YDN Magazine

VOL XXXVI t ISSUE 6 t APRIL 2009

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T H G FI N Y O I C T N A A T N R G O E P R E P D N E E T

INSIDE 20

COVER STORY

Identity Collision

BY NICOLE LEVY

In the world of RollerDurance, an exercise program inspired by roller derby, Rachel can become her alter ego, Evil, and cancer patient Jen can become wildwoman Jayne. They are teammates — and family — to the very end.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Daniel Fromson

MANAGING EDITORS

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Ben Brody, Jesse Maiman

PHOTO ESSAY

Union Station

BY STREETER PHILLIPS

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

New Haven’s Union Station has seen millions of passengers — and generations of Yale students — walk through its limestone halls. While everyone rushes to make their trains, one photographer decides to pause and take it all in.

Anthony Lydgate, Naina Saligram, Kanglei Wang, Victor Zapana

PRODUCTION MANAGER

Adrienne Wong

DESIGN & PHOTO EDITORS

Ginger Jiang, Loide Marwanga, Jared Shenson, La Wang

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FEATURE

Motion to Suppress

BY DARA LIND

FICTION EDITOR

At a Hartford federal building, a team consisting of Yale Law School students and professors tries to save 11 immigrants from deportation. Their only hope is the motion to suppress.

Angelica Baker

POETRY EDITOR

Rebecca Dinerstein

STAFF WRITERS

Rachel Caplan, Rebecca Distler, Jacque Feldman, Nicole Levy, Frances Sawyer, Eileen Shim, Jonathan Yeh

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For 99-year-old Mendy Glatzman, life is full of pain. But when his estranged younger brother dies, Mendy must face the affliction he tries the hardest to avoid: reflection.

Maria Haras, Sin Jin

COVER AND “MOTION TO SUPPRESS” GRAPHICS BY LOIDE MARWANGA FICTION ILLUSTRATIONS BY SIN JIN “TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT” ILLUSTRATION BY MARIA HARAS

A Bright Light for Death

BY JUSTIN STONE

ILLUSTRATORS

The YDN Magazine invites letters to the editor. Please send comments to the editor-in-chief at daniel.fromson@yale.edu.

The views and opinions represented in the Magazine’s articles and advertisements do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff. We reserve the right to refuse any ad for any reason and to delete or change any copy we consider objectionable, false, or in poor taste.

FICTION

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FEATURE

Life in Their Hands

BY NAINA SALIGRAM

For the first time in more than a decade, teen pregnancies are increasing nationwide. New Haven is working both to reverse the trend and to help those who are already part of it.

The Yale Daily News Magazine April 2009

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AROUND ELM CITY

In the Land of the Dead

BY ELIZABETH BEWLEY

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STUDIO SPACE

Gesture and Poise

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UP THE HILL

Downloading the Universe

BY SOPHIE QUINTON

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A Little Bit of Peace

PROFILE

Matching the Brightest Flames

BY RACHEL CAPLAN

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POEM

The Problem With Myth

BY ROSANNA OH

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TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT

Pasta and Wellness

BY ANTHONY LYDGATE

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At the weekly meeting of RollerDurance, everyone is encouraged to skate on one foot and fall. Turn to page 20 to find out why.

MY YALE

BY EILEEN SHIM

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NICOLE LEVY

BY ZARA KESSLER

BACKPAGE

Key Messages

EDITED BY DANIEL FROMSON

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

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elcome to the beginning of the end: the last issue of the Yale Daily News Magazine before the year-end Wallace Prize issue, in which we publish only prizewinners. Seniors, now is the time to begin quivering. If your parents are at all like mine, they’ve already feuded with you about commencement — Ibiza, so far as I know, was booked sometime in 1954 — and have requested that you submit a color-coded guest list, in triplicate.

Of course, for most people, this time of year is more or less a repeat.

Another room draw. Another round of papers. Maybe a realization like, “Wow, college is going by so fast,” or, “Those freshmen, somehow, aren’t really freshmen anymore.”

My personal version of this last thought came yesterday, when I was editing Nicole Levy’s “Identity Collision,” this issue’s cover story. We haven’t had a cover story by a freshman all year. But Nicole, miraculously, has cranked out a great one in which she became part of a deliciously strange subculture of ex-roller derby women.

To break up the April monotony, you might also turn to page ten for an eye-opening feature on the Law School’s fight to protect illegal immigrants, or to page 26 for a look at the Elm City’s efforts to combat the nationwide rise in teen pregnancy. Seniors who are feeling downright ancient can flip to page 33 for a short story about 99-year-old Mendy Glatzman that is sure to make you feel young again. If you like to eat your feelings, check out “Pasta and Wellness” on page 40.

As always, thank you for taking the time to pick up a copy of the YDN Magazine. We hope you enjoy this issue.

Best wishes, —Daniel Fromson

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April 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

AROUND ELM CITY IN THE LAND OF THE DEAD by Elizabeth Bewley Once upon a time in the Elm City, that leafy space we now know as the Green served as the colony’s cemetary. Although most of the remains were removed, Elizabeth Bewley discovers that not everyone made the journey to the new digs. called First Society of New Haven — was the only place of worship for miles. As the congregation grew, the church was rebuilt several times. In 1812, its fourth and current building was constructed lower on the Green, facing Temple Street — over a portion of the cemetery. As a result, the building’s foundations were placed only three feet deep, leaving 147 graves protected within a six-foot-high basement beneath the sanctuary. This is the crypt.

In 1821, the City of New Haven decided to relocate the rest of the headstones from the Green to Grove Street Cemetery, leaving the bodies interred below the Green.

The graves in the crypt, paired with the lone outdoor grave behind the church, are the only headstones that remain in their original locations.

The atmosphere of the crypt is solemn, but not spooky. As Lura Ellsworth, treasurer and former president of the New Haven Crypt Association, laughingly notes, “We don’t have any ghosts, and if we hear noises, it’s usually the organist practicing.”

The crypt encapsulates almost two centuries of New Haven’s earliest history. Interred in the crypt are some of the colony’s most famous denizens: Margaret Arnold, Benedict Arnold’s first wife; Rebecca Hayes, the grandmother of President Rutherford Hayes; James Hillhouse, after whose family Hillhouse Avenue was named; and Reverend James Pierpont, who donated books to start Collegiate School, which became Yale College. Also buried in the crypt is Hesta Coster, who bequeathed a large tract of Crypt tours run Thursdays and Saturdays, 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., land north of from April to November. Tours are free and open to the public. the Green to be COURTESY CENTER CHURCH ON-THE-GREEN

tepping down the stairs from the narthex into the low-ceilinged crypt under Center Church on the Green, you smell a faintly musty, dank scent in the air. Soft lighting and small, high windows illuminate the engravings on the aging, hand-crafted headstones, packed together in tight rows.

Each stone is unique: some are traditional rectangles; others are low, level “table stones”; still others are long, flat “wolf stones” that cover the entire grave to prevent wolves from digging up dead bodies.

Skulls, representing death, are engraved on some stones; wings emerge from the skulls to represent the connection between the mind and the soul, and the ascension of the soul to heaven. “Most stones face the east,” explains congregation member and crypt tour guide Harold Peck. “It’s a symbol of the beginning of eternal life, which resembles the beginning of a new day.”

In New Haven’s earliest days, the Upper Green served as the colony’s cemetery.

Today, the bodies of approximately 5,000 settlers remain buried beneath the Green.

Yet the only ostensible marker of the park’s graveyard heritage is the crypt beneath Center Church, the tall, red-brick, whitepillared structure nestled between two other churches. At the inception of the New Haven colony, Center Church — then

used for education; the availability of this land induced Yale to move from its original campus in Saybrook, Connecticut, to its current New Haven location. The oldest stone in the crypt belongs to Sarah Trowbridge, who died in 1687. Her epitaph, which runs clear around the side of the stone, describes her as “the painful mother of eight, six of whom are dead.”

Peck attempts to put this stone’s age into perspective: “She was dead and buried for one hundred years, and then George Washington became President.”

Unfortunately, stones like Trowbridge’s have begun to show their age. Church leadership first noticed their deterioration in the mid-eighties; as a result, they formed the Crypt Association to maintain the space. Preservationists blamed the crypt’s cement floor for the stones’ corrosion, claiming that cement prevented moisture from evaporating and turned the headstones into wicks that absorbed excess water in the soil. Today’s loosely-laid brick floor, set atop a bed of sand, allows the soil to breathe, although the Upper Green’s downhill grade makes water damage an ever-present problem. The Crypt Association has undertaken other measures to preserve the headstones; several stones are removed to “breathe” each winter, and many of the stones’ bases have been lined with a lead sealant. Still, fighting the effects of time is not easy. “Now we’re worried about lead in the soil,” notes Peck half-jokingly.

Ellsworth agrees that preserving the stones takes a lot of time, labor, and money, but she has no doubt that the crypt is worth the effort. With affection she describes the chubby, winged angel at the back of the crypt — her favorite feature — and explains the significance of each notable family represented on the stones. Ultimately, her summary of the crypt’s importance is simple: “It’s the history of the city of New Haven and its founders,” she explains.

Peck agrees. “It’s one of those treasures in New Haven that no one seems to know about.”

The Yale Daily News Magazine April 2009

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STUDIO SPACE GESTURE AND POISE by Zara Kessler tudio D sits at the end of a dark hallway on the fifth floor of Yale University’s Payne Whitney Gym. Mirrors line the walls, reflecting, admiring, and critiquing the every movement of nine dancers, including myself, present this Sunday to learn a new piece for the Yaledancers dance group choreographed by Tara Streich-Tilles ’09. Poised before us in a choreographer’s uniform of a T-shirt and baggy sweatpants, Tara waits for an instant. Conversations are smothered; all eyes zoom in on her limbs.

Tara shows the opening movements of the dance. She rubs her forehead with the back of her right palm and then drags her fingers from her cheek to her collarbone to her elbow and down her arm. She repeats this simple zigzag pattern several times and then instructs us to mimic it. The dancers begin. I find my own hand’s stroke along my upper body tentative. My fingers are uncertain of the path that my brain is telling them to follow. My mind panics that my arm is following the wrong course, that my elbow is pausing at the wrong angles, that I’m moving at a different speed than that of my fellow-dancers.

“Tara, can you show that again?” “Tara, can we try that with music?” “Tara, how far apart should our feet be spread as we do this arm movement?” Questions come pouring out of the dancers. I am not the only one perplexed by the foreign movements. Tara repeats the arm’s serpentine pattern in slow motion again and again. She switches on the soothing music of Feist, a singer-songwriter.

She warns us not to be afraid of really stroking our own foreheads, reminding us that hesitant movements will never register to an audience. We repeat the gesture, internalize, analyze, and repeat again.

Dancers learning new choreography are not the only ones who struggle. “I struggle to choreograph. It usually happens at the last minute the night before,” Tara reveals.

She seems to speak louder in movements than she does in words, and her voice is soft as she discloses that what I see each Sunday is the product of work that few dancers or spectators ever recognize. And yet once she teaches the movement, the torch is passed

FERRIN RUIZ

How does a gesture grow into dance? Where do the movements we see on stage originate? Zara Kessler takes us inside the studio to follow Tara Streich-Tilles ’09 as she choreographs a new Yaledancers piece from the ground up.

Choreography is a slow process, but countless repetitions make the movements ingrained and nearly effortless. Here, members of Yaledancers go through a routine. to her dancers. “I want to give movement and then see how people make it fit themselves,” Tara explains.

The degree of interpretive freedom that Tara passes on to her dancers can vary, though. “Sometimes I come in with very set things,” she admits. But the arm motion that opens the piece, for instance, was intentionally experimental. “This is the choreography, this is the music, let’s see how we can put them together,” she says of her approach to the dance’s beginning.

Such investigation and collaboration might not work as well outside of Yale’s confines. Having worked with many other dancers and choreographers before arriving at Yale, I know that many dancers expect choreographers to give the steps to them.

They accept and technically improve such movements with passivity, never questioning the source, the inspiration, or the feeling of the motions and interactions. But Tara recognizes that we are different. “Dancers who go to Yale are also an unusual breed. So, so very intellectual, [they] maybe connect with dance on a level that not everyone would,” she says.

A few weeks later, nine dancers stand neatly spaced in a diagonal line. The moist air of Studio D hangs in anticipation. Tara switches on the boom box, and two-bytwo, at staggering intervals, we begin the

opening arm movement. Our arms’ zigzag course melts into a slow spin. We fall to the floor, rock up and back on our legs, and then return to our feet, swinging our legs along a circular course. We reach out to the audience, half-bent over like a tabletop.

Another spin and a few flowing, quasiballetic arm motions, and I am running to the side of the studio, exiting the imaginary stage. The mirror reminds me that while I dance in time with the other dancers, I do not look exactly as Tara did when she first demonstrated the same movements. None of us does. The opening windy caress now feels as natural as brushing sweat off of my forehead; the turns and rolls are no more awkward than walking down the street. My ears can no longer hear the music without my body responding with the movements that I have repeated countless times on Sunday mornings.

Today, more new gestures that Tara’s mind and body have formed, molded, and modified will appear in the studio. She can present novel movements and repeat them again and again. But in the end, she trusts us to intellectualize our bodies’ twists and turns and fit them to our limbs. “It never ends up exactly as you had envisioned it,” Tara says, her voice tinged with both regret and excitement. She creates the dance, and we complete it.

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April 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

UP THE HILL DOWNLOADING THE UNIVERSE by Sophie Quinton

n open viewing nights at Yale’s Leitner Family Observatory, eager families form hushed coils beneath the facility’s twin domes, waiting for a glimpse of Venus through one of the observatory’s telescopes. It’s a magical experience, but it no longer defines educational outreach at the Observatory. This year, the installation of a planetarium has allowed the public to stargaze without actually going outside.

400 years after Galileo invented the telescope, technology has radically changed the way both scientists and the public learn about the universe. Thanks to cutting-edge software, modern day astronomers spend most of their time peering, not through telescopes, but at their computer screens.

Charles Bailyn, the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of Astronomy and Physics, can measure the mass of black holes from his office. Black holes, Bailyn explained, are chunks of matter that exert a gravitational field so strong that nothing — neither matter nor radiation — can escape their pull.

They are also invisible to the human eye.

“Black holes are a bizarre phenomenon,” Bailyn said. “They’re an extreme example of the effects of general relativity.”

When studying most stellar phenomena, he said, you generally “take a picture and you see the object as a particular point of light, emitting all kinds of strange radiation.” Because black holes bend the light they emit back into themselves, scientists study them via the radiation that foreign matter emits as it is sucked into them.

Bailyn’s research requires high-resolution telescopes able to detect radiation from extremely complex, far-off phenomena, and much of his data come from telescopes in orbit.

Three decades ago, astrophysicists couldn’t compile data like this from the comfort of campus. Not only were computers nearly nonexistent, but the only way to access telescopes was to travel to them. “It used to be true that it was tough to compete with the people that lived in Hawaii, Arizona, Chile,” Bailyn said.

For research-grade data, Yale astrono-

mers can still travel to the WYNN Obser vator y in Kitt Peak, Arizona, the Yale Southern Obser vator y in Chile, or the new W.M. Keck facility in Hawaii. But they no longer have to.

Every afternoon, Professor Bailyn e-mails telescope operators in Chile, outlining the data Yale astronomers can now manipulate the telescopes at the he wants collected. Leitner Family Observatory on Prospect St. from their laptops.

In the morning, the data land in his e-mail inbox. Should he telescope between two and ten nights want to look through the WYNN tele- per year. Like Bailyn, he feels that he gets scopes, he can do so remotely, from the more information when he actually goes comfort of a specially outfitted room in J. to a telescope. Yet telescopic technology W. Gibbs Laboratory. has become so advanced, Kenney noted, Yale undergraduates also use remote that a handful of nights of on-site research observing software, albeit on a smaller can yield months worth of data. Even if scale. Nick Albino ’10, a member of he were to abandon remote observing the undergraduate astronomy club, said entirely, he still wouldn’t spend much time he loves looking up at the stars but has gazing through telescopes — however done most of his research from his couch much he may enjoy it. in Trumbull College. He can maneuTelescopes take pictures and light ver the telescopes at the Leitner Family measurements that consume terabytes of Observatory from his laptop, and software data, which software programs then store, programs enable him to look at represen- sequence, and use to run simulations. tations of the sky from anywhere in the “There has been an explosion of data,” world, at any time of night. Pretty cool, said Kenney, “and a huge storage need.” but he added that “it’s not the same as The Keck telescope in Hawaii boasts ten going there and looking at it.” times the collecting area of the largRemote observing, Bailyn said, has led est telescope previously available to Yale to “a cultural change in the field. There researchers. are those who claim that it’s a bad thing.”

“We want to have even more powerSome say that visiting telescope facilities ful computers,” Kenney said. “Yale lags is vital, while others point out that with behind many universities for high perforthe advent of space telescopes, scientists mance computing systems.” He assured can no longer visit all their data collect- me that computers can’t expose the uniing sites. Bailyn added that sometimes the verse’s secrets alone: “We still have to most innovative research gets done when a decide what to observe.” But computing scientist is on-site and has an extra hour of technology now drives the quality and time. But as facilities become more expen- quality of research in the field. sive to create and maintain, the cost of Some day, Professor Bailyn said, astron“messing around” may just be too high. omers will find another Earth-like planet.

Jeffrey Kenney, chair of the Yale Right now, he said, “we don’t have the Astronomy department, visits an actual technology.” In ten years, maybe we will.

EVA GALVAN/YDN

Remote observing software is revolutionizing astronomy; but what is lost when scientists no longer have to be onsite to collect their data? Sophie Quinton talks to Yale’s finest stargazers about developments in the telescope.

The Yale Daily News Magazine April 2009

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MY YALE A LITTLE BIT OF PEACE by Eileen Shim The Victorian Gothic architecture of Battell Chapel forms an odd backdrop for “Stillness & Light,” a weekly event sponsored by Yale’s Buddhist chaplaincy, Indigo Blue, that offers sushi and relaxation for all. with a plate of assorted sushi. Before I can thank him, he inclines his head in a slight bow and returns to the food station. He promptly fetches another plate for a student who just entered. When I stare blankly at the sudden feast between my hands, the two girls before me turn around and smile.

“Welcome,” one whispers before turning her attention back to the calligrapher.

Indigo Blue, Yale’s Buddhist chaplaincy, hosts meditation gatherings at Battell Chapel from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. every day. But on Wednesdays, “Stillness & Light” begins a half hour earlier with food for all who drop by. Buddhist chaplain Bruce Blair ’81 calls it “meditation with the sound turned on.”

“For six years, we served tea everyday,” says Blair, who speaks with me from the small kitchen in the corner of the chapel. He is boiling water for the students, who continue to sit atop plush cushions on the floor. Then, this semester, they started serving food.

“What can be more natural?” Blair jokes.

“Food is nourishment, and that’s what we’re trying to provide for the students.”

“Stillness & Light” started in 2003 when the University wanted a supervised late-night program that could serve as an alternative

JARED SHENSON

s I rush into Battell Chapel for “Stillness & Light” on a cold Wednesday night, my nose picks up a faint trail of incense on the candlelit path. I walk inside, and I am immediately welcomed by a gentle hum of voices.

Looking at the sneakers, flats, and heels that dot the aisles of the chapel, I slip out of my own shoes and leave them by a pew in the front row. I walk forward onto the wooden floor and see a circle of 30 students sitting cross-legged on the floor. Under the stained glass windows depicting saints and surrounded by stations of sushi and tea, the students sit in muffled discussion as candles flicker from the center of the circle.

A Korean calligraphy master is sitting in the circle. The students watch him display his brushstrokes on crisp white paper with handmade ink.

“When I make ink, I forget my anger,” he says in accented English as his right hand demonstrates the circular motion of the ink stick. “In the action I forget myself and open my mind. It becomes open to imagination.”

I approach them and huddle behind the circle, and a smiling student approaches me

Buddhist chaplain Bruce Blair ’81 leads “Stillness & Light.” Here, Blair and a student meditate, perhaps following a plate or two of the evening’s trademark sushi.

to drinking alcohol. Blair suggested drinking tea. And now that platters of food from Miya’s Sushi and special guests such as the calligrapher are part of the meditations, more and more students are showing up to Battell on Wednesday nights.

“There are so many people now that food is involved,” says Josh Haselkorn ’10, a “Stillness & Light” regular. He does have some reservations about how they’ve attracted the newcomers. “Still, it’s great that so many people are showing up. Just look at that,” he whispers as he points at the group on the floor. “It’s just about enjoying sitting; it’s a place of community.”

Blair admits that food may be an incentive for some to drop by “Stillness & Light.”

However, he maintains that it serves as a positive form of Buddhist fellowship.

“It’s not about eating the food, but how it is served,” Blair says as he prepares to serve barley tea. “When I see students getting food for each other, it’s the perfect illustration of the Buddhist precepts of giving and service.

Yes, the food makes people stay, but they end up staying and listening to each other.”

This relaxed atmosphere has increased the attendance of students who do not identify themselves as Buddhists. Students such as Oliver Hill ’12, who heard about the meditations from a friend, and Ari Koslow ’10, who noticed a “Stillness & Light” sign, said that, while they do not call themselves Buddhists, they feel welcome at the gatherings.

“I am interested in the beliefs, and it’s just a chance to think about things in life,” says Koslow, after returning used cups and plates to the kitchen.

This openness is also what attracted Daksha Rajagopalan ’12. Although she was raised Hindu, Rajagopalan sees no conflict between the two belief systems, and she identifies herself as “spiritual.”

“I find spirituality here because I’ve been looking for it,” she tells me.

Haselkorn agrees that the space is unique.

“I was at the Mental Health Week symposium earlier, and they went through all the different options at Yale to reduce stress and anxiety,” he says. “People spend so much money and time to look for a little bit of peace, and it’s all here. It’s right here.”

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April 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

PROFILE

MATCHING THE BRIGHTEST FLAMES by Rachel Caplan When not teaching in Linsley-Chittenden Hall, J. D. McClatchy presides over the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which he was recently elected president. Prepare to enter the soul of one of Yale’s leading poets.

D. McClatchy speaks passionately, deeply engaged with the subject of poetry. At times he lunges forward, his hands close to his face as if shielding the fledgling idea he hopes to communicate. He speaks eloquently, too: in his words, a poem is “a machine made out of language,” and the process of writing means “getting a world onto paper.”

When we meet in L.C., he appears exactly as he does in the glossy author photo on the back flap of Mercury Dressing, his sixth and latest book of poems: a compelling face, a large head, short bright waves of silver hair rippling back over his head. The photo has captured an expectant look, as if he were thinking ahead, already testing a new idea or line of verse. In person, he has that same magnetism and commanding presence, moving briskly and gracefully in his dark wool coat and vibrant tie, or sitting in his spacious, dark wood office in Jonathan Edwards with filled bookshelves behind him.

McClatchy is perhaps best known as a poet. Hazmat, his 2002 collection of poems on the human body, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; Mercury Dressing, which came out in February, exemplifies the formal grace and emotional range of his poetry. The book’s dust jacket, which pictures a man pushing his way through vast swaths of voluminous silvery cloth as if on the verge of breaking through to light, is a visual counterpart to its meditative verse. But McClatchy’s career spans

the magazine that touts itself as “the nation’s oldest literary quarterly.” And in January, after ten years in its elite ranks, J. D. McClatchy was elected the 55th president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Upon learning of his election, McClatchy said that he is “grateful for the chance to serve this great organization,” whose members are elected for life out of the most prominent American architects, artists, composers, and writers. The Academy, which was founded in 1904, describes membership as “the highest formal recognition of artistic merit in the United States.” Earning the title of president is an even higher honor.

“I’m younger than most presidents,” he acknowledges, seeming baffled, offering his energy and efficiency as an explanation for his appointment. Though he admits that that the position is “in part ceremonial,” he is soon talking about his upcoming duties: to “write letters to the President and to Senators” in support of copyright protection laws and intellectual property, to give support to struggling artists in a time of financial crisis, and to identify and encourage the next generation of great writers, painters, and musicians he identifies as “the future of the American imagination.”

As a Yale professor, McClatchy teaches an even younger set of artists, some of whom have forged their own careers as poets. His rigorous verse-writing work-

set out to be a scholar,” he says, describing how he had planned to earn a doctorate in Renaissance Studies at Yale. During the Vietnam War, when he was vulnerable to the draft, he took three years away from graduate school to teach. Returning to school, he was no longer interested in writing essays on Shakespeare. Something new moved him: contemporary poetry. He began reading “seriously, passionately,” looking at literature with more attention and understanding. Describing the sentiment of a famous teacher of his, Harold Bloom, he imparts a sense of the excitement he felt immersing himself in new verse. “For Harold,” he says, “poetry was a matter of life and death.” McClatchy’s reading drew him to try writing his own poetry. He never took a class in writing; his teachers were the masters whose volumes are still stacked in his library. “You had to hold yourself up to the brightest flame,” he says, recalling his persistent question to himself: “what would Keats say about that line?”

It seems impressive that the solitary labor of scholarship and poetry could be combined with vital leadership in the Academy and a flourishing career in opera.

In fact, he fell into writing libretti — the text for operas — almost “by accident” as a replacement for another writer. In the late eighties the composer William Schuman asked McClatchy to step in and write the libretto for A Question of Taste, based on a short story by Roald Dahl. He has been receiving commissions ever since, and has written librettos for opera adaptations of works such as 1984, Miss Lonelyhearts, and Our Town. In 2011, La Scala will premier his opera adaptation of An Inconvenient Truth. In opera, as the libretto writer, everything follows from his words, including the score. But he often must reshape his language according to the needs of the composer and the limitations of the human voice. And then there are the competing demands of the other creative people involved: “Everyone has an

He describes the formality of his process and technique as the carving of verse out of marble. much more than poetry. A scholar by training, in addition to his six poetry collections he has written criticism and essays, and he has become famous as a writer of opera libretti. He has edited numerous volumes by fellow poets both contemporary and classic — James Merill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Longfellow, Dickinson — and is editor-in-chief of the Yale Review,

shop is notorious on campus. Known for his strong grounding in traditional poetic form, he expects his students to strive for the same, sending them home to write sonnets and villanelles. “Form is the basis of art,” he says simply. “It’s a craft, and requires an apprenticeship.”

McClatchy’s own apprenticeship came later than those of many of his students. “I

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GINGER JIANG

The Yale Daily News Magazine April 2009

With 13 of his opera libretti performed at such locations as the Metropolitan, Glimmerglass, and Covent Garden operas, McClatchy is more than qualified to instruct a survey of the genre from its 17th century Italian origins to the present day. opinion. The bassoonist, the wigmaker…”

Even though his first commission as librettist came as a surprise even to him, he discovered that he had been well prepared by his training in the “precision and concision” of verse writing. As of today, thirteen of his opera libretti have been performed at locations including the Metropolitan Opera, the Glimmerglass Opera Theater, and Covent Garden.

Fully at home in opera’s atmosphere of artistic give and take, McClatchy has always been a social butterfly. When he was younger, he chased after his heroes, becoming what he calls an avid celebrity hunter. As he learned to write by reading the great works of the past, he also felt he would have something to learn by catching a glimpse of those he most admired.

He recounts meeting writers Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Jorge Luis Borges. Once, he rushed backstage at a concert to greet Igor Stravinsky, who, he remembers, had his arm around a buxom blonde. Soon, he formed friendships with poets of an older generation, going on to

edit collections of their work. McClatchy is emphatically grateful to those who have shaped him as a poet. “It’s like touching the hem of Jesus’ robe… their work made me into the person I was.”

For McClatchy, it is vital to be wordperfect. The poems of Mercury Dressing are tightly bound by structure and tradition. The constraints of form have shaped the poems in the book: blank verse, rhyme and half-rhyme, here an exotic “double sonnet,” there the obscure story from the Hebrew Bible or the gods and nymphs of classical mythology. The collection is sprawling, ranging from fanciful takes on music — “Sorrow in 1944” imagines the afterlife of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, “On Memory” is inspired by the Berg Violin Concerto — to a series on the Seven Deadly Sins and poetic mediations that arise from dreams and personal memories. “These are difficult poems,” he begins, cautiously. “I try to do things the hard way, which is the lasting way. I try to have a shimmer and complexity.” He describes the formality of his process and

technique as the carving of verse out of marble. He seems reluctant to address the themes of the poems themselves, keeping a guarded silence around them, so that when I read them, the verses might speak on their own. One’s own poetry is fragile: the way he describes it, meeting the blank page of possibility doesn’t get any easier with time. First, he makes the earnest confession that he still feels himself “a beginner.” Then, in mock desperation, he exclaims, “and now my hair is getting as white as the paper!”

At one point in the conversation, McClatchy interrupts himself mid-thought.

“How are you possibly getting down all I say?” he asks, suddenly concerned as I blacken my page with notes. He wonders if I might want to re-send questions by e-mail, so he could answer more thoughtfully and eloquently. McClatchy’s speaks expressively, colorfully, yet he seems concerned that the words he speaks will not measure up to the crystalline standard to which he holds his printed verse, afraid that he will speak anything but poetry.

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BY DARA LIND

As the government cracks down on illegal immigrants, a handful of students and professors are battling to protect them. But how can the immigrants possibly win? he lobby of Hartford’s Abraham A. Ribicoff Federal Building has two security checkpoints. At the moment, nobody is using the one on the right, labeled “District Court,” but the line for “Immigration and Other Services” stretches out the door and into the October morning air. It numbers over 20 people: the 15 immigrants on trial today, and the dozen or so law students and professors here to represent them on behalf of Yale Law School’s Worker and Immigrant Rights Action Clinic (WIRAC).

The clients remove their windbreakers and place their belts in trays. WIRAC students remove their blazers and place their backpacks, briefcases, and file folders onto the conveyor belt. A security guard watches the X-ray screen, checking for corkscrews or pocketknives to confiscate. Another beckons each person, in turn, through the metal detector and into the lobby. When the students reclaim their briefcases, he instructs them to turn on their laptops as he watches. The X-ray cannot prove they are carrying MacBooks, not bombs, to the seventh-floor courtroom.

After the inspection, everyone clusters together in the lobby as one law student re-zips his backpack. The clients, in particular, are solemn as I walk past them and hover awkwardly by the elevators, trying to watch without calling attention to myself.

I certainly cannot march up to a student or client and start shooting questions at her.

Like other members of the media — or of the community — I am permitted, even encouraged, to attend hearings on WIRAC cases. But outside the courtroom, the clinic, its members, and its clients are generally closed to us. “There is a lot of discussion about whether the media supports our clients,” one WIRAC student confessed, declining to talk to me.

GRAPHICS BY LOIDE MARWANGA

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April 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

The understatement is massive. A stray word from anyone at WIRAC, from director Michael Wishnie ’87 LAW ’93 on down, could send someone out of the country. Public knowledge can become government knowledge, and the clinic is attempting to defend undocumented immigrants from a federal agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whose job is to deport as many of those immigrants as possible. ICE usually wins in Immigration Court. In straightforward cases, such as those facing WIRAC’s clients today, ICE always wins.

If WIRAC gets its way, however, these cases will become much less straightforward. Starting today, October 6, Judge Michael W. Straus is hearing evidence on a “motion to suppress,” which argues that ICE agents took unconstitutional actions during the raids. A favorable ruling would be a huge coup for Wishnie and his students. Practically, it would prevent ICE from using some of its most persuasive evidence against the immigrants. Symbolically, it would send a powerful signal to a community still traumatized by memories of the June 2007 raids during which today’s clients were seized.

It is inconceivable that a handful of law students and professors, however bright and dedicated, could hold their own against the federal government in a case that no other law clinic in the country would touch. But WIRAC is determined, if not to prevail, then at least to prevent the government from using the trial to gather evidence for further prosecution, or to conduct future raids like those in which the defendants were arrested. WIRAC’s only weapon is information: choosing when to divulge and when to suppress, when to speak and when to be silent. If the defendants say too little, the issue of whether ICE abused its power will remain unresolved; if they say too much, they will provide fodder for future prosecution or even another raid.

The motion to suppress could be the first step in bringing New Haven’s immigrant community out of its silence. It isn’t much.

But it’s the only chance they have.

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s closely scrutinized as the arrest and detention of undocumented immigrants have become, most people pay little attention to what happens next. Before being deported — or, far less frequently, released — every immigrant detained by ICE receives a civil hearing in Immigration Court. An “administrative court” separate from the judicial branch, it is regulated by the Department of Justice. Defense attorneys are privately hired or come from the nonprofit sector, when they come at all — there is no right to an attorney in administrative courts. Prosecutors come from ICE. Most defendants come to court after being detained by ICE. And, if necessary, ICE provides the planes on which immigrants are “removed” from the United States.

Most defendants end up on the planes. ICE took 316,000 immigrants to court last year. The government deported 277,000 of them — 89 percent.

The other 11 percent are generally immigrants who entered the country illegally but manage to persuade the immigration judge that they are worthy of “relief” from deportation. The types of relief are extremely specific — and criteria and quotas are strict.

A defendant persecuted by the government of his home country, for example, has a decent chance of being granted asylum.

Alternatively, an immigrant who has been in the United States for 10 years, has no criminal record, and has paid her taxes might be able to secure a “cancellation of removal” if she can persuade the judge of the merits of her case.

Most immigrants are ineligible for either. Once these defendants plead guilty to the charge of “illegal entry,” the best they can hope for is to receive “voluntary departure”: 60 days to leave the country on their own, plus a $500 fee to the federal government as compensation for the extra time.

Theoretically, immigrants can contest charges of illegal entry; theoretically, Immigration Court operates according to the principle of “innocent until proven guilty,” just like any other court.

But it takes very little to prove that someone is not authorized

The Yale Daily News Magazine April 2009

to be in the United States — as little as a foreign passport and a records check. ICE usually obtains all the evidence it needs when it arrests the defendant, and it almost never brings cases to trial without proof. Once ICE submits its evidence to the judge, all the defendant needs to do is state his name to prove his guilt. Such cases are all but unwinnable.

One of the immigrants WIRAC is defending in Hartford has been able to make an asylum claim, citing the domestic abuse she suffered in her home country of Guatemala. The other 14 fall squarely into the “unwinnable” category.

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n the early morning of June 6, 2007, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided a series of homes in the Fair Haven neighborhood of New Haven. They made 29 arrests. Mayor John DeStefano Jr. openly speculated that the raids were in retaliation for the city’s decision to create a municipal ID for all residents, documented and undocumented alike. (The Board of Aldermen had approved the ID program on June 5th.)

New Haven’s illegal immigrants, most of whom are Latin Americans living in Fair Haven, were traumatized. Like undocumented immigrants across the country, they had spent years in silence, afraid even to report crimes they had witnessed to the police for fear of being arrested and deported. The municipal ID was supposed to represent a huge victory in this regard, providing at least some protection to undocumented residents as they walked the streets of the city. After the raids, nothing seemed farther from the truth: ICE agents could arrest any immigrant they encountered based on suspicion alone — no warrant necessary. One Fair Haven resident told me that it took a year for the empty sidewalks of Grand Avenue, one of the neighborhood’s main streets, to return to a pre-raid level of activity.

The raid in New Haven, like similar ones across the country, has received a great deal of attention from the public and the press, and ICE’s tactics have become the subject of national controversy. Most recently, a report from the Migration Policy Institute showed that a well-funded ICE program designed to deport “criminal aliens” had instead targeted immigrants without criminal records, often using residential raids like the one in New Haven to fill arrest quotas.

Rumors that ICE invades homes without warrants — in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment — have persisted.

The effects on undocumented immigrants across the country have been similar to those in Fair Haven. “12 million people,” Michael Wishnie tells me, “are afraid to take their kids to school, afraid to work.”

Wishnie has designed WIRAC with the aim of protecting as many of those people as possible, using an approach he calls “21stcentury community-based lawyering.” In a limited sense, this refers to the way WIRAC chooses cases — they receive referrals from city government and community organizations, rather than the typical law-clinic method of selecting clients directly. More broadly, it means that WIRAC students are trained to file Freedom of Information Act requests in addition to litigating cases, to

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improve public awareness of their causes through media and other channels, and to think about the question “What does the community need?”

But for as long as WIRAC has existed, the answer to this question has been representation for detainees. In September 2006, as Wishnie was preparing to start his first year as a professor at Yale Law School after ten years at NYU (where he ran a similar clinic), he received a call from Danbury. 11 immigrants had been arrested in an ICE raid and were being held in detention centers across New England. (Wishnie still doesn’t know how the informant found his number.) With a “skeletal” student staff borrowed from other clinics, Wishnie tracked down the detainees’ locations and sent students to gather testimony so he could begin litigating their cases. The next semester, WIRAC was officially born, with the ICE raids in New Haven coming midway through the clinic’s first full year.

“There has been tremendous community-wide resistance to the raids,” Wishnie says, which he hopes will “help deter some of the worst abuses the next time around.” But what exactly those “worst abuses” are is unclear. The public has never heard an authoritative account of exactly what happened on the morning of June 6th — after all, many of the witnesses are too wary of ICE to speak out.

The 15 people who know best, of course, are currently on trial for their residence in the United States.

Enter the motion to suppress.

In criminal court, a motion to suppress is essentially a claim that a piece of evidence was gathered illegally. The judge takes testimony on how the evidence in question was acquired before issuing a ruling. If he rejects the motion, the case proceeds as if nothing had happened; if he upholds it, the prosecution cannot introduce any of the evidence the motion implicates, and the judge cannot use it to influence his verdict.

In 1984, in a case called INS v. Lopez-Mendoza, the Supreme Court ruled that motions to suppress were unacceptable in Immigration Court unless the evidence was gathered not only illegally, but also in a fashion involving “egregious Constitutional violations.” Most circuit courts have closed that loophole, prohibiting any argument on Constitutional grounds from being made in Immigration Court cases. The Second Circuit, which includes Connecticut, is one of two that have not.

Wishnie has pioneered the use of constitutional arguments in Connecticut’s Immigration Court, but he says judges are still “unfamiliar” with them. WIRAC believes firmly that the New Haven ICE raids on June 6, 2007 constituted “egregious Constitutional violations,” and it knows that without a motion to suppress, its case is hopeless. It has asked Judge Michael W. Straus to allow its clients to give testimony on the raids in court — to speak out at last.

ICE took 316,000 immigrants to court last year. The government deported 277,000 of them — 89 percent.

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he hearing is scheduled to last until 10:30 A.M., but Judge Straus gets to the point by 10:05: he will hear testimony on the motion to suppress from 11 of the defendants, focusing

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April 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

on WIRAC’s claims that ICE violated the Fourth Amendment by forcing open the doors of defendants’ houses. Students scribble furiously in their notebooks. Many of them will be responsible for questioning one or more witnesses, and they have very little time to prepare; the judge wants to take testimony during two hearings, to be held two and three weeks from now, respectively.

Straus goes on to explain that he has already denied motions to suppress for three of the defendants because the would-be witness who answered the door of their house at the time they were seized refused to testify. After the hearing, WIRAC student Stella Burch LAW ’09 will explain the situation to the press: since the woman in question is not in removal proceedings herself, she is “afraid to come forward” and risk exposing herself to ICE. Aware of the consequences, the three defendants who depended on her to speak up have agreed that they would rather protect her. The other 11 defendants, she assures us repeatedly, “are delighted to tell their story.”

But the more defendants speak up, the more they put themselves and their neighbors at risk. Silence may be oppressive, but it is also safe. WIRAC will have to prepare very carefully over the next few weeks, and get a lucky break or two, to keep the motion to suppress from harming its clients.

To a defendant facing removal, even the simple question “With whom were you living at the time of the raids?” can be dangerous.

During the hearing, detailed answers can help set the scene for the witness’ testimony and establish his credibility. If federal prosecutors get access to these details, on the other hand, they can use it as evidence to charge the witness (or his housemates) with harboring illegal aliens. In other words, even if the defendant somehow manages to win in Immigration Court and escape deportation, he may find himself charged in criminal court with harboring illegal immigrants. Since the law dictates that immigrants — even legal immigrants — can be deported if convicted of a felony, the Immigration Court testimony would merely postpone his fate and incriminate housemates who aren’t already in removal proceedings.

Testimony is never automatically confidential, and no one — not WIRAC, and certainly not the public — knows whether ICE will pass information to the U.S. Attorney’s office, which is responsible for filing criminal charges. Worse, ICE’s prosecutors could use cross-examination of the witnesses to “fish” for evidence of harboring, or even for information ICE agents could use in planning future raids. The agency’s legal arm is technically separate from its enforcement arm, but its attorneys refuse to divulge how much the two cooperate.

WIRAC has been faced with this trap before, in some of the Danbury raid cases. To prevent it from happening again, the clinic has asked that the U.S. Attorney’s office grant the witnesses immunity. Having heard nothing from the office after a week, Judge Straus postponed testimony until November 3rd, hoping the immunity question would be resolved before then.

In case their clients don’t get immunity, WIRAC has laid the groundwork for a Plan B: an alternate way to protect its clients from self-incrimination. In Immigration Court, as in any other court, the defendant is usually questioned first by his own attorney and then cross-examined by the opposition. WIRAC has already submitted affidavits for each of its clients, in which they recount what happened to them on the morning of June 6th — the stories that WIRAC student Burch said the immigrants would tell in public. Without immunity, however, the “public” in the courtroom could include representatives from the U.S. Attorney’s office, just as able to copy down anything they hear as we in the press would be. To minimize the amount of information witnesses divulge out loud, WIRAC has asked Judge Straus to waive direct examination.

If he agrees, the prosecution will cross-examine witnesses based on their affidavits alone.

I gather from Wishnie that his students have been preparing for any possibility: immunity, direct examination, or any combination of the two. They have practiced heavily with their clients as well, instructing them to plead the fifth (or rather to say, “Toma la quinta”) if they risk self-incrimination. The day of testimony that will make or break the motion to suppress is November 3rd. But when it arrives, the judge may or may not allow WIRAC to waive direct examination. The U.S. Attorneys might not grant its clients immunity. WIRAC has to be prepared for anything.

Judge Straus begins the hearing by ruling that he will waive direct examination. Then he adds that he has heard nothing from the U.S. Attorney’s office but does not want to postpone the trial any longer. The clients will not have immunity.

WIRAC will have to protect them from individual questions, while still maintaining their credibility. The motion to suppress now relies on the clinic’s ability to balance speech with silence.

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hris Lasch LAW ’96, a Yale law lecturer and WIRAC advisor, hunches his broad shoulders over the defense attorneys’ desk and faces Judge Straus. On the street, Lasch would look intimidating. Sitting attentively in the cramped courtroom, he almost manages to cut an imposing figure. Lasch is bearlike, with a reddish-brown beard and a rumbling voice, and, whereas Wishnie’s courtroom manner is fluid and gracious, Lasch’s is flinty and gruff. Lasch and Anant Saraswat LAW ’09 are representing WIRAC and the defendants as the testimony begins. They are ready for a fight: without blanket immunity, what information ICE prosecutors are able to extract from defendants will depend on how much WIRAC does to stop them.

Saraswat is a clinic veteran: in October, he presented an argument in front of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Like Lasch, he is tall and broad-shouldered, but his bouncy energy (and the overstuffed backpack at his feet) betray his youth. He jiggles his knee under the desk as he crouches forward, looking almost like an infielder preparing to field a ground ball. Behind him, the other

But the more defendants speak up, the more they put themselves and their neighbors at risk. Silence may be oppressive, but it is also safe.

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April 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

WIRAC students in attendance squeeze onto a bench, notepads ready. Their eyes are on Judge Straus as he swears in the first witness through an interpreter, then turns the witness over to the prosecution for cross-examination.

The ICE attorneys, Leigh Mapplebeck and John Marley, are clearly upset with Judge Straus’ decision to waive direct examination. Mapplebeck begins, her voice betraying their annoyance at having to open the cross-examination with “What is your name?” and “How old are you?” These are exactly the sort of questions that are usually established early in a direct examination and left unchallenged by the prosecution: basic, uncontroversial biographical facts, necessary to establish the witness’ identity and his credibility.

Without immunity, however, no question is safe for the witness to answer. Lasch and Saraswat are determined to get Judge Straus to do what the U.S. Attorney’s office has failed to do: grant the witness some sort of protection from future criminal charges.

When Mapplebeck asks “What is your country of origin?,” Saraswat pounces.

“Objection!” he cries, explaining that the answer could reveal his client’s liability. Straus quickly overrules the eager law student.

“Then we’ll instruct him not to answer the question,” Lasch snaps. “Overruled,” Judge Straus repeats, and declares that Lasch and Saraswat missed their chance to control the scope of the crossexamination when they declined to question the witness themselves. “It’s open season,” says Straus, on WIRAC’s witnesses.

After a few more unsuccessful objections, Saraswat switches tactics: he and Lasch will serve as the last line of defense for their client. In the moment after Mapplebeck finishes spitting out her next question but before the translator begins to repeat it in Spanish, Saraswat interjects, “We invoke the Fifth Amendment on behalf of our client.”

Mapplebeck and Marley, whose initial annoyance has blossomed into full-blown self-righteous agitation, explode with protests.

“How are you going to assess credibility?” Mapplebeck sputters.

“They have a strong motivation to tailor their testimony.”

Straus cannot overrule the invocation of the Fifth Amendment.

He cannot force the witness to answer. What he does instead is far more damning to WIRAC. The next time Saraswat invokes the Fifth, Judge Straus rolls his eyes toward the prosecution and intones: “Adverse inference.” The meaning is unambiguous: if the defendant does not answer the question, Straus will accept the prosecution’s interpretation of what that answer would have been.

WIRAC’s lawyers — Saraswat and Lasch at first, then, later in the hearing, Wishnie and Sara Edelstein LAW ’10 — continue to invoke the Fifth against any question not directly related to the raids. Lasch, in particular, grows increasingly convinced that the U.S. Attorney’s office’s refusal to grant immunity was deliberate.

“They’re trying to use this opportunity to go on a fishing expedition!” he exclaims. Mapplebeck takes offense, reminding him that ICE cannot file criminal charges. Straus fails to acknowledge Lasch, and continues to award adverse inferences to the prosecution.

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he witnesses blur together. Despite my best intentions to listen to them in the hopes of hearing the stories that could break their silence, the feuding attorneys grab my attention.

They seem stuck in stalemate: WIRAC continues invoking the Fifth for the majority of questions, and Straus refuses to restrain the

prosecution. Every so often, a witness answers two or three questions in a row without incident. Sitting in the front row next to the other reporters, I look up from my notebook, listening intently, trying to piece together what I hear: “I was waiting for my friend to pick me up and go to work. I opened the door because I thought it was him.”

“I opened the door a few inches and ICE pushed it open the rest of the way. I was knocked against the wall.”

“I was in bed. I wasn’t wearing any pants. The officer gestured for me to get up and put on pants.”

Mapplebeck laughs at this last answer, and asks the witness to mimic the gesture for “putting on pants” himself. When he does so, she states for the audio-recorded record, “That didn’t look like a ‘put on pants’ gesture to me.”

Judge Straus nods, accepting her interpretation.

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fter three and a half hours, the hearing is finally adjourned.

The WIRAC delegation and the defendants conduct their debriefing in the privacy of a conference room rather than the pavilion outside. Standing on the street corner across from the courthouse, the reporters conduct a debriefing of our own.

Halfway through his cigarette, Mark Spencer of the Hartford Courant asks, “Did you see the staffers from the U.S. Attorney’s office?” The rest of us had not recognized the man and woman sitting on a bench directly behind Mapplebeck and Marley. Despite the fact that both were in business suits, I had taken them for reporters from the fervor with which they scribbled on their legal pads. Lasch’s suspicion was correct: whether or not the prosecutors were deliberately going on a “fishing expedition,” the witnesses would have endangered themselves and others by answering questions more fully. In that respect, WIRAC’s strategy has paid off.

As we prepare to go our separate ways, Spencer asks if any of us will be attending the next hearing, when more of the defendants will be testifying. He receives a collective shrug in response. He admits he’s not certain he’ll be back anytime soon, either. Today’s hearing just took too much time, and it didn’t provide enough of a story in return.

Hearings on the motion to adjourn have continued. I’ve managed to keep abreast of developments through the occasional brief dispatch from the New Haven Independent, the only news outlet that covers the case. In January, Judge Straus demanded testimony from the ICE agents involved in the raids, arguing that six of the immigrants had given persuasive enough testimony that it was now up to the government to prove they did nothing wrong. In February, it became clear that the agents would not be taking the stand themselves, instead letting their written affidavits speak for them. Like the immigrants they had detained, ICE has reasons to worry about revealing too much.

The fact that Judge Straus is still considering WIRAC’s motion, all these months later, means that the clinic has already outperformed expectations. Furthermore, the U.S. Attroney’s Office does not yet seem to be pressing criminal charges. But what’s hidden from the federal government is also hidden from the community.

So far, WIRAC’s clients have avoided deportation only because, like undocumented immigrants across the country, they have remained silent and shadowed, calling attention to themselves only when necessary. In the courtroom, and to the public, their stories remain untold.

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BY NICOLE LEVY

For the women of the CT Rollergirls, breaking bones is just part of the game. But what happens when injuries threaten to strip them of their roller derby identities? Enter RollerDurance.

very roller girl has an alter ego. When Jen Reynolds laces up her skates, she becomes Jayne Bondage, 007.

By day, Jen works two jobs: she files legal bills at a law firm and books appointments as a freelance massage therapist. Level-headed and honest, Jen makes you feel welcome, and she makes you laugh. Before a resurgence of cancer beneath Jen’s pectoral muscle necessitated five weeks of radiation therapy, her alter ego Jayne spent her evenings at derby scrimmages in Danbury as co-captain of the Elm City Bone Crushers, one of three teams in the all-women’s Connecticut Roller Derby League. Jayne was tough, wild, and decisively fearless.

Jen and Jayne met two years ago in a scrimmage that demanded the intersection of their parallel realities. Jayne took a hit from her teammate, Guns ‘n’ Bruises, sailed off the rink in midair, and collided with the floor. The force of the impact dislocated both her ribs and a tumor, yet undiagnosed. When a PET scan failed to detect any malignancy, Jen sensibly requested her biopsy as a cautionary measure. The prognosis was delivered on October

15th: her cancer had returned, and the tumor was twice as large as before. It was surgically excised one month later. “So basically,” she concludes, “roller derby saved my life.” With the support of her family, friends, teammates, and with the courage of her alter ego, Jen skated her first and final bout as Jayne that December.

The Warm-Up

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ar from the raucous sport it is today, roller derby began as a test of endurance. The derby made its debut at the very height of the Great Depression. A Chicago promoter named Leo Seltzer had schemed of a skating spectacle to overtake the dance marathon craze then electrifying the nation. His brainchild was a smashing success, commanding an audience of 20,000 spectators in its first week alone. On August 13th, 1935, the first bout featured two competitors, one man and one woman, skating 57,000 laps, or 4,000 grueling miles.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY NICOLE LEVY

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The derby didn’t earn its notorious edge until three years later, the Iron Angels, and the Elm City Bone Crushers. Its travel team, when famed New York sportswriter Damon Runyan witnessed a with true tongue-in-cheek, calls itself the Stepford Sabotage. brawl at a “speed jam.” His shrewd suggestion to Seltzer: body Jayne was among the first to join the CT RollerGirls. She contact and score keeping would boost attendance. In the fifties, hadn’t skated since she was a child, and her green rental skates television broadcasts catapulted roller derby into national fame; were humiliating. Though Jayne no longer pays her official dues thousands of fans cheered women challengers, whose races along of $40, she still volunteers with the league from time to time. a banked track were seasoned nicely by pratfalls and punch-ups.

At a recent bout at the Sports Complex in Woodbridge, Jayne It was the inevitable evolution of affairs that, by the late sixties, documented scores and penalties in the league’s computerized derby should have become theatrical, kitschy entertainment. By system. the 1970s, it suffered the perils of extinction. But a third wave of The sport’s rules are fairly concise. Essentially, derby is a game feminists and the new millennium catalyzed derby’s resurrection. of counterclockwise chase on an oval track, slightly smaller in In 2001, a drifter musician named Daniel Eduardo Policarpo circumference than a basketball court. There are two 30-minute began recruiting women in downtown Austin, Texas, to realize his halves, during which each team fields five women at a time in hallucinogenic vision two-minute shifts, or of derby as one elejams. On offensive, ment amidst “a crazy the jammer scores a circus with these point each time she clowns unfortunately laps an opponent stabbing each other, on the track. Her these bears on fire four teammates play on these unicycles.” defense as the blockUpon Policarpo’s ers and the pivot; they sudden disappearskate in a pack, using ance, the She.E.O.’s the force of their — young women hips and their arms with an entrepreneurin “booty blocks,” ial spirit — foundand hefty “leans,” as ed the first modern ex-roller girl Moxie league. Their associaLady describes the tion, Bad Girl Good strategy, to make way Woman Productions, for their jammer and staged the derby’s stymie the efforts of inaugural bout on their opponents.

June 23, 2002. There The contact in were no knife-wieldroller derby isn’t ing clowns or blazJayne Bondage, shown on the left, and Polly Sonic are two of the founders of staged. Superficial ing bears. Instead, RollerDurance, an exercise program based on the brutal sport of roller derby. injuries like fishnet fake fights and Spank burn, rink rash, and Alley, a sadomasochthe bruise on Judy istic penalty box encouraging fans to spank the skaters’ behinds, Scarland’s thigh, a remarkable facsimile of Jesus, are only the more than compensated for their absence. As other leagues most minor injuries a roller girl can sustain in the line of fire. established themselves in endorsement of the same women’s Skaters endure “a lot of bruises, a lot of concussions, broken empowerment, do-it-yourself spirit, it was this mischievous may- ankles would be the most severe, and when they break, they break hem that drew in derby’s hipster crowds. At the modern derby, in three places,” Jayne explains. What you see on the rink is as skaters abide by the duality of the accepted norm: they dress in real as it gets. burlesque-inspired costume, adopt stripper stage names, and bear sexually-suggestive penalties, but they also deliver rib-shattering hits, operate the business of their skater-owned organizations by Laps for Endurance committee, and disassemble their flat skate tracks by hand.

Today, more than 15,000 skaters compete in 300 flat-track s Jayne herself will attest, the principles of derby can amateur leagues worldwide. In the U.S. alone, the Women’s Flat still bring satisfaction to those who find themselves in Track Derby Association, founded in 2004 with the governing recovery, temporary or otherwise, by way of a far more principle, “By the Skaters, for the Skaters,” coordinates well over mellow incarnation she calls RollerDurance. Every Monday night 200 all-female leagues. Leagues under the WFTDA’s jurisdiction from 8 to 9:30 P.M. alternating between the Ron-a-Roll rink in typically have three or four teams, alongside an all-star squad Vernon, Connecticut and the Middletown rink, participants in that represents them in regional and national competitions. The the program stretch, squat, and roll. RollerDurance is fitness on Connecticut league, called the CT RollerGirls, was established in skates. It stresses athleticism for all skill levels for everyone age March 2006, and is comprised of three teams: the Widowmakers, 18 and older — amateurs, retired roller girls, current profession-

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April 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

Members of RollerDurance prepare to skate at the Ron-a-Roll rink in Vernon. Tonight’s (non-violent) workout has a Fight Club theme.

als rehabbing from injury. A Suzanne Summers’ workout can’t sculpt your thighs and buttocks as well as interval training and squats on quads can. There has been legitimate interest expressed in marketing their workouts in the same scheme as the Jazzercise franchise.

Three women founded RollerDurance in April 2007. Jayne, Polly Sonic, and Wender Bender are all former roller girls incapacitated by broken bones. They take turns planning and leadings routines. Polly says that when she herself can’t attend the Monday meeting, “my fitness level for the week just goes down.”

But most importantly, the skating drills are “fun. It’s not work.”

RollerDurance channels derby’s orgasmic release of violent retort into a steady, pleasurable progression to fulfillment. You leave the rink hungry, exhausted, and happy. It is Polly’s belief that “when skating is a passion, it keeps you young.”

Tonight, I’ll see for myself. I’ve tagged along in the backseat of the carpool from New Haven to the Ron-a-Roll rink in Vernon, Connecticut; Jayne is our driver, Moxie rides shotgun, and Polly and Jayne’s younger sister, Lisa, sits beside me in back. When we enter the building, the youth speed skating team is still on the track. Lisa kindly offers to help me find the right pair of rentals.

As I lace them onto my feet with methodical precision, Moxie expresses interest in my article. I explain I was first taken by derby stage names. Moxie smiles. “Yes, it’s true we call one other by our stage names. Often, we don’t even know each other’s real

names. I may have introduced myself before, but I don’t think you knew my name was Allison, did you Evil? And I don’t think I know your real name.” Evil — who went by Evil Dread until she snipped the dreads — responds, casually: “It’s Rachel.” In this alternate universe, it is unsurprising that Moxie and Evil (who were practice partners when Moxie first came to RollerDurance) should have only now entered one another’s confidences on a first name basis.

Evil generously lends me a set of knee and elbow pads, and Polly instructs me in the basics of skating in quads. “Just push off every time. Yeah, that’s right.” We go half way around the rink; I wobble less with every stroke. “The other move we have in roller derby is eggshells.” Her skates diverge in complementary crescents and then rejoin beneath the frame of her steady knees.

I follow suit. “Those are some ambitious eggshells! Just make sure you don’t bring your feet in too close, or your skates will lock together, and you’ll fall.” I take conscientious note, but it’s the toe stops that ambush me. Polly explains that most amateurs “want us to say in words how to skate. They don’t understand that the upper body navigates you more than your feet. It’s more about experience, you learning about where your body is. Once you become a skater, you walk different.” When I finally hit my stride, I could sail forever on these wheels.

Every week, RollerDurance has a theme and a soundtrack.

Tonight, Jayne is recycling a routine she planned a few months

The Yale Daily News Magazine April 2009

ago: Fight Club. This implies fight music, bicep curls, and punches delivered midair. Punch one, punch two, squat. Overwhelmed by the quick succession, I let some squats slide. Jayne blows her plastic whistle to signal that we should now go counterclockwise, because, as she quips, “we don’t want one ass cheek bigger than the other.” The skaters swerve in the opposite direction; ineptly, I attempt a wide, awkward arc. Polly whizzes by, her arms poised mid-punch, remarking in good humor that “Jayne always has us doing these crazy moves.” As she banks the corner, I envy the effortlessness of her crossovers.

To learn to crossover, you must fall. When I voiced my ambition to learn, Jayne’s reply was: “It’s much easier to learn at the rink at Middletown. It’s so small you have to crossover at the corners.” When it comes to crossovers, it’s a matter of testing just how far you must lean to convince your leg it should come along with you; it’s a matter of pushing your own boundaries. “Falling means finding edges, balance. If you don’t fall, you don’t push yourself,” Polly tells me. “Falling as an adult is scarier; falling on purpose is scary,” Jayne adds.

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is now a competitive trick skater. Until he joined Connecticut’s first male roller derby league, The Death Quads, a small association of 10 players that competes against out-of-state teams, he never missed a RollerDurance. Now he comes every other week.

Another regular is Marty, who for 25 years managed the rink in Wallingford where RollerDurance first met, before the owners sold the establishment. Roller-skating was his life: Marty tried to talk the owner out of the deal, but he couldn’t convince him.

Polly likens him to the protagonist in “that movie with the guy who lived on the ocean liner. He was born there... He never steps off the boat. He was part of the boat, and when the boat went down, he went with it.” Marty is more than 50 years old.

He doesn’t participate in any of the drills, but he enjoys the dance elements of the routines in silence.

There are amateurs like Dan, an electrical engineer who insists on wearing his inline blades. Dan is the inventor of the Danolight, the biggest-selling bike light in New Haven — lightweight, pocket-sized, and battery-operated. He cycles long-distance and

Balance Drills

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his is why Polly is an adamant proponent of the shootthe-duck exercise, in which the skater bends the skating knee and then extends her free leg before her. Most amateurs fall, but the benefit of the squat is that they fall close to the ground. When the chairwoman of the CT RollerGirls, Ruby Wreckingball, made her first appearance at RollerDurance, she dismissed the significance of the drill, insisting that roller girls should do anything but fall.

Evidently, there are factions and ongoing tiffs in the social fabric of the derby community. It’s bound to happen, when skaters socialize at the after-parties and charity events the league coordinates. The RollerDurance clan itself is an intersection of very different planes of society, a balance of unique eccentricities. “I was never involved in team sports” Jayne says. “Learning this as a 35 year old woman, that having one common thing can bring you together…Rollerskating brings together a very eclectic group. These are people I would never have met in my regular life.”

There are active roller girls like Anita Guinness, who fell at her first bout as a Motley Crucial, or league recruit, but skates in the determination to improve her skill. Sometimes she tests her limits so ambitiously that Nelly Knuckles, a derby girl from the motorcross and an M.V.P. in the league, has to keep her in check. There are retired roller girls who bridge the wide spectrum — like Moxie, a former Motley Crucial, who confides in me that she attends regularly because “it’s everything I loved about derby without the aggression.” Moxie is a middle school teacher with a graduate degree from NYU in poetry. She admires Emily Dickinson and tutors in Yale’s “Daily Themes” class. In our exchange on the merits of RollerDurance, she argues for a theme of “authenticity.”

Andy would know about authenticity. He was the first man to attend RollerDurance. It was clear he was genuinely interested because he had to switch his Dungeons and Dragons night in order to come. Andy has played professional bocci in Europe and

The roller girls — whose day jobs include teaching, motocross racing, and go-go dancing — take a rest from their workout.

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April 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

plays guitar in a surf band called “The Clams.” The girls tease him playfully about his balancing difficulties.

Polly herself has mastered balance in both its literal and figurative connotations. As I struggle to capture the skaters’ illusive images on my Canon, she glides by my side of the rink in demonstration of what can only be conceived as a graceful spiral. In her pursuits beyond the roller rink, where she was once captain of the Iron Angels, Polly skates a diverse gamut.

She has illustrated seven children’s books, a line of greeting cards, financial magazines, and opera posters. She is also a costume shop stitcher at the Yale School of Drama, a chauffeur for New Haven’s Arts and Ideas Festival, a figure skater, a go-go dancer, and a burlesque artist. Every profession and pastime in which she engages suits her as well as the next; she balances her interests with admirable poise, though her failing car complicates matters. When I meet her for the first time, her hair is still stiffened with spray from the go-go dancing for which Dan had contracted her the night before. Her longtime partner had bailed on her, but thankfully, Judy Scarland, a roller girl in the Elm City Bone Crushers and a regular at RollerDurance (by day an opera singer and vocal coach) agreed to fill in on such short notice. That is what Polly has come to expect from her derby girls: loyalty.

reating the feeling of being on a team. People protect you with everything they have; it carried over into real lives.”

It is this sense of companionship, this tenderness beneath the fierce exterior of the derby that the dance choreographer Liz Lerman was looking to capture in “Radical Derby,” a piece

“It’s more about experience, you learning about where your body is. Once you become a skater, you walk different.”

Skating in Pairs

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ayne blows her whistle and everyone pairs off. One skater stands behind the other, pushing her partner around the circumference of the rink, as fast as she can.

In the game of derby itself, defense is all about supporting the jammer. A blocker must think of protecting herself and her team.

The derby stance is a guarded one. But the necessity of protection extends beyond the rink.

Polly has shown me what she calls her “Harry Potter scar,” once prominent with scar tissue: it required six months physical therapy and two surgeries to heal. She had been blocking the back of the pack in a scrimmage, when her entire team went down in a pile-up. Polly came up behind and did her best to jump over, extending her right hand to catch herself, should she fall. She did: the weight of her entire body came down onto her middle digit, her hand bending backwards with force enough to snap it.

Polly knew just as well as any one else the old roller girl adage, “It’s not if you will get hurt, it’s when,” but it was her right hand that had earned her living as an artist. With the finger hanging limply from her hand, Polly found herself unable to express her condition and her fears. She fainted. “Hospitals are my biggest fear,” she explains. “I have this wicked, wicked phobia because my dad died of cancer, and I spent a lot of time in waiting rooms when I was little. I ended up having more panic attacks in this waiting room in Waterbury.” The three girls who drove her to the emergency room stayed the entire night. She thought, “This is my family; they’re going to be with me the whole time. They took care of me through the whole process. It was worth rec-

performed in East Shore Park. Polly was driving Lerman to the airport in her capacity as chauffeur for the New Haven Arts and Ideas Festival when they first met. Lerman was intrigued by what Polly told her of RollerDurance. She came one day to interview the skaters, recording what would later serve as the soundtrack to RollerDurance’s feature in this last summer’s production of “Liz Lerman Dance Exchange’s 613 Radical Acts of Prayer.”

Watching the video on YouTube, I hear the stories I’ve already been told, a layering of familiar voices: “I was in it for the sport, and some other people I think were there to crush people, so I decided I was going to make sure to protect my team.” “It’s really all about protection in roller derby, because there are so many things you can get injured by, by people, by falling. You have to protect your team, you have to protect your jammer, and also each person has to protect themselves against an opposing person, and that’s why you have so much gear. I mean, head to toe, you’re covered.” Meanwhile, Wender and Polly peel off the layers of their clothing in a symbolic gesture — only white tanks and skirts clothe their bodies now — they hold each other’s hands, and spin like carefree children. Five other skaters circle them with prayer ties that blow in the winds of East Shore Park.

Altogether, the women exude elegance, sublime bliss I have not yet had the pleasure to witness in person.

Follow the Leader

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n person, we’ve lined up to follow one leader. Whatever he or she chooses to do, we do too. We snake about the rink in whichever direction should strike the Indian chief.

The directions the RollerDurance girls have explored in the past are highly entertaining: four girls skated at a seventies roller night for a tribal nation ceremony at Mohegan Sun; 10 girls in blond wigs and gold sequined tunics, who called themselves the “Solid Gold Nuggets,” performed in a half time show at the Providence roller derby to the tune of Donna Summers’s “Bad Girls,” with Andy dressed as their pimp; three girls skated among the likes of luminaries like Ashanti and Marisa Tomei at the flashy opening of Lola Staar’s Dreamland roller rink in the Child’s Restaurant building in Coney Island when Staar, a boutique owner and activist for saving the Boardwalk, won a contest sponsored by Glamour magazine and designer Tommy Hilfiger in March 2008.

The Yale Daily News Magazine April 2009

And there are many other avenues the RollerDurance girls could still pursue. They have considered orchestrating kids’ roller skating parties, even if it meant dressing up as Hannah Montana.

They would love to hold sessions in New Haven. As of now, RollerDurance alternates between a rink in Middletown, and the Ron-a-Roll in Vernon. But the travel time has been an enormous hassle. It takes a half hour for Jayne to drive to Middletown, but an hour to get to Vernon, and when the weather is bad, like it was during a blizzard three weeks ago, carpooling isn’t an option. A rink in New Haven would be much more convenient, boosting the attendance of RollerDurance regulars and, at the same time, attracting new skaters.

As always, the issue is space — space to rent for rehearsals and workouts. Jayne has just found out that the local YMCA cannot host RollerDurance because their insurance policy forbids sports on wheels. The regulations for rink size are 80 feet by 60 feet.

Jayne has her eyes peeled for another location in the city, some empty warehouse with a concrete floor. Polly believes every “urban city needs a roller rink” and New Haven had its chance when a site opened up in Long Wharf. The community voted on whether it wanted a rink or a bakery. They wanted bread. Polly jokes that, if push comes to shove, RollerDurance should find an open space and organize a flash-mob.

It has always been Jayne’s dream to open a rink of her own:

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“Jenny Boom Boom’s Rockin’ Rollin’ Derby Dome.” She would coordinate endurance skating classes, rent out the space for pilates and yoga sessions, hire a band, book kids’ parties. All she needs is the money. In a flight of fancy, Polly suggests the rink could associate with a car dealership. “It’s wheels!” Jayne corroborates. “You could showcase cars for them,” Polly continues.

“There always has to be an angle.”

The Cool Down

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s we carpool home, I meditate on the ways women believe the derby has changed them. Moxie claims it gave her the nerve to get her first speeding ticket. Other women insist more generally on resonances of empowerment and firm behinds. And silently I thank Jayne and Polly and Moxie, because had it not been for them and their derby spirit, I might never have had the courage to intrude upon what seemed an exclusive community, nor would I have felt welcomed.

Every roller girl has an alter ego. My first time in quads, a little boy named O.J. tells me his sister thinks I’m a nerd. With a positive spin, a jibe that could have deflated my self-image inspires the alias of my own derby doppelganger — Executia Nerd.

Executia Nerd. It rings with sass, and truth.

Three roller girls whizz around the Ron-a-Roll rink practicing their moves: eggshells, crossovers, and the difficult shoot-the-ducks.

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BY NAINA SALIGRAM

As New Haven mobilizes innovative measures to try to stop teen pregnancies, the city is also looking for ways to protect teen mothers and their babies.

n the red room of the Elizabeth Celotto Child Care Center, a four-month-old baby boy stares at me with piercing green eyes.

His little digits gently encase the index finger of his mother, who is kneeling beside him; his tiny lids dreamily open and close, each time emitting flashes of his brilliant gaze. “The ants go marching one by one” is playing in the background. Tissue-paper flowers are pasted on the walls. The daycare teacher is picking up spilled Cheerios. And the little boy’s mother sits silently, providing her finger as a seemingly eternal guarantor of her son’s comfort.

Until the bell rings. First period is over. “Goodbye, baby,” the mother says, regret and enthusiasm mingling in her voice. “Momma’s gotta go to school!”

Tucked away in what was once an unused metal shop, the Elizabeth Celotto Child Care Center in Wilbur Cross High School offers free daycare to the children of mothers attending schools throughout New Haven. The idea came in 1992 from a group of Yale Law School students who interviewed 60 adolescent mothers around the city and found that a majority had left school, and the primary reason was a lack of daycare. They wrote a letter to the mayor — arguing that, though teen fathers could continue their education, mothers were held back — and suggested the creation of an on-site daycare facility in one of the high schools to help mothers graduate. In 1994, the Celotto daycare was incorporated, and 15 years after its inception, it boasts a 95% graduation rate for the teens.

But the Celotto daycare is only licensed to serve 32 children. The average annual number of births to New Haven adolescents from 2004 to 2006 was 272.

To address the services available to pregnant and parenting teens and to reduce the need for such services, Mayor John DeStefano Jr. PHOTOGRAPHY BY LA WANG

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April 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

The coat rack at the Elizabeth Celotto Child Care Center in Wilbur Cross High School. The daycare is licensed to serve 32 children.

formed the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Council last March.

Despite significant reductions over the past decade, the New Haven birth rate to teens remains 1.8 times the national rate and twice as high as the state rate. “We want to remove as many barriers as possible so that teens can make informed choices and have the best opportunity for successfully completing high school,” wrote Alison Moriarty Daley, a Professor at the Yale School of Nursing and the Council’s chair, in an e-mail.

The pressure to remove barriers compounded this year. In March 2009, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy announced a 5% increase in the national teen birth rate from 2005 to 2007 — the first increase after a 34% decline over 14 years, an increase which is starting to be documented locally as well.

“Now is the time to take action,” said Adriana Arreola, a liason between the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Council and the City of New Haven. “Now is the time to make change.”

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ominique Williams, a 17-year-old sophomore at Hill Regional Career High School, sends her son Na’saird to the Center. She has a tattoo on her left arm and a ring on her lower lip, but one hardly notices these because her words and story are riveting.

When Dominique learned she was pregnant last year, she didn’t want the baby. Her mother had a baby at 14, her older sister had a baby at 16, and neither of them wanted her to repeat

their pattern: teen mother, high school dropout. Dominique, who admits that she used to “get into a lot of trouble” before motherhood, had been pregnant once before but had decided to abort the pregnancy. This second time, her family and the baby’s father urged her to do the same. “But as time went on, I realized I wanted to keep this baby,” Dominique says. “I didn’t wanna kill it.”

She chose not to terminate her pregnancy, but she also refused to follow in her mother’s and sister’s footsteps. She transferred to the Polly T. McCabe Center, a transitional school in New Haven for pregnant teens, and after Na’saird was born seven months ago returned to continue her education at Career. Since Dominique’s mother works a full-time job, nine hours a day, she is not able to take care of her grandson. Celotto provides the child care that enables Dominique to continue as both mother and student.

Lorraine DeLuz, the Executive Director of the daycare, says that the program strives to show teen mothers like Dominique that the future still holds possibility. “Just because you have a baby doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world. There is life after giving birth, a life for your child and a life of your own.”

The Celotto daycare is the largest of its kind in Connecticut.

The program presents teen mothers with a myriad of resources: door-to-door transportation, parenting classes, therapy, case management outreach, education and health counselors. With the Wilbur Cross health clinic a hallway away, it becomes, in

The Yale Daily News Magazine April 2009

DeLuz’s words, “one stop shopping.” For seniors, the program offers after-school classes so the students can train to be nurse assistants. DeLuz tells me about a recent trip to visit her sister in the Hospital of St. Raphael. “When I walk in the door, I see one of our former students. She says, ‘Hi Ms. DeLuz! Remember that I got my CNA certificate senior year?’ And then when I go in to see my sister, another of our teens is handing her her tray!

It’s fabulous to see. They’re doing what they’re supposed to do, what they deserve.”

DeLuz says that many students do go on to college, but the same issue of finding affordable daycare repeats itself. Only a smattering of colleges offer daycare. Though Gateway, a community college in New Haven, has some child care services, they are not available for infants, making the path to higher education arduous for young mothers.

When I ask Dominique what advice she would give to other teenagers, she says, “I would recommend them to wait, to enjoy their life now. It’s a lot that comes with a child...”

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tistics. In 2006, the Mayor organized a task force to address teen pregnancy in the city, which produced a report entitled “A Call to Action.” The report asserted that 50% of New Haven women become pregnant at least once before the age of 20 and put forth a number of recommendations to reduce teen pregnancy in the city: to initiate a comprehensive health curriculum in the public schools and education initiatives for those not in school, to secure access to reproductive care and health insurance for teens, to increase services to parenting and pregnant teens. The Council is now systematically working to accomplish the task force goals, and serves as a coalition to reach out to teens and unite prevention initiatives in the city.

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ernadette Strode, the principal of the Polly T. McCabe Center, New Haven’s school for pregnant teens, is a member of the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Council.

Strode sees pregnancy prevention and support to pregnant teens as correlative goals. At the school, she talks to students about how to make wiser choices, about how prevent further pregnancies. “Our ultimate goal is to get fewer kids,” she explains.

“But I am a realist. And what’s real is that it [teen pregnancy] is happening.

My mission is to prevent this school from being heavily populated and to expand support for those who fall through the cracks.”

Founded in 1966, The Polly T. McCabe Center is a transitional school that is part of the New Haven Public School system, and its mission is encapsulated in its motto: “Educated Mothers!

Healthy Babies!” Nestled in a corner adjacent to Wooster Square, the school offers both middle and high school education.

In addition to a standard academic curriculum, students enroll in a wellness class and must participate in a post-natal parenting education program before returning to their former schools.

In the 1970s, progress among McCabe’s students was used as testimony before Congress and helped lead to the development of the Federal Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs. Today, the school remains a national model for education and services to pregnant and parenting teens.

Last year 176 students transferred to McCabe. This year, the number will be slightly higher, and 42 are currently attending the school. 40 years ago, if a student was pregnant, she had to go to McCabe. But now, students can choose to attend the school at any point during their pregnancy; students taking AP French, or Latin, or Aquacultural Biology at the Sound School — classes not offered at McCabe — might decide not to transfer. But Strode says that large public high schools are not safe environments for pregnant women and that by enrolling in a separate school, the girls become a part of a “family of support.”

“We are here to support them intellectually, academically, physically, emotionally,” says Sheila Brantley, a former English

While anti-violence and anti-drug messages are common, she says, teen pregnancy is little addressed.

But it ought to be.

ominique isn’t the only teen sending this message to peers. This summer, a group of New Haven high school students filmed, directed, and acted in a series of six public service announcements challenging students to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. One video emphasizes that one in four New Haven teens has a sexually transmitted infection. Another shows a game of tag — if you’re having sex, you never know when you might be the one to become “it.”

“We feel like it’s important for kids to get a message from other kids,” says Warren Lowery, one of six media students from Co-op High School who worked on the project. Alexandria Simmons, another of the students, adds, “it’s something that really needs to be brought up.”

While anti-violence and anti-drug messages are common, she says, teen pregnancy is little addressed. But it ought to be.

Nationally, teen pregnancy is highly correlated with poverty, and children are nine times more likely to grow up in poverty if born to unwed, teen mothers who do not graduate from high school, according to the National Campaign. Furthermore, 52% of mothers on welfare had their first child as a teenager.

Children born to teen parents have greater chances of being born prematurely and with low-birth weights. 60% of mothers under 18 do not graduate from high school, and pregnancy is the leading cause of school dropouts among girls. In New Haven, the annual public sector costs of teen pregnancies and births exceed $9 million.

New Haven’s Teen Pregnancy Prevention Council, which sponsored the student public service announcements, was formed last year to prevent the realization of these haunting sta-

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April 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

teacher at the school. Brantley recalls having ordered “large, comfortable, and wide” chairs for her students to make their classroom experience as enjoyable as possible. She used to take her classes on field trips to Yale’s art museums and plays in New Haven and had her students write for the city’s literary magazine.

She didn’t want them to feel that they were deprived of any opportunities on account of their pregnancy. One of her classes wrote a play that won a city-wide competition. “They ended up performing it at the Long Wharf,” she says with pride. “Some people in the audience were a little shocked: ‘are those girls pregnant?’ they would ask. And I would think, ‘yes, but that doesn’t mean they need to stay at home all day! The pregnancy is happening to their body, not their mind.”

Although it is only her second year at McCabe, Strode too has made a decisive impact on her students. “She’s an advocate for the women,” says Brantley. “She spends time finding housing for the girls who don’t have anywhere to live.” Strode is modest but adds, “how can I go home if my girls have nowhere to go?”

Once when a student had left the school, Strode climbed into her car and “tracked her down,” spoke with her, and motivated her to return to McCabe. Later, it was Strode who took the girl shopping for graduation clothes, who had tears in her eyes when she watched the student’s grandmother rejoice at the first sight of a grandchild crossing the stage.

Despite these positive interventions, Strode has found that only 50% of students who leave McCabe go on to graduate.

Though many of the mothers using the Celotto program come from McCabe, the main reason Strode cites for the low graduation rate is insufficient access to daycare. Given the economic situation, the Celotto daycare is in no position to expand, and Strode dreams of having a full daycare at McCabe. But the numbers do not tell the whole of McCabe’s story, as success cannot always be measured quantifiably. Instead, success for Strode is

“those beautiful babies. It’s the young mom who says ‘thank you Miss Strode.’ It’s the lives we’ve touched.”

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hile the Polly McCabe Center supports students once they have become pregnant, education programs in New Haven seek to prevent teen pregnancy from happening in the first place. The reasons why teenage girls get pregnant are complex, but Pierette Silverman, Vice President for Education at Planned Parenthood of Connecticut, thinks that prevention should start with something as simple as knowing the parts of our bodies. Silverman gets up out of her chair, puts her hands on her head, and starts chanting: heads and shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes… “What’s missing from the song?” she asks. “That’s our cultural message. That this” — she gestures to everything between shoulders and knees — “is off limits. It can be a safety issue. You’d be surprised how many girls will complain that their ‘stomach hurts’ after they’ve been molested. They don’t have the words to explain what really happened. We need to learn how to name things — how to call a penis a penis. If you don’t name something, then that’s attaching shame to it.”

Teen Talk, a Planned Parenthood education program designed to help adolescents make healthy decisions regarding sexuality, begins with a session on anatomy and physiology. Having originated in New Haven, the initiative has recently been deemed a “promising program” for teen pregnancy and STI prevention by the Center for Disease Control. It covers healthy and unhealthy relationships, birth control, and how to be a “healthcare consumer.” In addition to Teen Talk, Planned Parenthood has been the motive force behind Real Life, Real Talk, a sex education program for parents where 36 partners around the city host workshops encouraging parents to be the primary sex educators for their children. “We want to reframe the public dialogue around healthy sexuality,” Silverman says. “To normalize the conversation. Sexuality is a part of who we are.”

The Teen Pregnancy Prevention Council recognizes that while abstinence would be the best way to prevent teen pregnancy, 60% of high school students have had sex. Its main goal this year has been to make comprehensive contraception available in New Haven’s schoolbased health clinics. Currently, students can receive condoms in one-on-one consultations at the clinics, but the Council seeks to expand contraceptive offerings. Alison Moriarty Daley has been trying to get birth control approved in the clinics for years, for improved contraceptive use has been cited as the primary The red room at the Celotto Center. 95% of mothers who leave their children at the center factor in the decline of the teen graduate, but it is one of the few official daycare options for teen mothers in New Haven. pregnancy rate in the country.

The Yale Daily News Magazine April 2009

By contrast, many studies have suggested that abstinence-only programming does not effectively lead to abstinence. This year Superintendant Dr. Reggie Mayo has publically “promised” that birth control will be available, but it has yet to make its way into the clinics. Some parents and religious leaders have opposed the move toward greater contraceptive access, thinking that greater access would incite more teens to have sex. But use of the health clinics requires parental approval, and an “opt-out” clause exists so that parents can restrict access to certain services. “There is a way to protect everyone’s ethical and religious concerns,” says Terry Freeman, director of adolescent programs at the Consultation Center, a prevention organization affiliated with Yale.

Nonetheless, cultural resistance to safe sex initiatives persist. In America, the notion that talking about sex is a taboo is pervasive.

“Europeans are much more matter of fact about sex, about contraception,” says Freeman. “I guess we still have a Puritan hang-up.”

As America has the highest rate of teen pregnancy among developed nations, increased support to teen parents is needed.

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age, she nonetheless takes care of her grandson everyday while Alicia finishes her senior year.

Alicia is lucky that her mother is around, that she has a safe home to return to after school, that Zach can take his bath in the same tub every night while she plays him Beethoven music. Not all teen mothers can count on this stability. One third of the teens served by the Celotto daycare experience homelessness in shelters. One fourth are living with parents abusing substances. One fourth are not living with anåy family at all. Many start to lead lives of transience: they become “couch-surfers,” moving from the couch of their best friend to that of their boyfriend, the baby’s father, the parents of the baby’s father — never finding a constant home.

Alicia’s life has not been easy either. Every day she wakes up at 5 a.m. and doesn’t go to sleep until past 1 a.m., balancing the duties of motherhood with her academic obligations.

Her relationship with her mother is acerbic — “I want to be my own mother. I don’t want her to tell me how to parent,” Alicia says. She has lost many friends since her pregnnie McGuire works for nancy, and Zach’s father, Mike, the Social Development is no longer in their life. This Department in the Public month, Alicia is taking Mike to Schools and leads a parenting court for child support. Alicia group each Wednesday at Career says that Mike is involved with High School. One student in this drugs, that he has no place to group is 18-year-old Alicia Riley. stay, that although he is “very Alicia’s dark hair careens to her nice,” he doesn’t recognize waist. Her black sweater and jeans that parenthood needs to be a put me at ease, her black lace-up “full-time job.” boots remind me of a pair in my Many fathers of children closet. When Alicia found out she Former English teacher Sheila Brantley (left) and princiborn to teen mothers are not was pregnant, her first thought pal Bernadette Strode (right) at the McCabe Center. involved in their children’s was: this can’t be happening. Not lives. Rick Jennings, a case to me. “I was a straight A student, manager for Student Parenting I had a great group of friends, I didn’t do any drugs or go down and Family Services, is working to change that. Many of the that path,” she pauses. “It was my first time.” fathers are older, some are still in school, some are working, She took seven pregnancy tests to confirm the truth. When she some are incarcerated. His role is to reach out to the fathers told her mother — Alicia says her family is Italian and doesn’t and help them become dependable parents. “There aren’t many accept sex before marriage — she didn’t believe her either. “She programs for guys — except the court system,” he says. So for would say, no you’re just fat. It took her two months to believe Jennings, “the biggest reward is to see them taking responsibility that I really was pregnant.” and an active role in their child’s life.”

Throughout her pregnancy, Alicia remained at Career — Though Mike no longer has a presence in Zach’s, Alicia has a she hadn’t heard of Polly McCabe at the time, but wishes she new boyfriend. “You wouldn’t believe how much he loves Zach,” had known about the school — and in the summer after her she gushes. Later, she remembers sitting with a group of friends sophomore year gave birth to Zachary. “My little butthead,” around a lunch table in the 8th grade. “We were all talking and she says, smiling when she mentions her son for the first time. everyone was like ‘wouldn’t it be fun to have a baby!’ I was the Now Zachary is 18-months-old, and though Alicia’s mother only one who was like, ‘No, I want to wait until it’s with the per“despises” the fact that her daughter has a child at such a young fect person….” She trails off. “I was living in a dream world.”

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A

nnie McGuire acts as a sort of second mother to Alicia: Center, Terry Freeman employs a broad-based prevention model she tells me that Alicia ran track through her third month which seeks to increase such “developmental assets” as family supof pregnancy; she shows me pictures of Zach on her cam- port, school engagement, self esteem, and creativity in youth so era. “When I work with a girl, I make her mine,” she says. Alicia they can build a positive view of their future. Another initiative, is not the only one whom McGuire has claimed. She mentors the Teen Outreach Program engages students at Troup Middle between 30 and School in “ser40 teen parents vice learning” in many of New as pregnancy Haven’s magprevention: net schools. through active McGuire is service, youth aware of the “feel imporplethora of sertant, they see vices to teen that they’re parents in New going to be Haven which the future of offer education, this city,” says healthcare, project direcshelter, and tor Camellia outreach. There Redway. is the Polly T. It is a belief McCabe Center, in hope, in the the Celotto potential of an Child Care adolescent’s Center, Student future, which Parenting brings togethand Family er the diverse Services. There constituents in is Life Haven, the multifacetMinding the A young boy waits in the Celotto Center. Many New Haven programs are aimed at young ed approach to Baby, Nurturing mothers and seek to ensure that neither they nor their children fall prey to statistics. teen pregnancy Families. There prevention and is New Haven teen parenting Home Recovery, Me and My Baby, Youth Continuum, New support in New Haven. All united through their affiliation with Haven Healthy Start. There is FatherCare and the Male the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Council, they are also united in Involvement Network. There are administrators, counselors, a shared mission. Though many have different priorities — some teachers who devote their lives to helping teen parents make it. want increased health education, others birth control in public “People are envious of New Haven,” says Terry Freeman of the schools, or greater access to day care, or a program to secure Consultation Center. stable housing, or money — they all see hope as a way to prevent Still, McGuire laments, it’s not enough. She wishes there were unwanted pregnancy, and as a way to help parents defeat the a systematic case management approach which followed all teen odds that numbers fortell. They empower teens with the fuel of parents in the public school system, from pregnancy through hope, and are fueled by the adolescents’ successes in return. graduation. And despite her overwhelming energy, her drive to When I return to the Celotto daycare one afternoon, I see a shape the future of adolescents, she is only human. “I’m tired,” small label above a red hook — it is scrawled with the name of McGuire confesses.

Dominique’s son, Na’saird. I see a row of journals, filled with details of what the children did that day so that the mothers cGuire keeps persisting because she is inspired by stu- won’t miss the memories of their development. I see a sign: dents like Alicia. After Alicia graduates this spring, she “Seniors, have you applied to college yet? There’s still time.” plans to go to college. She has already been accepted And I see once again that four-month-old baby with striking to Western Connecticut State University and is on the waiting green eyes. It is 2:15; the school day has ended, and his mother list at Quinnipiac. For Alicia, as for many mothers, her child returns to the red room. “Oh I’m ready for a nap, aren’t you, strengthens her ambition. “I think I would have given up if I baby?” she laughs, and bundles him up in blankets, buckles him didn’t have my baby,” she says. “Zach gave me the umph to look into a car seat. As I watch this young mother getting ready to at brighter things.” In the future, Alicia wants to be a pediatric leave, I remember something Berndatte Strode has said of her cardiac surgeon. “There’s nothing holding me back.” students: “you have your life, your child, in your hands.”

Dr. Michael A. Carerra, an innovator in teen pregnancy preven“See you tomorrow,” the mother says to the daycare teacher, tion, has famously said that “hope is a powerful contraceptive.” and she walks toward the door. Her book bag is in one hand, the In New Haven, Carerra’s vision resonates. At the Consultation car seat in the other.

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The Yale Daily News Magazine April 2009

33

FICTION A BRIGHT LIGHT FOR DEATH by Justin Stone Bedbound, suffering from hemorrhoids, and nearing his one hundredth birthday, Mendy Glatzman receives word of his younger brother’s death, and must finally take stock of the life, legacy, business, and family they shared.

or the third time in three hours, Mendy Glatzman made the motions. He opened his eyes and coughed and cleared his throat.

He grasped the bedpost for support and swung his spindly legs over the side of the bed. He sat up and stiffened his creaking back. His feet found his slippers and he put them on. Then he moved his left hand to his nightstand and pushed down onto it and stood up completely, though he wobbled a few moments before he was balanced. He trudged through the bedroom a few inches each pace and found the bathroom and there he urinated and did not flush. Then he started back toward the bed and walked slowly and found his position and shut his eyes again.

Maybe a half-hour or an hour passed and Mendy woke anew.

“Already?”

(Continued on p. 35)

April 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

SIN JIN

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But he realized that he felt no urge to urinate. He wondered what stirred him. He heard a soft, shrill ringing: the phone. He saw flashing lights on his digital clock: 4:24 a.m. Of course Mendy knew what to expect. Over the years he had taken many phone calls late at night.

He fumbled for the speakerphone button.

“Hello?”

A low muttering. He tried again.

“Hello? I need my hearing aid.”

Mendy flipped the lightswitch. His eyes adjusted and in the room he witnessed a ragbag of objects, blurry and inscrutable. The muttering continued. He made some of the motions; then, standing and moaning, he scanned his bedroom. On top of the armoire in the little blue box? No. The plastic bag on the windowsill? No. He could discern that the voice was becoming frantic and he tried to expedite his search. Maybe it fell under the bed? No. Under the lampshade, next to the dentures, on the desk? Yes. He squeezed the device into his right ear and it beeped loudly, ready for use. “…on Tuesday in San Francisco. We’re all going. All the New York Glatzmans are leaving tomorrow. It’s at the Beit Israel cemetery. Can you hear me? Dad? Your brother passed away. It was peaceful. Can you find the hearing aid? Check the desk. It’s always on the desk. Daddy?”

“Who?” “Dad, it’s Helen.”

“I mean who. My kid brother?”

“Frankie. He was 89 last Monday.”

“What do you know. My kid brother is dead.”

“It was peaceful. He took a nap on the couch, that’s all, and didn’t get up.”

“Always taking naps. He used to carry around a pillow.”

“Daddy, how are you doing?

“Your old man is alright. That’s terrible about Frankie, though.”

Mendy said “terrible,” but Mendy thought: “well, it’s Frankie.

Coulda been worse. Coulda been one of my daughters that died.”

He had not spoken to his brother for more than fifty years. When Helen was young and her aunt and uncle missed Thanksgiving for the first time, she had asked her father: “What happened to Uncle Frankie and Aunt Bertha?” Mendy responded, “Forget about them, they’ve moved on.” Now Frankie had moved on. And this is terrible?

“Did you two ever reconcile?”

“No.” “Well. We’re all going to the funeral, your kids and grandkids and great-grandchildren. And everyone knows that you would go if you were doing better. So maybe this will set things right.”

“Sure, sweetheart.”

“We’re going to come visit you after the funeral, a group of us.”

“Nonsense. You’re going to fly New York to California and then to Florida? That’s crazy.”

“We want to. We just spoke about it. We’re not going to bother you, we’ll stay in the hotel next door. Okay?”

“No you won’t. That’s outrageous. $300 a night.”

“It’s not money. We want to come see you. Your brother just died.”

“And?” “Your brother just died.”

“And how!” Helen detected the excitement in his response.

“We’re coming to visit you. And you’ll be happy for it.”

35

And though he meant to argue more, Mendy did not have the means. He felt the rush and the bulge in the inflamed prostate and he knew how quickly he would have to find the porcelain.

“Sure, okay. I love you, my first-born girl.”

“I love you too, daddy. Oh. And I think you should call the widow.”

She hung up. Mendy stumbled into the bathroom, wheezing and dizzy, his hearing aid screeching, his kneecap cracking, and he urinated and whimpered. Then he sat down on the seat and excreted and stood up and did not flush. He knew he’d be back too soon.

Then he noticed some blood and it reminded him of his other maladies: the persistent headaches, the prickly skin, the hemorrhoids, the failing vision and hearing, the aching knee and collarbone, the stiff neck, the dentures, the overexerting heart. The ninety-nine-year-old man.

“Why can’t I die,” Mendy wondered.

Then he walked out to the balcony and reclined in his chair and stared at the luxury condominiums. Miami Beach and its coralcolored monoliths, dozens of them, bounded by the Atlantic on one end and polluted ghettos across the intercoastal. Each stack of condos twenty stories or higher, each a harbor of the old and the ill, and in the blackness of night the headlights below and the antennas above illumined the towering facades so that coral appeared grey, like a gravestone. Mendy drifted.

F

rankie and Mendy’s Cabinets and Countertops!

Firesale. You don’t want to miss this! Firesale.

Up to 50% off. October 12th – 15th.

9th and Flatbush.

Franklin Glatzman was reading the New York Times Classifieds.

“Why’d you put ‘firesale’ twice?”

“Bookended. You know, to emphasize.”

“Where’d you learn about that?”

“What? To make a little advertisement? Common sense, you big dope!”

“Sure, and let’s see if it works worth a damn.”

“Worth $12.50 and a damn, to be exact.”

Frankie was despondent. “You spent $12.50 on this rubbish?”

“We’ll make it back in a day, you watch.”

“I should sure as hell hope so for that kind of cash!”

“Frankie. Do you know anyone cheaper than your big brother?

Twenty years ago. Black Tuesday. I was only twenty-two years old, the markets crashed, the convenience store was selling a can of soup for two cents. And there was a crack on it. So I offered the guy behind the counter a penny instead —” “And the schmuck took it.”

“And the schmuck took it! I can sell, Frankie. It’s a cinch. I fled the pogroms you know, got the hell out of there age of four. Came here and did the paper route age of six. Five in the morning I woke up, you imagine that? And then I went to school, and then I worked in the candy store for your uncle, four hours each afternoon —” “Yes, do give me the history top-to-bottom —” “— and then I mopped the house and did my arithmetic and went to sleep. Then, I was ten and you were born, and I helped out with that, too. I changed your goddamn diapers. So I can sell some cabinets and make back the twelve-fifty and hundreds of dollars more, and then maybe you’ll stop hockin me in the chainik over a dollar here or there.”

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“You did not change my diapers.”

Mendy looked into the eyes of his brother. They were shimmering nacre.

“I sure did. Mom and pop wouldn’t touch those things. You were one runt of a hellishly ugly baby.”

Too harsh. Can’t call an ugly man ugly. You can only call a pretty man ugly if his hair is off or he has some pickle stuck in his tooth.

Look at me: six foot two, muscular physique, cutting jaw, sturdy brown hair and a widow’s peak, piercing blue eyes, sharp nose. I looked great. Handsome and hearty, to be honest. An athlete. A chest of Damascus steel. Not for nothing I played ball, twenty cents an hour as a dedicated hitter in the Brooklyn minors in ’31. What we did for money back then. The Great Depression, it turned many great minds into switch-hitters. Not that I was a great mind. That was Frankie. Frankie who could do calculus, who could read Latin and write Greek. Frankie who aspired to practice law. Frankie who graduated high school and started in college, until his scholarship ran dry and he needed to join forces with me in business. Frankie, squat and already partly bald with muddy eyes, a screechy, lisping voice, and a massive nose. Like a ski slope.

“Please don’t call me ugly.”

Business. We were good complements. I told my kid brother to run the numbers, and I’ll do the talking. You balance the books and I’ll stare in their eyes and smile and say, ‘well Mr. Loewenstein, you’ll never get a better deal than this one here, never.’ And then he’ll sign the dotted line, and we’ll split the profits even. Sound good? Maybe you didn’t want to be my calculator, but you were good at it. And I did great on my part. So what was the problem?

“I said you were ugly. Come off it, you can’t still care now you’ve got the prettiest cat in town.”

“Mendy…”

“I’m just kidding with you. Mine’s the prettiest, but Bertha’s a close second. How’d you score such a character anyway?”

“It’s a deep, enduring love, Mendy.”

“Can’t hurt she’s half blind — I’m kidding with you!”

“Enough with the jokes. You’re a pain in the ass.”

“That’s fair, Frankie. But it’s nearly seven, and we should get to the store, because you know every blessed mother from Monsey to Montauk will be lining up today.”

M

endy awoke to the sunrise. The early sun cast its light upon the graveyard and made it coral again. Mendy stared outward for a moment, then screamed: “What is wrong with my eye!” His left eye had started to twitch convulsively and it did not seem anxious to stop. He readied his right hand and massaged his eye ferociously and he was able to quell the convulsions, but not the pain. He peeled some crust from the eyelid, and flicked it over the balcony. Then, he felt the surge and stood up and made the motions and didn’t flush.

He fixed himself a breakfast of an Einstein Bros. bagel topped with Muenster cheese. He tore the cheese into miniscule strips and then melted them in the microwave atop the bagel and then cut away the excess so that the surface of the bagel was perfectly covered.

He took the extra melted cheese, scraped it onto a plate and set it down for later so it would not go to waste.

He stared at the wall of his dining room and even through his throbbing eye he could decipher the words in the framed awards.

Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, 1951: to Mendy Glatzman for three years of innovation. The New Yorker’s up-and-coming.

Official notification of inclusion in the Manhattan social register.

“For such a dolt, you did okay for yourself,” Mendy said.

And he found his address book and turned to G and examined the list of eleven numbers under Frankie Glatzman. He had kept a meticulous record of the various phone numbers of his brother over the years and yet he had never dialed any of them.

He dialed the number for San Francisco.

A feeble voice answered: “Hello?”

“Hi, Bertha?”

“Yes.” “Bertha, it’s Mendy.”

Bertha did not respond. It was silent and Mendy wondered if Bertha was finding a hearing aid. Or perhaps she was trying to find the words to apologize. To find the words to beg forgiveness. To make rapprochement. To craft the perfect sentence to win favor.

“Mendy, you were right and he was wrong.” Or “Mendy, it was my fault and you were being a good brother.” Or “It’s been so many years I’ve needed to tell you how guilty I feel, how much I’ve wanted to fix things —” “Well, Mendel, what do you want?”

He was wrong. She would make no apology. She would be indignant, and Mendy would have to suffer her tone the rest of the phone call to appease his daughter, and so he resolved to make the conversation as short as possible. And then the urge to urinate hastened him further.

“I wanted to say sorry about Frankie. That’s terrible.”

“It is terrible. It’s a tragedy, the death of that man.”

“How are you holding up?”

“I’m holding up. And I don’t know how.”

“Well. Okay. You’ll soon see the family.”

“Okay.”

“Take care, Bertha.”

She hung up and he made the motions. The day was already fraught with pain and Mendy intended to spend it supine on his recliner. And so he did nothing but lay and twice get up to make a bagel and seven or eight times to urinate and once to take a call from Helen, to know that they had arrived safely in San Francisco.

And then it was sunset and his right eye was suffering paroxysms and spitting pus and Mendy could not bear the agony and screamed to the heavens and heard no response.

T

hat’s a shit suit on you, Mendy.”

On me, even a shapeless suit looked somewhat better than shit.

“Well, it cost three dollars.”

“Man, you are cheap.”

“For a successful man, I suppose I am.”

“What makes you say you’re successful?”

“I know how business works.”

“Evidently not. You’re reinvesting company assets into volatile funds. You’re liquidating safe money bonds. You’re overcharging on cabinets and undercharging on countertops. You’re barely paying your blue-collars. And you have me signing off on your accounting as if I had one goddamn thing to do with your terrible decisions.”

“The spiel again. We’re still turning a profit, aren’t we?”

“Barely.”

“Bullshit. Where did all my money come from?”

“Look, Mendy. I respect you. You’re my big brother. You’re a terrific salesman. But those awards, that big house of yours, putting

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the kids through college – it will all mean nothing if you don’t make some adjustments.”

“Yeah, you’ve said so eight or nine times.”

“And you’ve never heeded a word of it, Mendy!”

“You could defy me if you really wanted.”

“You’re the face of the company. I don’t want you frowning.”

“It’s too late for that.”

“Look. I need to have some say on the financial decisions. Not by defying you. With your support. I’m supposed to be more than a glorified bookkeeper. I’m your brother, and I think you’re erring badly. Life’s tough enough at home that I don’t need to come to work to take orders from my older brother.”

“What’s tough at home?”

“You know. Young kids. Bertha’s always gone. I’m trying to run a business and keep toddlers in line. It’s not too healthy.”

“Where is Bertha going all the time?”

Why would I press onward? Did I want him to know?

“It doesn’t matter. She’s got PTA meetings or she’s taking an

art class or she’s reading at the library, God knows what. Point is, half the time she’s somewhere else and I’m left managing home and hearth and you know how that can be with a three-year-old.”

“Sure. I remember when you were three.”

“So. Do I have any sympathy? Can I get a say in any decisions?”

That was a reasonable request. But I was the older one. The more experienced. I decided there was something to that. They all say that was a mistake, and maybe it was, but what’s the harm in making one?

Business survived. Could have been better at some points. Could have been worse.

They say that money is not everything: that there is more to life than money. And they say that what doesn’t make you dead instead makes you stronger and they say to seize the day or else you’ll wake up, they say, and not know what you missed, only that you wish you didn’t miss it. And that it’s better to die with dignity than to live without it. An apple a day…

They say a lot of things, but sure I don’t believe it. What was the problem here? Tell me: what was the problem?

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“Well Mendy?”

“Not a chance. You said it yourself. I’m the face. And the face talks.”

well. But it won’t be immediate. She really loved him.”

Warmth again.

T

s she heaved and hawed, Bertha’s bosom rippled over Mendy’s chest. He ran his arms over her back and pulled her tightly upon him: so that it was expedient.

“Hurry.”

Any number of things could have gone wrong, that time or the many before it. Frankie comes looking. My own wife comes home.

Or his daughter knocks, God forbid. A condom breaks. She forgets some lingerie. A lingering perfume. A kiss with lipstick. One moan too loud. And none of it would make a mite of difference, because there was no pleasure so deliciously forbidden as sex with a brother’s wife.

“Faster!”

I said I made mistakes. Just like everyone. She always slept around.

Before me. After me. He was a good husband, a good father, and a good person, but not a good lover. I always had that on him.

We finished, she left, and the phone rang.

“Mendy,” my brother says. “My wife is cheating on me.”

“How do you know?”

“One knows. It’s too often she’s gone.”

We exchanged words. We equivocated. I deflected. I invited him over for a drink. A glass of gin. He came into the bedroom to drink it. He furrowed his eyebrows, and he knew. One knows. There was also the scent of her perfume. Abandoned lingerie. And her wedding ring, under the lampshade on the desk. Probably intentional, but who can remember.

Of course the woman pins it on me. Honest to God that she initiated it. She came over earlier and said she wanted a divorce, and I talked her out of it and fucked her out of it. Frankie, it will never happen again. Frankie, don’t tell my wife. Please don’t tell my wife.

One is enough to ruin today. One is enough.

“And I’ll tell you something else, you subhuman piece of shit.”

Frankie screamed. “I’m out of the business. I’m out of this state.

We’re out of your life. You’ll need a new calculator. Don’t ever call or write. I don’t want to hear a word out of your godforsaken mouth again. Not today, not tomorrow, not until the day you die.

Or I do.”

He slammed the door and was gone. He didn’t drink the gin.

he sun set and Mendy’s throbbing eye blurred his vision.

The condo towers united. Mendy was writhing. He sensed a warmth beneath the pain but could not embrace it, and so he settled for suffering.

And so he suffered. On the recliner, on the toilet, on the bed, with the hearing aid, with his eyeglasses, with his walking stick, despite the Percocet, despite the Flagyll, despite the Nemenda, for naught. On Tuesday morning he had an appointment with the proctologist and the doctor looked inside Mendy’s anus and saw the hemorrhoids and said: “these are thick varicose veins.”

“What does that mean?”

“It probably means that you are stressed out. That creates hypertension, which stiffens the sensitive blood vessels down there. It’s a certain amount of stress. And you are far too old to be stressed, Glatzman.”

“There’s another thing, doctor. My eye hurts like hell. It twitches.”

“I noticed that myself.”

“Well, what’s wrong with it?”

“You need to see a specialist. It looks fine to me, but what do I know. In the meantime, just don’t look at anything bright.”

“Don’t look at anything bright?”

“I’m speculating.”

“What bright thing shouldn’t I look at?”

“Exactly. I don’t know. What bright thing is there? I guess just don’t stare at the sun.” The doctor chuckled.

Then the doctor took tight rubber bands and situated them around the hemorrhoids so that they would constrict and reduce the inflamed areas over time. The rubber bands caused enormous pain.

Back on the balcony, Mendy tried to keep his eyes from the sun.

Eventually he heard the doorbell.

“Grandpa!”

Benjamin charged up to him and offered a magnificent hug.

“I missed you, grandpa!”

“Great-grandpa,” Mendy corrected. The descendants had arrived, and Mendy reveled in his patriarchal status. There were three of his children, Helen among them, and they each came with one grandchild and one great-grandchild. A staggering number of sharp faces and slick brown scalps. They took Mendy to Chinese food and he sat next to Helen.

“How does your old man look?”

“You look fine, daddy!”

“I look fine?”

“Why wouldn’t you!”

“Everything hurts. Every part of my body aches every moment of the day. I have prescriptions and doctors but no comfort. I piss fifty times a night. I’m too damn old.”

“Well, you’re one hundred in two weeks. Maybe you’ll feel better when you hit the special number.”

And Mendy wondered: “already”? A centenarian in a fortnight.

Triple digits.

“I can’t believe it. I’m too damn old. How was the funeral?”

“It was lovely.”

“Bertha look okay?”

“Beautiful as always. Very well contained. Seemed to be coping

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A

nd Mendy returned to the balcony and concentrated on the sun. He was burning. Helen came up to him and tapped his shoulder.

“You have the hearing aid in? Good. I’ve brought you the phone.”

“Who is it?”

“The widow. Wants to tell you something.”

Mendy grabbed the phone.

“Bertha?”

“I wanted to thank you for calling me. I should have thanked you when you did. But I didn’t think of it.”

“My kid brother died. Of course I’d call.”

“He never spoke of you. Not once.”

“Of course not.”

“You really hurt him.”

“I know.”

“I did too.”

“Well. What can we do now?”

The Yale Daily News Magazine April 2009

“Nothing.”

“Nothing,” Mendy repeated. And he hung up the phone.

Nothing.

He knew what would come next.

Mendy’s eyes sparkled in the light. He had to think what to tell Helen. There are five thousand dollars beneath the loose floorboard.

Don’t sell Fidelity; it doesn’t mature for three years. Treat well the hardcover of Portnoy’s Complaint — it’s autographed. Don’t be afraid when gangsters come to the funeral. I used to live next door to Meyer Lansky. We got along, and they just want to pay their dues.

I’ve already chosen an epitaph. It’s written down. I think in the will.

I’ll just tell you. It says “Mendel Glatzman, 1907-2007: The Last Man Standing.” Bury me next to my brother.

“Helen…”

“What do you need daddy.”

“I just wanted to tell you something.”

39

“Tell me anything.”

“Be a good person. Don’t be a bad person. Be a good one. You won’t regret it.”

“That’s what they say.”

Then Mendy stared into the sky with every ounce of intensity his decrepit mind could muster. He made his final request.

“Will you get the Publix catalogue?”

“Why, daddy?”

“There are coupons. You should cut out the one about the soup.”

“What does it do?”

“You can buy twelve cans and get the thirteenth free.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Your old man likes a good bargain.”

“Has my old man ever seen an armored car following a hearse?”

Mendy chuckled. The sun rose and set and rose again.

The Problem With Myth In the story my mother told, the angel never returned to heaven— the woodcutter stole her cloak of wings while she bathed by the mangroves and took her as she shuddered in the wilderness.

They married, they had children— such are the premises of womanhood. Out of childish greed, I liked this version where motherhood was a virtue.

Small-shouldered, my mother goes out, then shuffles in, arms heavy with laundry and asks my father what he believes.

But he disagrees with whose tragedy the story is. Hence, the corrected version: The angel was to blame.

The woodcutter was seduced, moonstruck.

Love breathed the moon in a single syllable of radiance that seized her hair, casting it infinite, like raw metaphor. Beauty justified the coveting, the rape of an angel, or woman, rather.

Eventually, she found the wings and flew away, forgetting that hourless forest and he wed another woman.

—Rosanna Oh

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April 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT

PASTA AND WELLNESS by Anthony Lydgate It takes true foodies to appreciate the sensuality of making pasta, but Anthony Lydgate and his family definitely qualify. The Marcato Atlas 150 is the star of the show in this classic romantic tale of boy-meets-pasta-machine. arganelli are a tubular pasta like penne, only without ridges.

When properly formed, they are thick and toothsome in the middle, and agreeably floppy around the edges. They are the ideal fresh pasta, fulfilling the three primary criteria of the pasta enthusiast. First, they are quickly made and easily mastered; difficult to botch, they can be replicated at a dinner party without fear of embarrassment. Second, they are impressive. Similar in shape to machine-produced pasta, but with the inimitable taste of the fresh stuff, they bespeak a certain homegrown refinement. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, they satisfy the deep urge for sensuality in cooking. Raw pasta is the lower-sodium cousin of Play-Doh; one is yellow and delicious, the other fuchsia and inedible, but both call for the same gratifying process of kneading, rolling, and slicing. This similarity explains much of the allure of pasta-making. Anyone who has used scissors to cut a fresh cylinder of PlayDoh in half will instantly recognize the near-criminal joy of segmenting a sphere of pasta dough. Anyone who has pulled spaghetti-like strands through a Play-Doh extruder can guess the attraction of shredding tagliatelle. And anyone who has fashioned the perfect leg for a Play-Doh giraffe knows the simple satisfaction of a well-formed garganello.

I make garganelli using the Marcato Atlas 150, a gorgeous conglomeration of stainless steel rollers and blades. The Atlas 150 has two basic functions: flattening and shredding. It swallows large blobs of pasta dough and spits out dainty yellow sheets, cool and clammy to the touch. These can be hand sliced or fed back into the machine’s shredders, which are sized and shaped for spaghetti (cylindrical) and tagliatelle (ribbon-shaped). The Atlas 150 comes with a crank, a clamp, and a brochure called “Pasta & Wellness” (or, as the German translation says, “Nudelmaschine und Wellness”). This little tract features a model on its cover. Her nudity is concealed by a scarf-like swath of fresh pasta, which is draped around her shoulders and over her chest. Its fettuccine-

width fringes hang below the lower limits of the photograph. Her hands are placed delicately around her face — one on the jaw, one on the temple — and her eyes, tranquil beneath copper lids, betray nothing of the strangeness of having flour and raw egg plastered to her nipples. Just above the shadow of her navel is Marcato’s logo: a strip of pasta folded back on itself to make an M, an Italian version of the Golden Arches.

The “Pasta & Wellness” brochure, like the box it comes in, shows signs of wear — warped corners, blotches of extra virgin olive oil, a light dusting of flour. Though my Atlas 150 is only a few years old, it has already received heavy use. Hundreds of

Garganelli require no care, cannot be killed, and are asexual. They are also nearly impossible to screw up. sheets of dough have passed through its rollers, and they have been turned into every conceivable kind of pasta — long coils of tagliatelle, delicate fringes of spaghetti, haphazard ribbons of maltagliati, soft pillows of bacon-and-cheese-filled ravioli. Though the work is sometimes arduous, there is always a helping hand. My family is full of foodies. In fact, pasta-making is probably one of the less remarkable food-related activities we engage in. My sister Annie, for example, recently purchased cured meat from over 2,000 miles away, and now must devise a way to use up several pounds of finnochiona and hot soppressata. My mother cures her own olives, spending hours every autumn cracking them by hand, soaking them in a giant purple bucket, and sealing them in gift-sized mason jars. My father, though, may be the

worst offender. Besides being an avid saver of duck fat, he has been known to break the law in the name of a good meal. He once smuggled a gaggle of French Helix pomatia into the United States by encouraging snails to attach themselves to the underside of an umbrella, which he then packed safely in his carry-on luggage. Miraculously, they survived the flight, and my father brought them home to Cambridge, placing them outdoors in an earthenware jug. Lacking wilted grape leaves, the snails’ food of choice, he began feeding them corn silk. The idea was to raise enough specimens to provide a source for the delicacy known as escargots. But the tale of the immigrant mollusks did not end happily. “I knew they were hermaphrodites, and kept hoping they’d have babies,” says my father. “They didn’t.” The breeding stock seemed distinctly uninterested in breeding. A chilly New England autumn soon arrived, and the snails began to perish; the same delicate constitution that made them delicious after a brief encounter with garlic butter and a sauté pan also made them unable to withstand the cold.

My father brought them indoors, but the population continued to dwindle until it was finally wiped out — he doesn’t know why. “Maybe they OD’d on corn silk,” he says. He hadn’t tasted a single snail.

My food ambitions are more modest than my father’s. I do not dream of herds of escargots; I avoid border protection officials and fussy hermaphrodites. Garganelli require no care, cannot be killed, and are asexual. They are also nearly impossible to screw up. First, roll small balls of dough through the Atlas 150’s flattener, using the 1-setting three or four times to achieve uniformity and then moving up through the finer settings. The 8-setting yields a sheet between 1/16 and 1/8 inches thick. Let dry for several minutes before cutting it into two-and-a-half-inch squares. Then roll each square from corner to corner around a floured dowel, roughly the diameter of a pencil, and carefully press together. If the dough will not adhere to itself, moisten its edges. Slide the finished garganello onto a floured cookie sheet. Repeat.

41

MARIA HARAS

The Yale Daily News Magazine April 2009

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April 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

BACKPAGE

KEY MESSAGES edited by Daniel Fromson Excerpted from a memo in which global advertising agency Carat detailed how to communicate the effects of a major restructuring — including numerous layoffs — to its employees. The company’s “chief people officer� accidentally emailed the memo to the agency’s approximately 14,000-person workforce. This stuff is too good to make up.

OFFICE MEMORANDUM Why are we taking this action?

We are right-sizing Carat for several key reasons, including client spend reduction. We feel confident about our future and believe our new structure will make us stronger.

Keep in mind, however, that when an organization has to go through this kind of exercise it is always unfortunate, because it affects our colleagues, whom we do care about.

Critical Talent Message We value you. We want to make sure our people understand that Carat is strong, and since we see you as a leader in this company, we need your help. We want to make sure our people understand that we are transforming this company into a more entrepreneurial culture that will service our clients across many different channels. Some of your colleagues may be questioning if this is the right place for them to build their careers.

Let them know we are building for the future. The actions we had to take were necessary to right-size the company. Please assure them that we are confident about the future.

Message to Impacted Employees ‡ , XQIRUWXQDWHO\ KDYH VRPH GLIILFXOW QHZV ZKLFK DIIHFWV \RX DQG \RXU SRVLWLRQ ZLWK the company. Based on the continued reduction in our client’s spend and a restructuring of the core functions (insert group here), we had to evaluate a number of factors and took a hard look at our future and current business need (capacity), performance, and the evolving skill sets needed for our clients and their businesses. ‡ $V D UHVXOW ZH QR ORQJHU KDYH D UROH IRU \RX ‡ 3OHDVH NQRZ WKDW ZH YDOXH \RXU FRQWULEXWLRQ WR WKH FRPSDQ\ DQG ZDQW WR KHOS \RX DV you transition to the next stage of your professional career. If you would like to go home today and come back tomorrow to clean out your desk or office, you are free to do so. )UHTXHQWO\ $VNHG 4XHVWLRQV

:+< $5( :( '2,1* 7+,6" $V ZLWK DQ\ EXVLQHVV FKDQJH ZH QHHG WR VWUDWHJLFDOO\ ORRN across all capabilities to assess capacity and performance.

:+< $5( :( '2,1* 7+,6" :H DUH DOLJQLQJ RXU UHVRXUFHV ZLWK WKH GHPDQGV DQG QHHGV RI our business and our clients going forward.

+2: ',' :( '(&,'( :+20 72 /(7 *2" :H WRRN D KDUG ORRN DW RXU FXUUHQW EXVLQHVV QHHGV It was a very thoughtful process.

&$1 :( *(7 7+( 1$0(6 2) 7+( 3(23/( :+2 :(5( $))(&7(' ,1 &$6( :( :$17 72 +(/3 7+(0" :H have made it a practice not to give out the names of those who have lost their jobs. â&#x20AC;Ś

:,// 7+,6 %( &20081,&$7(' 72 7+( 35(66" :H ZLOO QRW SURDFWLYHO\ LVVXH DQ\ SUHVV UHOHDVHV DQG ZH DVN WKDW \RX QRW GLVFXVV WKLV WRSLF ZLWK WKH SUHVV 2I FRXUVH WKH stock market and our investors anticipate moves like this from time to time, but are for the most part not concerned unless there is some material impact to the company. â&#x20AC;Ś

+2: '2 :( .12: :( :21Âą7 +$9( 72 '2 7+,6 $*$,1 ,1 7+( )8785(" 1R RQH FDQ HYHU SUHdict what the future will bring. That said, we do not anticipate another action of this nature in the foreseeable future.