned with a vengeance.

Was I a feminist? It was a difficult question, one I had avoided successfully up to that point. But now “feminism” was hanging from the tip of every tongue, and rolling across the pages of my morning paper. Reading the flurry of articles and opinion pieces that followed the DKE scandal, I was surprised to learn about multiple flare-ups of misogyny in Yale’s recent past. But as fiery debate faded into dull litigation, talk about feminism faded, too. I decided to let the op-ed writers handle the on-campus dialogue.

For three years, I continued to avoid the topic. I was embarrassed to admit that I still wasn’t sure how I felt about feminism. And then, my senior year, I learned that I wasn’t the only one.

According to a 2013 Economist/YouGov poll, just 28 percent of men and 38 percent women consider themselves feminists. The numbers jump to 47 percent of men and 67 percent of women when the poll subjects were provided

with a definition of “feminist” (a person who “believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes”), but their initial hesitation to embrace the “feminist label” seemed telling to me.

Could the same trend exist at Yale?

Could it be that in all my self-doubting, I had failed to notice that other women at Yale were also grappling with feminism?

In my last year at Yale, I turned to the women around me to answer the questions that, for so long, I had been asking myself.

One of the first women I spoke to was Julia Calagiovanni ’15. A former associate editor for Yale feminist magazine Broad Recognition and a Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies major, Calagiovanni has kept a finger on the pulse of Yale campus feminism.

“A lot of the thin tgs that have happened in the past couple years have made people wake up and say: ‘What’s happening at Yale and is this ok?’” says Calagiovanni.

Headlines from the past several years lend the impression that sexism at Yale resurfaces like the seasonal flu. Just as people are forgetting about last year’s trauma, another nauseating act flares up, provoking new and fleeting media coverage.

In 2005, 20 T-shirts emblazoned with messages to Yale campus from rape survivors were stolen from outside of the Women’s Center. In 2008, a Zeta Psi pledge class posed in the same spot holding a sign that said, “We Love Yale Sluts.” In 2009, Zeta’s “Preseason Scouting Report” ranked incoming freshmen females by the number of alcoholic drinks the brothers would supposedly need to consume before hooking up with them.

Calagiovanni says the reality is that a large amount of sexism occurs outside of these explosively publicized incidents.

“It only comes to our attention in acute situations,” she says. Incendiary incidents like the DKE scandal are shocking, but they don’t come out of nowhere. They are manifestations of problems that persist at Yale year round.

Sexism at Yale is actually more like a

cover chronic cold.

Calagiovanni says Yale’s lack of long-term institutional memory is a big reason people why people discount sexism at Yale. “Because of the relatively short time undergraduates spend at Yale, they may not know about things even from the recent past. Because of that, it is hard to see the big picture, the repeating patterns.”

After talking to Calagiovanni, I realized the extent of Yale’s thriving feminist culture. But why hadn’t I felt its presence? Why, despite reoccurring incidents of misogyny on campus, weren’t there more vocal feminists at Yale?

I turned to an expert on the issue of college-campus feminism. Michael Kimmel is a sociologist at Stony Brook University who served as an expert witness in the Citadel and Virginia Military Institute cases on admitting female students. He also wrote several articles on the DKE hazing scandal for Ms. Magazine. Kimmel thinks today’s would-be feminists assume that feminist battles have already been won. When I asked him about college students’ relationship with feminism, he described a typical exchange: “‘Feminism,’ my female students tell me, ‘that was your generation’s issue! Women couldn’t play sports; we couldn’t have orgasms; we couldn’t have equal rights in the work place — and we are very grateful — but you won!”

Perhaps Yale students share this premature perception that we are beyond needing feminism, and that there are more serious fires to put out elsewhere.

According to Kimmel, college is a sheltered environment in which many female students don’t see any obvious need for feminism.

“Can you imagine a more genderequal place in the world than Yale University campus during the day?”

Kimmel asked me.

He had a point. I couldn’t think of a single time I felt that my gender had prevented me from getting into a seminar or stopped me from joining a

group. Without the sense of urgency felt by women in earlier decades, many collegiate females assume that feminism’s

crossed my mind.

Political correctness is any Yalie’s first language. It’s astonishing that no

Corporate Lives and Trophy Wives.

Librarians and Barbarians. I attended and I dressed up. I drank, I danced. battles have been fought — and won — by earlier generations.

“In class everyone says ‘him or her,’ ‘everyone’ is politically correct. You read feminist texts,” said Kimmel. “But at night,” he continued, “the fraternities rule, and women are suddenly transformed into babes or bitches.”

Babes or bitches? I jotted down his words, but they didn’t make me think of Yale. I thought of the nightmarish stories I had heard from my high school friends attending southern state schools where athletics and Greek life sit atop a high pedestal. Maybe there’s sexism at those schools, I thought, but not at Yale.

According to Alexandra Brodsky, ’12 LAW ’16, that misconception is not uncommon. Brodsky, an editor of femininisting.com and a signatory to the 2011 Title IX complaint that alleged mishandling of sexual misconduct cases

by Yale’s administration, is concerned about the attitude that feminism’s battle is “over.”

“One thing that is hard about Yale is that there is a self-congratulatory progressivism that makes people think they couldn’t possibly be misogynists,” Brodsky said. “Like: ‘I voted for Obama — I couldn’t be sexist!’”

I had certainly felt invulnerable to sexism at Yale. During my brief stint in Greek life, I gained exposure to the kind of female mentoring that would make Sheryl Sandberg beam. But what did I like the most? Themed parties that I now realize were straight out of Animal House.

Corporate Lives and Trophy Wives.

Librarians and Barbarians. I attended, and I dressed up. I drank, I danced.

Nothing remotely related to feminism

one I knew ever raised an eyebrow at these blatantly sexist themes. I certainly didn’t. Women’s battles did feel “won” at Yale. It felt like a given that we were “progressive.” We were satirizing sexism in clever, rhyming, or ironic ways — all in the name of good fun, all within Yale’s bigotry-proof bubble.

Looking back, I can see that I dressed up and played into sexist stereotypes because I never felt any real risk that anyone at Yale would box me into one.

M

y mother taught me there were three things I should not do at the table: curse, talk religion, and talk politics. At Yale, I was delighted to find most people did all three at the table, and often simultaneously. But Yale, I learned, had its own rules on taboo subjects.

I noticed that, when lobbed casually into dining hall conversation, the topic of “feminism” unpredictably triggered debate, polarization, or uncomfortable silence. “Feminism,” it seemed, was a new “F-word.”

Organizations like Broad Recognition and the Women’s Center productively voice the feminist cause on campus.

But their dialogue about gender equality does not permeate into everyday conversation. Speaking with Kimmel and Brodsky helped me begin to grasp why Yale might not be the most fertile ground for feminist action to take root, but I still struggled to understand why feminism was so uncomfortable to discuss by name.

I asked 15 poised, confident women in their junior or senior year to discuss their relationship with feminism at Yale. Coming from a wide array of

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 37

cover hometowns, majors, and social groups, they represented a range of Yale’s communities. Although all of them were willing to speak, many walked on eggshells, contorting and hedging their words with addenda and disclaimers.

Eight of the women I interviewed, when asked whether they identified as feminist, antifeminist, or somewhere in between, expressed anxiety or guilt about their own classification.

One facet of feminism that may cause women to hesitate is the perceived vagueness of the word’s meaning.

Some women I interviewed struggled to identify as feminist because they couldn’t pin down or define today’s feminist principles.

While comfortable discussing feminism, Amal Ga’al ’14 has witnessed how the term can be misused in conversations at Yale. “I was in a dining hall and this guy was telling a joke,” Ga’al said. “He called this a girl a feminist and then apologized for it.” Ga’al jumped in to correct the comedian, saying, “That is not an insult.”

But not everyone agrees with Ga’al.

According to the Economist/YouGov Poll, two times more Americans consider “feminist” to be an insult than believe it to be a compliment. From my few, uncomfortable experiences voicing doubt about my own feminist identity, I knew that some people considered women who rejected feminism to be ignorant or shameful. A badge of honor in one context, “feminism” is a red letter in another. It’s not surprising that it’s

hard to bring up in conversation.

And in writing, too. Over the course of two months, I interviewed 15 Yale women and eight experts, including academics and activists. I heard the voices of antifeminists, feminists, and everyone in between. I began this quest to distinguish between label and meaning, hoping to find how feminism might fit into my own identity. But as I stared at the cursor blinking expectantly on my computer screen, I realized I still could not write a clear answer. I couldn’t communicate the complex range of feelings I had about feminism.

Frustrated, I burst into my suitemate’s room to vent. There, I found Kimaya Abreu ’15, and asked her if she identified as feminist. She immediately responded that she did. But mere seconds after, a shadow of doubt flickered across her face.

“Well,” she backtracked, “it means a lot of different things to different people.

I would rather explain what I think than use that word.”

She contemplated her initial statement and spoke again. “What do I mean when I call myself a feminist?” she said — more cautiously and to no one in particular.

O

ne of my favorite aspects of life at Yale was how I was able to wear different hats: student, volunteer, traveler, writer. Another part of why I hesitated to call myself a feminist was my fear of putting my gender at the forefront of my identity. After all, I

thought, what’s more empowered and “feminist” than basing your decisions off of your interests, rather than your gender?

Vivienne Hay ’14 is, in many ways, a shining example of feminism’s successes: a double major in Physics and Math & Philosophy, she is thriving in three fields historically notorious for exclusion of women.

Hay is not a feminist.

She says she’s witnessed firsthand Yale’s efforts to encourage “women in the sciences,” but she pushes back on that categorization, which she considers reductive. “People just always speak of women in the sciences as a rare commodity,” she says. The label, she says, might imply, “You are this person who ticks off this box and that makes you valuable.”

Other women, I learned, felt that the label “feminist” collided with their other important identities. Earlier phases of feminism were criticized for serving primarily the needs of white, middleclass women. Edirin Okoloko ’14 says that when she first came to Yale, her identity as an African-American female had contributed to her antifeminism. “I grew up with a clear order of identity in my mind,” she says. “I was black first, female second.”

While at Yale, Okoloko has come to understand and appreciate feminism’s rich diversity. “It wasn’t until I got here … that I realized that these two inherent parts of my identity did not, in fact, need to conflict.”

cover Some people struggle to reconcile their identities as feminists and their identities as women. Isis Sakainga ‘14, a student from Sudan, considered herself a “partial feminist” but says that her opinions on the role of women and mothers in a household, opinions largely influenced by Sudanese culture, are at odds with her perception of feminism.

I had noticed clear discomfort among young women when discussing their ambitions for family, as opposed to their career. Pressure for young women to prove themselves in areas of life outside of those considered traditionally feminine can act as a double-edged sword, creating limitations alongside its empowerment.

Logan Kozal ’15 is the first and only woman I’ve met at Yale who, in her future plans, openly prioritizes having a family. Kozal also talked of other ideas for her future — becoming a pastry chef or a marine biologist — but those professions seemed less striking in Yale’s conversational setting than her sincere expression of excitement to eventually raise kids.

“It’s very infrequent that I ever get outwardly judgmental responses of the type of ‘You are throwing your life away’ or ‘You are wasting your talent,’” Kozal said. “But the few times I have, it has been from other girls.”

I

n my exploration of how the word “feminism” is viewed today, I had begun by questioning the divide between the popular acceptance of feminism’s values and the stigma of its name. A YDN survey polled 134 Yalies, half male and half female, asking, “Do you consider yourself a feminist?” While 97 percent said their beliefs aligned with the popular definition of feminism (that

// YALE MANUSCRIPTS AND ARCHIVES

(Left) Women picket outside Mory’s in 1970, protesting the eating club’s maleonly membership.

(Right) One year after Yale becomes coed, people demonstrate to increase the college’s female enrollment.

men and women should have equal rights), only 60 percent of the same respondent pool identified themselves as “feminist.”

I see now that I started out with a false assumption: Searching for the values of “real” feminism was like pouring a pitcher into glass after glass, trying to find the “real” shape of water.

Women at Yale have embraced and refuted the ideas of feminism in entirely distinct ways, with varying degrees of disassociation, rejection, and activism.

But while their self-applied labels varied, the struggles they described as juniors and seniors about to leave academia for the workplace were uncannily similar.

We all think about give-and-take across our future personal and professional lives and about how we can be defined first and foremost not as women, but as people. As a senior woman also nearing graduation, I have trouble not wondering how being a woman, regardless of how I identify, will affect my life in the future.

The real question now is how our negative perception of feminism determines our actions. In the same survey, only 46 percent of the respondents said that they’d be comfortable being publicly referred to as a feminist. So while Yale seems to have a higher proportion of feminists than America, a 14 percentage point drop from those identifying as “feminist” and those willing to be identified as “feminist” indicates that many of them aren’t eager to talk about why.

The perspectives of fellow Yale women and my own crippling trepidations in expressing my feelings on feminism writing this article have shown me that “feminism” is an incendiary term — regardless of whether or not it deserves that image — and inhibits the much-needed normalization of women’s rights advocacy in everyday dialogue.

Perception shapes reality. Our common reluctance to identify as feminists leaves the work of true feminism to the hardy few who are brave enough to accept the stigma of the big red “F.” Six years have passed since I last slipped a gloved hand into the crook

of my escort’s elbow at the Richmond Cotillion. At parties, there’s no longer a dance caller who conducts my movements around the room.

But now I understand that cotillion was teaching more than dancing. It was also teaching us a social construct. He steps forward; I’ll step back. The dance’s invitation listed only the appropriate wear for boys, but I knew what was expected of me. He wears a suit; I wear a cocktail dress and white gloves. He wears a sports coat; I wear a pencil skirt and blouse.

Though the voice of the dance caller has not followed me from cotillion into adulthood, I have begun to notice other voices in my environment that seek to shape and inform my actions and words.

The conversations I had with my peers in writing this article have inspired me to listen vigilantly for — and call out — the voices seeking to control and stifle women. But I have also become aware of another voice: my own. It was my own voice telling me not to risk judgment or offense by sharing my doubts. It was my own voice that had kept me out of the conversation.

Arriving at Yale, I had felt as though my uncertain relationship with feminism was a problem in need of a definite solution. Now mere months from graduation, I have stopped waiting for the epiphany. I have realized that my ambivalence is not inherently a problem.

In four months I will cross another graduation stage. On the other side, a largely gender-unequal “real world” waits for me. I don’t know what, if any, role feminism will play in my future. But I am confident that I will push past my instinctual wariness of divisive subjects and speak my mind, even when doing so feels awkward or alienating. I am not the girl in white gloves and a party dress any more. While I certainly don’t seek to offend anyone, I have stripped away the layers of etiquette that kept me from joining divisive conversations.

Lately, I am pleased to report, I have been dropping the F-word left and right.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 39

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