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4 table of contents The Wallace Prize — the most prestigious independently awarded undergraduate writing prize for fiction and nonfiction at Yale — is awarded annually in memory of Peter J. Wallace ’64, a former member of the Yale Daily News editorial board.

4

THE MANY MASKS OF SABIR ABDUSSABUR

12

REMEMBER THE LADIES

second-place nonfiction by SKYLER INMAN ’17

LET’S TALK ABOUT INTIMACY

39

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE

Photography Editors Elinor Hills Kaifeng Wu

Associate Editors Gabriella Borter Brady Currey Frani O’Toole

Illustrations Editor Ashlyn Oakes

Magazine Design Editors Emily Hsee Amanda Mei

Editor in Chief Stephanie Addenbrooke

Cover photo by Elinor Hills

EITHER/OR

second-place fiction

by MICAH OSLER ’18

22

28

Copy Editor Martin Lim

Publisher Joanna Jin

STAFF: Graham Ambrose, Charlotte Brannon, Teresa Chen, Edward Columbia, Elena Conde, Ahmed Elbenni, Abigail Halpern, Emily Hsee, Eve Houghton, Madeline Kaplan, Emma Keyes, William Nixon, Aaron Orbey, Tsedenya Simmie, Eve Sneider, Oriana Tang, Claudia Zamora DESIGN ASSISTANTS: Amanda Hu, Quinn Lewis, Ben Wong, Holly Zhou BUSINESS LIAISON: Diane Jiang

THE LAST SNOW

17

18

third-place fiction by SOPHIE DILLON ’17

16 Managing Editors Hayley Byrnes Lillie Lainoff

15

CATZ’S FAMILY DICTIONARY

first-place nonfiction by RACHEL CALNEK-SUGIN ’19

Design Editors Mert Dilek Eleanor Handler Tresa Joseph Samuel Wang

14

third-place nonfiction by YI-LING LIU ’17

The winning submissions in each genre are published in this issue of the Yale Daily News Magazine. Judges for the prize are professionals drawn from the fields of academia and journalism, and have no connection to the News.

Magazine Editors in Chief Abigail Bessler Elizabeth Miles

11

first-place fiction by DELEINE LEE ’19

32 Yale Daily News Magazine | 3

nonfiction

4 | Wallace Prize 2016

nonfiction third-place nonfiction

THE MANY MASKS OF SABIR ABDUSSABUR

by Yi-Ling Liu photos by Yi-Ling Liu

I

t is 11:32 p.m., Saturday night in New Haven, chilly after a day of rain. I am waiting with my bike on Elm Street, by the J. Crew store in downtown New Haven next to the Yale University campus, where we had arranged to meet. The latenight food stops are bustling with business.

Flocks of dressed-up Yale freshmen grab egg-and-cheese sandwiches between dorm room pregames and a fraternity party.

Students from the nearby Quinnipiac University are piling out of buses for a rowdy weekend night at their favorite New Haven nightclub Toad’s Place.

I hear dubstep blaring from the distance. A masked man on a bike appears further down Elm Street, weaving through the traffic toward me. He is wearing a red windbreaker, his head is covered in a black ski mask, and strapped to his shoulder is a scratched black boom box blasting the trap remix of a Snoop Dogg song. The mask on his face is bone white, with hollowed eyes, expressionless. The biker swivels to a halt in front of me and hops off his bike.

“Hey Sabir!” I call out.

“Hi!” He replies.

The self-proclaimed “Masked Maniac” Sabir Askir Abdussabur takes off his mask, revealing the handsome, smoothly shaved face of a 21-year-old African-American man. He’s been biking for a while already, and his hair and brow are covered in sweat.

Every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night, Sabir bikes several rounds downtown with his mask and boom box for two hours, through what the New Haven Independent calls the “most stratified spine of the city — from the Whalley strip to the multimillion dollar Yale University Art Gallery to the lower-income, crime-ridden Fair Haven barrio.”

He’s already finished his first round,

and has stopped at the intersection so that I can join him on his ride. He bikes roughly 40 to 60 miles a day, and is capable of clocking 30 miles an hour on a simple hybrid bike.

“Thanks for letting me join you tonight,” I tell him. “Sorry if I can’t keep up.”

My usual bike route consists of a oneand-a-half minute ride from my Yale dorm to a lecture hall, when I’m too lazy to walk.

“Not a problem at all,” Sabir smiles.

He opens up his backpack, rummages around and pulls out another mask, which he hands to me. I accept it with two hands, carefully, reverently. It is similar to his, but black not white, plastic not plaster, nose thinner, face rounder, features more effeminate — a mask better fit for a smaller Asian woman.

“You’re probably gonna need to take the helmet off first,” Sabir says.

Of course. I unbuckle my helmet and slide the mask onto my face. It fits just right. I lift my head and look straight ahead through the hollowed eyes, surveying my surroundings like a prince fresh after his coronation. A police car passes by, headlights flashing. The street lamps twinkle.

“I’m thinking we do two rounds,” Sabir suggested. “And then we stop for a break in the middle somewhere. Maybe Dunkin’ Donuts at Whalley, grab a bite, and then do a second round. Sounds good?”

I nod. We get on our bikes and steer onto the road. “Ready?” he shouts over the din of the traffic. I give him a thumbs-up, and begin to pedal.

I

first found out about Sabir Abdusabbur through the “Arresting Patterns” art exhibition and conference hosted this

September by Artspace, a nonprofit visual arts organization in New Haven.

The blurb in the Artspace newsletter said that the exhibition showcased a group of artists “who sought to uncover the oftenoverlooked patterns of racial disparity in the criminal justice system” and, through the conference, brought together “perspectives on art, race, community expression and activism.”

I wanted to understand. I was an international Chinese student from relatively racially homogenous Hong Kong, from a place where most people generally looked like me, thrust into a campus where racial prejudice occupied the forefront of conversation, in a city stratified along a color line, in a nation reeling from the aftermath of the Ferguson riots. I had a Wikipedia-level understanding of “Jim Crow” segregation, and was reading W. E. B. Du Bois for the first time, for a surveylevel African-American history class.

Before visiting Artspace, I decided to read up more about the conference, and scrolled through the speaker list online. They paired headshots with blurbs introducing the conference panelists — suited-up law students, smiling national correspondents, brooding artists. And then I found a photo of a man in a mask. Bonewhite, expressionless.

I’d seen him before, on a bicycle. I was walking back to my dorm from a Thai restaurant last spring, and stopped in my tracks, startled and unnerved. The blurb next to his photo read: “Sabir Abdussabur is the President and Founder of Youth Day Projects, the Director and Founder of The Youth Revolution: International Youth Development President, and the CoFounder of Masked Maniacs. He grew Yale Daily News Magazine | 5

nonfiction up in Beaver Hills and still resides in New Haven today.”

A quick Google search of Sabir lead me to a stocked resume. First Achievement from Amistad High School, 2012. Studied at the University of Connecticut. Degree from Gateway Community College in Human Services.

It took me a while to realize that Sabir, freaky-looking masked guy and Sabir, president and founder of various impressive-sounding youth empowerment programs, were the same man.

How did the mask fit in all of this?

“I

t started as a social experiment,” Sabir explained, while sitting across from me in a booth at Panera Bread. Sabir and I arranged our first meeting on a Friday afternoon, a rare moment of repose in his busy week. “I wanted to gauge other people’s reactions.”

In July 2013, Sabir was teaching a photography workshop through the Youth Revolution, an organization aimed to empower New Haven youth through the arts. He organized a photo shoot for the kids: they would take photos of each other wearing white masks, and then edit the

6 | Wallace Prize 2016

photos to practice their Photoshop skills.

“Then we decided to take it a step further, wear our masks on the Green, and see how people would react,” said Sabir. Pedestrians were shocked, unnerved, stopped in their tracks to watch. Sabir spiced things up by bringing a boombox to the Green, and one of the kids in the program, a fan of Parkour, brought his bike. Soon, they were biking to and from Dwight Hall, masks on, music blaring.

A few weeks after, on the weekend that “The Amazing Spiderman 2” was being released, Sabir experimented with biking around the city in a Spiderman costume.

Kids waved at him, families took photos with him, and police officers gave him high-fives.

But when he swapped his superhero suit for what would become his signature “Masked Maniac” outfit — black shirt, black pants, white paintball mask ordered for $10 off Amazon — reactions changed.

Parents pulled their children back, pedestrians avoided him, and cops began to pull him over. By the end of 2014, he had been pulled over by the cops 24 times. “They didn’t know how to deal with something that looks like a threat every

day,” said Sabir, “but is actually not.”

The impromptu social experiment evolved into a routine. Sabir began to wear the mask every day. A few months later, he began to do his night rides every Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Now, he has over 50 masks in his apartment, bought in bulk from Dollar Tree, as well as a gas mask for the winter to protect him from the cold.

He wakes up in the morning, brushes his teeth, grabs breakfast to go and puts a mask on. He walks out of the house every day, preparing to be scrutinized, stared at, misunderstood. How does it feel, darting through the city, as the physical archetype of the feared, unknown other? How will the people of New Haven respond?

W

e’re now biking midway down Elm Street, about to take a right on Temple. I notice a friend from my English seminar standing next to the gate of Calhoun College, and give a nod of greeting in her direction.

She notices my nod and shrinks away, face full of suspicion.

I remember that I am wearing a mask, suddenly hyperaware that I am being judged and assessed by the people

nonfiction around me. I observe the faces of the other pedestrians on the street and identify echoes of my friend’s facial expression — suspicion, mistrust and uncertainty.

This extreme sensitivity to the judgment of others reminds me of a passage that I had read earlier by Du Bois, on the sensation of the “double-consciousness.”

It is a “peculiar sensation,” he writes, “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

It is the feeling the black man gets when the pedestrian walking toward him on the street throws him a wary glance and walks a little faster to keep her distance. It is the feeling he gets when the passengers on the train avoid the empty seat next to him like the plague.

The mask, in some sense, is like a physical manifestation of this veil, a replication of a heightened doubleconsciousness that forces its wearer to perceive himself or herself through the validation of the other world, a world that has historically regarded him or her with fear and disdain.

The sensation is novel to me. It is also temporary. At the end of the night, I get to take my mask off.

D

u Bois’ sense of the “doubleconsciousness” is nothing new to Sabir. As a 21-year-old black, Muslim man, he has learned to be sensitive to the judgment of others all his life. In his AP History class at high school, he served the role of the token black kid, who represented the entire oppressed history of his race. “Every time I walked out of that class, and we were learning about slavery,” said Sabir, “my friends were like, did you see the teacher look at you when she said colored people?”

Sabir has grown up conscious not only of his black, but also his Muslim identity.

Sabir was raised Muslim, homeschooled until seventh grade and learned to read and write Arabic from his parents. Having a name like Abdussabur carried a whole slew of stereotypes of its own, particularly

after the September 11 attacks by Islamist terrorists. “In high school, there was a group text going on with my friends where somebody said Sabir’s parents are going to drive planes into a building,” said Sabir. “I was so pissed.”

When he started attending the University of Connecticut, Sabir explicitly avoided the African American Cultural Center. “ I did not want to just be that black kid on campus,” he explained.

At UConn, Sabir also found that he loved to dress up, and that dressing up was an effective way to evade stereotypes. He wore a three-piece suit, a fedora and glasses every single day of the week. “Everybody thought that I was 35,” said Sabir. “The first time I met my sophomore English professor, he asked me what class I taught.”

Today, Sabir still dresses nicely. Every day, he wears glasses to Starbucks, where he works as a barista, even though he has 20/20 vision. Glasses, according to Sabir, make him seem like “a bigger deal.” With his glasses on, he sometimes gets mistaken as the manager, but more importantly, he isn’t mistaken as a threat. When the police first started getting 911 calls about a masked man walking into Starbucks, they would always be surprised to find a respectable-looking guy in glasses and a collared shirt.

“They’d be like, oh it’s just you?” said Sabir. “Because how many black men do you see with glasses on, in a mug shot?”

Wearing glasses, donning a collared shirt, leaving the saggy pants at home — these are all ways to cope with the fear of being pulled over, being arrested.

These are also all pieces of advice that Sabir’s father, Shafiq Abdussabur, a law enforcement officer in New Haven, must give to not only his son, but to all young black men.

In 2010, Shafiq published a book called “The Black Man’s Guide to Law Enforcement in America,” which aimed to help communities of color — in particular young men — avoid unnecessary and potentially injurious encounters with the police. His guidance is straightforward and pragmatic. “Be courteous and polite,”

Shafiq advises in the book. “Pretend that your grandmother is watching. Don’t pretend that you’re [radical civil rights activist] Al Sharpton.”

“When you have a black son, a son of color, who lives in America, particularly in an urban city,” Shafiq explained to me over the phone. “You need to give them the right guidance they need to get through the day.”

According to Shafiq, the young black man in New Haven, in particular, is in urgent need of this guidance because he is under a lot of pressure. “Riding through Newhallville [a neighborhood with the highest crime rates in the city] he has to be worried about getting shot. Riding downtown, he has a high chance of getting pulled over,” Shafiq said. “Riding through the Yale campus, he needs to be prepared of being accused of something.”

If he wants to protect himself and navigate through all this successfully, he needs to look sharp, wear the mask, play the game, be twice as good.

“Growing up, my son probably experienced a great deal of pain from others, because he’s black and Muslim,” Shafiq explains. “The mask is probably a coping mechanism. With his mask on, he’s able to remove his race and religion entirely out of the equation.”

“My mask protects me from more than just the wind,” Sabir posted, on the MaskedManiax Facebook Page in February 2015. “It protects me from your assumptions about my stereotypically black face.”

The mask, perhaps, is more than just a social experiment, more than just confrontation. It is, as Shafiq says, a “coping mechanism,” a form of protection. It allows provocation, but also concealment, allows for differentiation, but also anonymity.

“Once, I forgot my ski mask at home, and a kid saw the back of my neck and was like Oh he’s black!? New Haven has a black superhero?” Sabir recounts. “And I thought, why can’t I just be a superhero?”

After that incident, Sabir started wearing gloves too, to cover his hands.

Sabir can don a pair of glasses, button Yale Daily News Magazine | 7

nonfiction up his collared shirt, put on a suit; but perhaps the most efficient way to free himself from the burden of stereotypes is simply to cover up his skin entirely.

W

e’re on Temple Street and a car drives precariously close to my right, trying to swerve in front of us. Sabir turns his head to make sure I’m ok. When we reach the traffic light, he bikes vigorously toward the car and pulls out two metal bike locks attached together out from his backpack.

He twirls the locks in his right hand so that they make a loud clanking sound, brandishing them in his right hand like a police baton by the car window, to try to get the driver’s attention.

“Hey,” he shouts at the car, “Watch where you’re going!”

Over the last year, Sabir’s night rides have transformed into a kind of community-policing effort. He rides alongside pedestrians to make sure they can cross the road safely, protects bikers from aggressive cars and makes sure that drivers are following the rules. He’s taken it on himself to act as a kind of traffic vigilante, a superhero of the streets of New Haven.

It certainly feels this way as we speed down Temple into the bright, fluorescent lights of the storefront of Dunkin’ Donuts, where we decide to stop for our break. “Harlem Shake” is blasting from Sabir’s boombox, we cruise in on our bikes, and a homeless woman standing in front of the store greets us, beaming.

“Hey it’s you! Oh wow! I’ve seen you before!” she exclaims as we walk over.

“Oh wow, you’re a pair now, I like that.

I’m such a fan.”

“Nice to meet you, I’m Sabir.” He takes off his glove and shakes her hand. I bask in his glory and shake her hand too.

“I used to think you were so creepy and crazy. I remember sitting on the Green hearing you bike by, your music going dahnananana,” she exclaims. “And then I saw you the other day, next to Starbucks, and was like, oh he seems like a nice guy.”

Sabir smiles and looks away.

8 | Wallace Prize 2016

“Can I ask you something?” she continues. “Why? Why do you do it?”

Sabir shrugs. “Just because.”

“Just because?”

He nods.

She purses her lips, and thinks for a moment. Perhaps, she like I, was hoping for more of a snappy slogan — the manifesto of the Masked Maniac, the eloquently worded political agenda of New Haven’s superhero on wheels. “Well, just keep doing what you’re doing,” she says, opening the door for us. “Take care!”

We order at the counter and sit down.

“Seriously though, why do you do it?

Is that what you tell people?” I ask.

“I mean, it changes every time,” said Sabir. “Sometimes I tell them it started out as a social experiment, sometimes I tell them it’s to protect my face, and sometimes I tell them just because.”

“Ok.” I try something else. “What does it feel like? What does it feel like when you’re on the bike, with your mask on?”

Sabir paused, and thought about it for a second.

“It’s kind of like when you’re at a party and the lights are dim,” he said.

“Ordinarily you’d be afraid, but when the lights are dim, no one can really see you and you can just dance and do anything you want.”

G

rowing up, Sabir wanted to do a lot of things. When he was seven, he wanted to be an architect. “I used to get cardboard boxes and cut them up and make buildings and mosques and stuff,” he said. (He was obsessed with Bionicles and still has a big box of his childhood collection in his apartment.) In middle school, he got into programming and computer hardware, and made it his responsibility to go around and help the neighborhood kids learn to use their new Macintoshes.

He also liked being active. His father had taught him how to fish, how to shoot a bow and arrow; he got his hunting license at age 11. He flirted with the idea of being a firefighter, but after watching the film “Ladder 49,” decided that it

wasn’t the path for him. In high school, he decided he wanted to be an artist. At 16, he started his own hip-hop production company “4Real Productions,” and named himself executive producer.

By the time he graduated from college, Sabir realized that what he was most interested in was teaching. “Youth empowerment. That is the one thing that Sabir has always kept pushing all his life,” his father Shafiq explained.

“The Youth Revolution,” the organization that Sabir still spearheads today, was actually founded by Sabir in eighth grade, after he was inspired by a skit he performed with his class on drugs and violence. Through TYR, he created the Youth Day Project, an annual citywide arts event to showcase the artistic talents of New Haven youth, a program that is now in its sixth year.

In addition to their annual showcase, the Youth Day Project organizes events throughout the year, from leadership training sessions to fashion shows to video game competitions.

Currently, the members of the Youth Day Project are organizing an open mic, which will take place in a downtown cafe on Black Friday. I joined Sabir and four other Youth Day members — Naani, Giovanna, Nigel and Jordan — one Saturday morning for their weekly meeting in Westville Public Library to discuss the event. We are seated around a table in one of the private meeting rooms, eating Pop Tarts and brainstorming potential performers who could feature at the event.

“Do you guys know of anyone we could reach out to?” asks Sabir.

“I could get Ty Ty, Christian and some of those guys. But I gotta pull some strings,” says Naani, currently a senior at the Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School in New Haven. (Nigel and Giovanna are juniors there right now, and Jordan is a freshman at Gateway Community College.)

“Wait a second though,” Giovanna asks. “What if people don’t wanna come because they’re all out shopping during Black Friday?”

nonfiction “We don’t have to worry about that,” Sabir shoots back wryly. “People who are coming don’t got no money to go shopping on Black Friday.”

Later, when Sabir goes to the bathroom, I ask Naani what it’s like working with Sabir. “Sabir’s funny and he’s cool,” said Naani. “He knows when it’s a good time to get serious, and when it’s a good time to joke around.”

Sabir is indeed capable of speaking in many tongues. He can quickly and seamlessly assume the role of the “serious” leader and inspiring rhetorician. During the meeting, he reminds the group of the importance of their work. “Every other open mic in the city is adult-oriented.

It’s either at the community center or in bars,” said Sabir. “Remember that you are hosting it in prime location. Remember, that you are the only open mic organized by and catered to youth.”

He also talks to the Youth Day members about race, and the prejudices that they must face as persons of color. His words are hardboiled and straightforward.

“Sabir had the three-strike conversation with us,” explained Giovanna. A strike, as defined by Sabir, is a “stereotype that you suffer because society thinks less of you.”

According to Sabir’s metric, as young black women, Naani and Giovanna have three strikes against them — “1) they’re black 2) they’re female 3) they’re under 21.”

We talk about the recent Yale fraternity party scandal, where brothers of a fraternity allegedly turned away non-white students, saying that the party was for “white girls only.” A fraternity brother was also accused once of insisting on touching an AfricanAmerican female student’s hair, before she could be let into the party. (Sabir does not bike by this fraternity anymore, which used to be part of the route of his night-time rides.)

“I hate it when people ask me if they can touch my hair,” Giovanna says.

“It’s so annoying,” Jordan adds, “once I was walking with this girl with this huge fro and every she went, I could hear people saying — Can I touch it? Can I touch it? At one point I couldn’t stand it anymore and I was like you can touch my …” He pauses and turns toward me with a sheepish grin. “I’m not gonna say it, there’s a reporter here.”

“Serious” Sabir is equally capable of assuming the role of the “funny and cool” older-brother figure, well-versed in adolescent concerns and high school lingo. He gives them a space to let out their frustrations through wit, laughter and commiserative banter.

“Sabir, what did someone call your boombox that one time?” Jordan asks.

“Oh yeah. Once, this lady walked up to me and says,” Sabir pauses and puts on a mock, shrill voice, “Hey I saw you the

other day biking around with your ghetto blaster!”

We break into laughter. A ghetto blaster.

“When I heard that, I was like, he doesn’t even play ghetto music. He plays dubstep and Nickelback,” Jordan says.

“And Fall Out Boy.” In addition to planning open mics and talking about race and doling out advice, he fixes bikes. Jordan lugged his broken bike over on the bus to the Westville library today, so that Sabir can help him fix the jammed wheel. Sabir came over to Jordan’s house two weeks ago, but his bike was acting up again. “I’ll take a look at it after the meeting,” Sabir promises.

Matthew Feiner, the founder of The Devil’s Gear Bike Shop, a bike store in New Haven that has catered to the community for the last 15 years, says that Sabir drops by the store nearly every other day. “He’s either bringing in a kid, to help them look for parts or fix their bike,” says Feiner.

According to Feiner, there is a sense of apprenticeship unique to bike culture, one that Sabir has taken advantage of. “When you first become a biker, you don’t know how a bike works, so you have to engage somebody to help, be it a mechanic at a shop or a friend who is handy with tools.” said Feiner. “You have to be taken under someone’s wing.”

Among the young people that Sabir has

Yale Daily News Magazine | 9

nonfiction taken under his wing are six young and wiry seventh- and eighth-graders — Leandre, Lewis, Jahard, Anthony and DeVante — aspiring young Masked Maniacs.

One day, they were biking in downtown New Haven and bumped into Sabir with his mask on. “He told us that if we followed the rules on the street and stuff, that we could be part of the Masked Maniac bike club, and bike with him every week,” Leandre said.

The following Saturday, they were invited to come to the bike club tryouts and bike with Sabir through the New Haven Green, down Orange and up Crown Street. Sabir shows them how to bike single file on the streets, and calls out a car that does not follow the rules and give them the right of passage. (“See that?” he asks them, after biking up to a car and berating the driver at his window. “A car like that should not be speeding down Crown Street like that, especially on a weekend when there are families around!”)

We stop at Aladdin Pizza. He shows them how to prop their bikes upsidedown, without locks, outside the storefront, so that they do not get stolen. Sabir has offered to treat everyone to lunch, and orders two large, steaming pepperoni pizzas to share.

Over lunch Sabir demonstrates that he is capable of not only sparring verbally with high school seniors, but is also equally proficient in the lingo of the pre-pubescent, Chicago Bulls cap-wearing, BMXloving middle schoolers of his bike club.

He mediates a tussle over slices of pizza (“Everybody gets two slices!”); he ensures that the boys are healthy and patched-up (“Leandre, let’s get you some bandages and ointment for that hand after we leave,”); he coordinates the Bike Club meeting times around all of their schedules. (“Is 3 o’clock the only good time for y’all on Saturday? DeVante, when do you get out of basketball? What time does everybody gotta get home? Eight? Ok we’ll get you all home by eight.”)

I ask them why they think Sabir is doing what he is doing. “I don’t know. I guess the bike shops is more comfortable 10 | Wallace Prize 2016

with us riding with him than riding with other people,” explained Leandre, as he takes a bite of his pizza. “It’s fun. And I guess it keeps us out of trouble.”

Shafiq appears to agree with Leandre.

To him, through the Masked Maniac Bike Club, Sabir is “giving kids opportunities, creating a relationship with young people that builds their self-esteem and gives them an alternative to a life of drugs and guns.”

In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin writes: “Every Negro boy, reaches a point, where he realizes, at once, profoundly, because he wants to live, that he stands in great peril and must find, with speed, a ‘thing,’ a gimmick, to lift him out, to start him on his way. And it does not matter what the gimmick is.”

For Baldwin, the gimmick was the church, the gospel, the Christian faith.

For Sabir, the gimmick, perhaps, is biking around with a mask. Biking, as Feiner explains, “keeps you off the streets, gets you out of your shell.” The mask serves the same function. “It allows the wearer to step out of himself,” says Feiner. “As soon as you have a mask on, you’re a different person, you can be whoever you want to be.”

And Sabir’s gimmick is simple, exportable and accessible to all. “What I do can be done by anyone — that’s the craziest thing about it,” Sabir explained in an interview with the New Haven Independent.

“He does not have an endowment fund, or donations from hedge fund people, or a youth center,” Shafiq explained to me. “But he has a concept, a program, a passion. And he has a bike, and he will come to you.”

We’re finishing up our pizzas and getting ready to head out. Sabir takes out another mask from his bag and gives it to Leandre.

He slides it on. It swamps his small face.

“Does it fit?” he asks. “How do I look?” I give him a thumbs-up.

Leandre will get a mask of his own, if he passes the tryouts and proves himself fit enough to bike with Sabir. “Sabir says that we get to have a mask,” says Leandre. “If we keep up.”

nonfiction But it is hard to keep up with someone like Sabir. He is constantly on the move, speaks in many tongues, operates in different communities, always thinking about his next project; he is a jack of all trades, difficult to pin down.

Throughout the week, he is darting around, from home to work to meetings and back home again on his bicycle. When he’s not working his regular 9-to-5 shift as a barista at Starbucks, he’s tutoring kids after school, leading workshops in everything from hip-hop to spoken-word poetry, writing flyers for The Youth Revolution or managing its online presence. Friday mornings, he attends service at the local mosque. Saturday mornings he’s running Youth Day meetings, afternoons he’s running the Masked Maniac Bike Club.

He also to make sure he spends quality daylight hours with his girlfriend, Tila.

“When he comes into the store, he always has a new story to tell,” says Matthew Feiner at The Devil’s Gear Bike Store. “Something interesting is happening to him every day because that is the energy that he attracts. I’m like Jesus Christmas man, is there not a day that something nutty doesn’t happen to you?”

“Sabir and I both love Star Wars, and we both think that we’re Jedis, in a corny way,” his father Shafiq tells me over the phone, laughing. “Listen to me, I tell him.

You can do anything. You’re the force.”

When I asked him for his contact details so that I could reach him later, he handed me a name card that read: The Masked Maniac Misunderstood … Cyclist, Artist, Athlete, Activist, Entrepreneur “Is there anything that you are not?” I asked, jokingly.

Perhaps that is the appeal of the mask. It allows him to be elusive, shapeshifting, enigmatic. In hyperracialized America, a society where your potential as an individual is constrained by your appearance and bound to the color of your skin, Sabir has the freedom to re-create his image again and again. He can have an identity in constant flux, and evade and deflect the assumptions that others are

so keen to slap upon him. Unrestrained by race, by religion and by other people’s expectations, Sabir can do anything he wants to. He can do things just because.

I

t’s 12:45, and we’re still at Dunkin’ Donuts. It’s getting late and time to keep going. Sabir finishes his tea. We get up, put on our masks, and get ready for round two.

I get on my bike and Sabir selects a song from the #MaskedManiax playlist on his iPod Mini. The playlist features: the soundtrack of Empire, the dubstep remix of Immortals by Fall Out Boy, and some number by Montreal punk rockers SkullNBone. I request the Fall Out Boy. We bike down Crown Street back towars Elm, towards where we started our night. The street is lively. Clusters of tipsy 20-somethings stand outside bars, around tall tables, flocking to the

warmth of the wine and conversation.

“Wayho!” Somebody calls out to us as we bike past. Somebody else whistles.

Sabir turns up the music and begins to pedal faster. We’re flying down the streets now, and it’s hard to keep up with him, but I try anyway. I imagine the others joining us — Leandre, Jahard, Lewis, Anthony, DeVante — racing down the street next to us, exerting their wiry young legs, struggling to keep up but trying anyway. Naani, Giovanni, Nigel, Jordan, all the young people of New Haven whom Sabir has taken under his wing, join us on our ride, biking alongside us.

He takes his hands off the handlebars, and we are following closely behind, exhilarated.

Biking down the street, masks on, it feels like we’re at a high school party. It’s like the lights are dim, and we’re dancing.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 11

fiction

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THE CATZ’S FAMILY DICTIONARY by Sophie Dillon | illustrations by Catherine Yang Sivan (p. noun): /sē/vôn/ 1. What they would call the baby girl.

2. Spring.

Origin: Her mother had always thought the name was pretty. She didn’t think to look up the precise meaning until after they’d printed the certificate. It was Hebrew for “Born in the ninth month,” which wasn’t very poetic. If Sivan ever asked, she would tell her the name meant “Spring.”

E.g. “What’s her name?”

“Sivan.”

“Pretty.”

Ema (p. noun): Ɲ Pԥ 1. Hebrew for Mother.

2. Sarah Broder, now Mother.

Origin: Ema’s mother had called her own mother Ema, who was now Bubbe.

Bubbe would like her to be an Ema, she figured.

E.g. “Ema! I want bed!”

Abba (p. noun): /ô/bԥ/ 1. Hebrew for Father.

2. Josh Catz, now Father.

Origin: If she would be Ema, he would be Abba.

E.g. “Abba loves you very much.”

“Sh! Abba is sleeping, pretty girl.”

Big Loofy (prop. noun): /big/loo/fē/ 1. The living room couch.

Origin: Unremembered.

E.g. “I wanna jump on Big Loofy!”

Smiley (noun): /smī/lē/ 1. The round bare stretch of a balding head.

Origin: Sivan thought Abba’s bald spot looked like a smile.

E.g. “Is Abba wearing the smiley hat?”

“It’s called a kippa, Sivan.”

Elijah (noun): /Ɲ OƯ Mԥ 1. A scary man.

2. Penis-taker.

Origin: They’d put a chair aside at the bris for Elijah, the prophet. Sivan thought he was a man who was coming to take Aaron’s penis, so she could have a sister.

E.g. “Ema I don’t want to go in there. It’s full of Elijahs.”

Aaron (p. noun): HUԥQ 1. What they would call the baby boy.

2. In Hebrew: high, exalted, tall mountain.

Origin: Abba’s grandfather had been an Aaron. Ema was relieved when she looked up the name’s meaning. It was sturdy, just like the chubby boy.

E.g. “What’s his name?”

“Aaron.”

“I have an uncle named Aaron.”

Burpy (prop. noun): /'bԥܿpiܿ/ 1. Aaron.

Origin: Sivan thought it was funny that Ema had to burp the new baby when

12 | Wallace Prize 2016

Sivan could burp herself just fine.

E.g. “Are we bringing Burpy to school?”

Mikvah (noun): /mikvԥ/ 1. What Ema calls Aaron and Sivan, when they are good.

2. What Ema calls Aaron and Sivan, when she sleeps in their bed — before they move to the apartment on Cedar and get separate rooms.

3. What Ema calls Aaron and Sivan: something small, something safe.

Origin: A Mivkvah is a Jewish ritual bath that wholly purifies. Ema went to one at her mother’s request after her first and only miscarriage. She left with the distinct feeling that she had been unhusked, that she had left some part of herself floating in that pool.

E.g. “Goodnight my little mikvahs.”

“Goodnight Ema.” Peecee (noun): /pē/sē/ 1. A piece of something.

2. A handful of something.

3. A look at something.

Origin: Sivan was upset that Abba always fell asleep when they went to the movies, so he would let her get candy as compensation. She chose Reese’s Pieces every time. Abba pronounced them “Ree-sees Pee-sees.” He would ask Sivan in the middle of the movie: “Can I get some peecees?” Abba liked them so much he sometimes stayed awake through the end.

E.g. “Burpy give me a peecee.”

“What do we say, love?”

“Please?”

fiction Abba is sleeping (phrase): /ô/bԥ/ /iz/ / slēp/iNG/ 1. Abba is passed out on the upstairs futon.

Origin: When Sivan used to ask where Abba was and Ema did not feel like explaining.

E.g. “Where’s Abba?”

“Abba is sleeping.”

“Again?”

“Again.”

Take a Shiv (phrase): /tāk/ /ԥ/ /SHiv/ 1. Sitting Shiva.

2. Dying.

Origin: When Bubbe passed, no one remembered to explain shiva to Aaron.

Not even Sivan. When he asked, frightened, “Do I have to take a shiv?”

Ema asked him what he meant and it turned out no one remembered to watch him, either. Unsupervised, he’d seen a documentary on prison fights the night before, in which he’d learned Pepsi (prop. noun): /pep/sē/ about shanking. He had thought they 1. Sivan would all take shanks to go join Bubbe.

Origin: Because Sivan made Aaron, It was the only time Ema laughed that “Burpy.” And Pepsi made Aaron burpy. week.

E.g. “Pepsi! There’s eggs! And we’re E.g. “If he forgets one more time leaving soon!” he’s taking a shiv.”

“I’m going to stop by Kugli (adj.): /koo/gԥ/ lē/ the Meyersons, they’re taking a shiv.”

1. Messy, disordered.

2. Hot, damp, sweaty.

Suburbadurb: /sԥ/bԥr/bԥ/dԥrb/ Origin: When Bubbe came and Ema (adj) tried to cook traditional kugel for 1. Something very suburban, such as Shabbat, the pan came out with a a minivan, PTO meeting, book club, etc. centimeter of gray water hovering over (verb) the pudding’s surface. Bubbe told Ema 1. Doing something that is very she didn’t have to pretend to be Jewish surburban, such as driving a minivan, for her. Ema said she wasn’t pretending attending a PTO meeting, organizing and didn’t speak to Bubbe the rest of a book club, etc. the night. Abba recited the parsha from Origin: The first time Ema signed up to memory, one of the sections he still bring snack for Aaron’s rec soccer game knew from Hebrew school, decades ago. and brought blood oranges instead of Aaron said the kugel was the grossest normal ones, the team walked back on thing he had ever seen in the whole field looking like a flock of vampires. world. Sivan kicked Aaron so he’d shut One of the boys on the other team up. had started crying and the ref called a E.g. “Don’t go in my room right penalty. The other mothers didn’t talk now, it’s so kugli.” to Ema for a full week’s practice.

“Take a shower Burpy, you’re E.g. “Oh screw all that suburbadurb all kugli.” crap.”

“Let’s go Burpy, we’re Bibi (phrase): /bē/bē/ suburbadurbing in five.”

1. I love you.

2. I am sorry.

Origin: Someone misspoke “Burpy” or “Pepsi” or “Excuse me.” Someone else kept saying it. Someone else wrote it down.

E.g. “Burpy?”

“Yeah?”

“Bibi.”

“Bibi too.”

Asshat (noun): /ԥ/SHat/ 1. Harry Trusman.

2. Someone mean and dumb, like Harry Trusman.

Origin: Second lunch at lower school when Aaron forgot his bag so Sivan fed him grapes from her lunch tin, Harry Trusman hollered to the whole playground: “Sivan and Aaron love each other!” Aaron, who had not spoken more than four words to his second grade class, yelled, “Harry Trusman is an asshat!” He pronounced it wrong but everyone knew he’d just swore something bad and Harry left them alone after that.

E.g. “Stop being such an asshat and give me the remote.”

Hooker (noun): /'hookԥr/ 1. One who skips school Origin: Sometimes Sivan would put on Ema’s low voice and call the two of them in sick — “playing hooky,” as Abba used to say. After Ema left for work they would get a hoagie and go to the park. There was a family of ducks they used to try and feed, but they could never throw the bread far enough.

E.g. “Shh, Burpy, we’re being hookers today.” *8* (symbol): unpronounced 1. Abba is drunk Origin: They wanted a symbol to text each other. Aaron suggested an 8 because it looked like a bottle. Sivan didn’t see the resemblance and added the stars, so they’d know it wasn’t any old 8.

E.g. r you home? yes. *8* again? again.

To jewmanji (verb): /joo/män/jē/ 1. To play Jewish.

2. To pretend you are comfortable with faith.

Origin: Sivan got a job working daycare at the synagogue, because there was money, though not that much. The other girls worked there because they Yale Daily News Magazine | 13

fiction were Jewish, and it was a good thing to do, to look after children. The other girls wore needle-thin necklaces with Stars of David. The other girls could read Hebrew. Sivan started going to services, but could never pay attention, so she stopped. Aaron told her to play like the other girls, as if it were a game, like the board game in that movie with Robin Williams.

E.g. “How was work Peps? You jewmanji ok?”

Pepsi Card (phrase): /pep/sē/ /kärd/ 1. A favor from Sivan, such as: money, a ride, lying to Ema. Origin: When Aaron was in high school and would go to house parties in his teammates’ beige neighborhoods.

When Aaron was too drunk to drive home. When Aaron got kicked out of prom for getting caught on LSD, though he said he didn’t know he had taken any. The one time Aaron got a bambi pregnant. Sivan drove them to the clinic. Aaron held the girl’s hand Bambi (noun): /bam/bē/ so tight, Sivan remembers thinking the 1. One of the girls who follows Aaron girl must have been in pain. home from school, touches Aaron’s E.g. “Just this once, please?” arm when making conversation, “You have swiped your Pepsi Card for leaves notes in Aaron’s locker, leaves the last time this week.” a bottle of Drakkar Noir in Aaron’s locker with the note: “Not that you ( ) (p. noun): a resting silence smell bad, my dad had extra lying 1. Abba. around,” doodles Aaron’s initials 2. What they have to say about Abba. across her English homework and Origin: When Ema came home after turns it in without erasing them, etc. work and Abba was still passed out on Origin: Around Aaron’s sophomore year the upstairs futon. When she could not when his arms swelled up like ripe fruit lift his body. When she could not close and people stopped making fun of him his dull eyes. for his dark eyelashes and Sivan found E.g. “I’m sorry for your loss.” his name inscribed twice in the same “( ).” bathroom stall, Ema had noticed a few girls walking him home. He had tried Take a Shiv (phrase): /tāk/ /ԥ/ /SHiv/ to shake them before they’d reach the 1. Sitting Shiva. eyesight of the apartment’s front window 2. ( ). but they wouldn’t leave. Ema asked about Origin: That week they received more his “bambis” when he walked through food than the house could hold. No the door and he had flushed blood-dark. one was hungry. Aaron and Sivan hid He didn’t like it, so it stuck. from their relatives in the bathtub.

E.g. “Why don’t you invite a bambi Aaron opened the cupboard and found over for dinner sometime?” a bottle of French aftershave that must “You taking a bambi to the have been Abba’s. He dripped a bit on dance, Burpy?” his neck but it didn’t smell like Abba.

He wondered if he would ever forget To scoop (verb): /skoop/ the smell of his father.

1. To grab take-out.

E.g. “One more day of taking a shiv Origin: Ema was always tired, and Burpy, one more day.”

Abba was always Abba, which is to say “( ).” upstairs on the futon. Sometimes Sivan would look in the fridge and it was all Musli (noun): /moo/sԥ/lē/ condiments with varying months of use.

1. One of Aaron’s soccer friends.

She’d grab the keys and Abba’s wallet and Origin: They were “musli” because go to the strip mall with the Thai places. they were built and “muscle-y,” and E.g. “I’m scooping — you want because they were bland like muesli, the anything?” oatmealy thing that Bubbe used to eat 14 | Wallace Prize 2016

for breakfast.

E.g. “I’m going over to Ben’s.”

“Who’s Ben?” “A musli.”

“Oh. You need a ride?”

Win the lotto (phrase): /win/ /THԥ/ /'lädō/ 1. Pulling an all-nighter.

Origin: When Sivan was away at school, she’d call Aaron a few times a day. School was more work than she thought it would be, though everyone else felt that way, Sivan figured. Aaron suggested they call “all-nighters” something fun, so the slow tired would feel like a gift.

E.g. “Can I call you back? I have practice in ten.”

“Yeah. Call whenever. I’m winning the lotto tonight.”

“Congrats Peps.”

“Thanks Burps.”

Peecee (noun): /pē/sē/ 1. Percoset Origin: When Aaron tore his ACL, he moved back in with Ema. For six months he sat on Big Loofy. The bulk of his body was a landscape.

E.g. “Ema.” “Yes?” “Peecee. Please.”

The Talk (phrase): /THԥ/ /tôk/ 1. The conversation about getting Aaron back in school.

Origin: After medical leave, he took the year off. After the year off, he dropped

fiction out. When Sivan asked, he said he would return the next year. He was getting a job. His friend’s dad needed help in the office. It’s fine, he said. Drop it, he said.

E.g. “How do you feel about having the Talk right now?”

“Again?”

“Again.”

college and thought she would never graduate and would sit in her bed for whole days biting her fingernails off.

She started saying it to Aaron, though he mostly just nodded and said he had an interview next week. She hasn’t seen him in a tie since high school.

E.g. “Aaron, the sun is out. Gay avek!”

“Tomorrow, Ema.” “( ).”

“All right.”

sometimes she would notice the neat Hebrew, mention jokingly to Ema that she couldn’t remember what the words meant.

E.g. “Happy Shalom Em.” “Which one is it?”

“I don’t know.

Aaron (p. noun): /erԥn/ 1. In Hebrew: high, exalted, tall Hammy (p. noun): /ha/mē/ mountain 1. Sivan’s landlord 2. What Sivan calls Aaron.

Origin: She had told Ema on the phone The state (phrase): /TH/ /stāt/ Origin: Unremembered. that his hands were hammy — like wet 1. A pleasant fog of intoxication, E.g. “Happy Birthday Aaron. Hope slabs of meat. Ema had been falling induced by alcohol and/or Percocet, you’ve had a good year. Give me a asleep and not entirely listening. She’d Oxycodone and/or Demerol. call when you get this message.” thought that was just his name. The Origin: Aaron. next call she asked Sivan about her E.g. “Is he in the state right now?”

Gooey (noun): /'gooē/ friend, “Hammy.” Sivan laughed.

“Don’t.”

1. One of the people on TV. E.g. “I’ve emailed Hammy about it 2. One of the people in the twice but he hasn’t responded.” ( ) (verb): to rest in silence neighborhood who walked their 1. I do not have anything to say to dogs, or their kids, or themselves.

Aaron is sleeping (phrase): /erԥn/ /iz/ / you.

Origin: He found them gooey, somehow slēp/iNG/ 2. I do not have anything to give to — their happiness, the way they talked 1. Aaron is passed out on Big Loofy. you. to each other about nothing of particular Origin: When Sivan kept asking where 3. I love you. I am sorry. importance. Aaron couldn’t remember Aaron was and Ema did not know how Origin: Unremembered. when he’d stopped being able to do to explain.

E.g. “Ema?” that — speak like them, make small E.g. “Can I talk to Burpy?” “( ).” talk with neighbors and cashiers, the “Aaron is sleeping.” language a sort of social currency. He “Again?”

Don’t (phrase): /dōnt/ said it once at loud and Ema thought “Again.”

1. Please don’t bring up Aaron. he’d mispronounced “Goy.” 2. Please don’t bring up Aaron E.g. “What are you watching?”

Asshat (noun): /ԥ/SHat/ getting back to school, he’s working on “I don’t know. MTV. Gooies.”

1. Sivan’s current boyfriend. it.

Origin: She met a couple nice boys 3. I am very tired.

Bibi (phrase): /bē/bē/ online. One at a cooking class. Another Origin: Ema could tell from the tone of 1. I love you. through a friend of a friend. They were Sivan’s voice when it was about to spill 2. I am sorry. dark-haired and smart. Aaron hated all out.

Origin: Someone misspoke “Burpy” or of them, though he never met one.

E.g. “Ema.” “Pepsi” or “Excuse me.” Someone else E.g. “Yeah I’m going with Mike.”

“Don’t.” kept saying it. Someone else wrote it “That asshat?” “( ).” down. Then Abba forgot it. Then Ema “You don’t even know him.”

“Ema.” forgot it. Then Aaron remembered, like “I don’t need to know him.” a floodwater, Sivan’s long, warm hands Happy Shalom (phrase): /'hapē/ / on his shoulders.

Gay Avek (phrase): /gī/ԥ/vek/ SHԥ'lōm/ E.g. “Sivan?”

1. Yiddish for “Get out of here!”

1. Happy holiday we forgot to “( ).”

2. Aaron, go do something. celebrate.

“Yeah?”

Origin: Ema bought a Yiddish 2. We are not comfortable with faith.

“Hi.” phrasebook on a whim and flipped Origin: Sivan’s friend bought her a “( ).” through it that afternoon. “Gay Avek” calendar with all the Jewish holidays “I didn’t think you would call.” was the only phrase she remembers her printed in the corner. Most of the time “I know.” mother saying to her, when she was in she forgot to rip the sheets off, but “( ).”

Yale Daily News Magazine | 15

nonfiction

I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.

— Abigail Adams in a letter to John Adams, 1776

O

ver the 29 years that she’s owned Lady Olga’s Lingerie, Jeniene Ferguson has learned that most women don’t know what they need — at least when it comes to their undergarments.

Around the store, Jeniene — a brunette 50-something with a tri-state twang and a penchant for large silver earrings and even larger silver bangles — fills many roles. She is head bra fitter, chief customer greeter and master salesperson. The world of breast support is one that requires a spiritual intermediary, and that’s the role Jeniene tries

16 | Wallace Prize 2016

to fill; instead of allowing bra shoppers to browse the racks of rack-supporting goods, she guides them straight to the fitting room and brings the bras to them.

When customers leave, Jeniene re-shelves the goods they didn’t buy. Plus-sized bras, like the super-reinforced Statuesque Duo, go along the back wall, not far from the more common cup sizes. Pajamas — brands with names like Fleur’t With MeTM and Hanky PankyTM — hang near the standalone turnstile that twirls to display one-size-fitsmost bralettes.

nonfiction

second-place nonfiction

REMEMBER the Ladies

by Skyler Inman The store is dreamy, soundproofed by layers of soft fabric, padded bra cups and fuzzy robes. It’s a natural but potentially unnerving quietness, so Jeniene plays a local Top 40 station in the background.

The only other noises in the store are Jeniene’s voice — warm, insistent — and the soft strike of her rubber-soled shoes on the linoleum floor as she hurries to and from the dressing rooms.

“Eight out of 10 women wear the wrong size bra,” Jeniene tells me as she waits on a customer one Saturday. “The other two buy their bras at Lady Olga’s.

It’s an old ad we have.”

In fact, the older ads put the number of mis-fitted women at three out of five.

I know that the slogan has changed only because Jeniene has kept every advertisement that the store has ever run: 29 years of marketing clips sticking out willy-nilly from three oversized binders in her office. The older, more delicate ads lie flat, pressed like flowers in transparent

photos by Matthew Leifheit

plastic sleeves. A script for a 30-second radio spot on KC101, folded and tucked into the cover of one binder, promises customers will feel O-o-h, la, la, terrific!

In another clipping, I read a phrase Jeniene has said aloud several times: A woman’s bra is a woman’s best investment.

But at the bottom of each ad, and at the end of each radio spot, there’s always a quick mention of something else: Also specializing in Post-Mastectomy Products & Services. In other words: breastwear for the breastless.

I

n 1987, when Jeniene was 25, she decided she was done working for anyone but herself. She quit her job as a paralegal and opened up Lady Olga’s Lingerie and Intimate Obsessions Inc. If you consult the business license today, that’s technically the store’s full name, but Jeniene dropped the “Intimate Obsessions” from regular usage because it sounded too suggestive. These days,

most people know the business simply as Lady Olga’s — which Jeniene pronounces “Lady Alga’s” thanks to her tri-state twang — or even just Lady O’s.

The real “Lady O” — the store’s namesake — was Olga Driend, Jeniene’s mother.

Olga was what Jeniene calls a “true corsetiere,” which means that she not only sold undergarments, she was able to make them, custom, for any woman who came into her store. It was already a dying profession when Olga retired in the 1980s, but it was one she loved. So when Jeniene asked her to return to work a few years later, Olga agreed — with a few stipulations: they had to use Olga’s name (to attract her old clientele), and they had to serve groups of women who didn’t already have a specialty store in Connecticut (to attract new clientele).

For Olga, who had always been on the heavier side, this meant plus-sized women, but also mastectomy patients Yale Daily News Magazine | 17

nonfiction — women who might be embarrassed to ask for help at a larger department store, or who would get subpar advice from less-experienced counselors.

“Post-Mastectomy Products & Services” are a discreet side business at Lady Olga’s even today. Casual customers come in, find a bra, buy pajamas, purchase a present for a daughter, mother, aunt or sister, and leave again without noticing anything except the goods on display.

But there are signs that Lady Olga’s cares about the breast more than the bra: On the main wall, a framed poster reminds customers that a woman dies of breast cancer every 13 minutes in the United States. Next to boxes of nipple covers and adhesive bras stands an advanced reader’s copy of The Divine Secrets of the Ta-Ta Sisterhood. Next to that sits a stack of pamphlets inscribed with a quote: “Cancer might rob you of the blissful belief that tomorrow stretches into forever. In exchange, you are granted the vision to see each day as precious, a gift to be used wisely and richly. No one can take that away.”

But the sight of mastectomy prostheses is an unfriendly reminder of the fact that breast cancer can take something away from you — something more tangible than your sense of immortality. It’s the darker side of the so-called “Ta-Ta Sisterhood”: a sinister truth behind the fluff of the pink-ribbon campaign. For many women who undergo a mastectomy, the thing they lose to the cancer turns out to be inextricably tied to their sense of femininity. And that’s where Jeniene steps in.

A

ndrea Johnson never planned to become one of Lady Olga’s most loyal customers, even when she still had both of her breasts. In 2001, when her doctor informed her that she had stage 2 invasive lobular breast cancer, her first thought was that she would do whatever her doctors deemed necessary — lumpectomy, mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiation — you name the combination, she said. I’ll do it.

Andrea wasn’t surprised to find out

18 | Wallace Prize 2016

about the cancer. She fit the risk profile for it, which is, to be fair, “women who are aging.” But of the 50 U.S. states, Connecticut clocks in with the highest per capita incidence of breast cancer; between 2008 and 2012, the state saw 137 cases for every 100,000 women.

For Andrea, the prevalence was visible. Over a five-year span, four of the 10 women on her street in Cheshire were diagnosed with some kind of breast cancer. One of the four died from it.

Andrea’s neighbors on Beaver Brook Court wondered about the possibility of environmental factors — pollutants in the water, maybe — but Andrea didn’t care about the “why” of it. All she wanted to know was how she could get it out, and when.

“You just have a bad breast,” her doctor told her when she went in for a consultation.

Andrea liked the matter-of-factness of it, but she wasn’t sure how to feel when her oncologist suggested a mastectomy and her plastic surgeon said no reconstruction. They counseled Andrea to heal first, let her body adjust and then start chemotherapy as soon as possible. During the course of chemo, her immune system would shut down, making even minor surgery a potential for major infection.

Besides, they said, there would always be time to come back for reconstructive surgery once she had recovered.

That was 14 years ago, and today, the left side of Andrea’s chest is still flat. A thin, horizontal scar, now faded, stretches across her pectoral where the doctors made the cut. Since the nipple is technically breast tissue, the doctors take that, too.

J

ust a few feet away from Lady Olga’s fitting rooms, there is a closet filled, floor to ceiling, with boxes of breasts. Just like their living counterparts, the prosthetic breasts vary in size, shape and weight. Especially high-end ones, which run about $450 per breast without insurance, come in nice boxes with ribbon-tie closures

and fancy script lettering. The box of one model, the Amoena Sublime, unfolds to reveal a photo of the aurora borealis. Nested into the other half of the clamshell is the prosthesis, made of squishable beige silicone to allow for a lifelike texture through clothes. Online, Amoena advertises that “close physical contact, even a hug, will not reveal that you are wearing one.” Some versions, like the Sublime, have decorative features like fake nipples (with textured areolae for tactile effect), even though there’s no way to see the nipple when the prosthetic is inserted into the pocket of a mastectomy bra. Other breasts, which don’t look like breasts at all, are made of cotton, like oversized shoulder pads — good for patients who are still too tender from surgery to support the full weight of a silicone prosthesis. Still others are made of mesh — functional, sporty — so that water and sweat can flow through them with ease. The sports prostheses are heavy, looking and feeling more like hacky sacks than breasts, but Jeniene explains that their weight is the whole point, since it keeps them in place during backstrokes and golf swings.

Medical supply companies classify mastectomy prostheses as “Durable Medical Goods,” a category that also contains oxygen tanks, metal walkers and wheelchairs. Before Lady Olga’s, women in Connecticut had limited options. They could either walk around a sterile supply warehouse, passing unsexy reminders of mortality, old age or infirmity, or they could return to the hospital where they had the surgery — a place that might hold negative memories of their chemotherapy. Either way, there was rarely anyone around who was knowledgeable enough about breasts to give advice.

Sometimes, Jeniene’s customers are bashful. First-timers, fresh from surgery, call ahead to schedule their visit for a slow period in the day. Sometimes they cry. Other times, Jeniene will have to coax them into even looking at themselves in the mirror. But by the time Jeniene has gotten them into a mastectomy bra

nonfiction — lean over, shake yourself in, now stand — and they’ve seen themselves in their clothing, something always shifts.

“By the time I put them in a prosthesis and a bra — oh my God, they’re walkin’ outta here, their scarf ’s stuffed in their pocket, you know, their shoulders are back, chest out … They thank me. They say, ‘Oh God, you’ve made me normal again,’ and I say, ‘No I didn’t. You were already normal. I just made you even.’”

“ They say, ‘Oh God, you’ve made me normal again,’ and I say, ‘No I didn’t. You were already normal. I just made you even.’ ”

T

he earliest known record of breast cancer comes from a document known as the Ebers Papyrus, which is believed to date back to around 1500 B.C. All those centuries ago, an Egyptian doctor filled 110 pages with medical and herbal knowledge, describing the many maladies he had witnessed and the ways he knew to cure them. One illness, which he called “bulging tumors of the breast,” had no known cure. It was fatal. Always.

About a millennium later, around 460 B.C., the famed Greek physician Hippocrates came up with a name for growths like these: cancer. Latin for “crab,” the term derived itself from the crablike appearance of tumors, which would extend forth with leggy tendrils as they expanded.

The irony of breast cancer’s history is that an advancement in medical knowledge led to what can only accurately be described as a period of horrific procedures. In the 18th century, medical professionals realized that these tumors were not a symptom of the disease — they were the disease. With this knowledge, the idea came about to cure the cancer by removing the breast itself. In theory, this idea — an early precursor to the modern mastectomy — was absolutely revolutionary. In practice, like most procedures pre-anesthesia, it was nightmarish.

Without general anesthesia, women would endure the amputation of their breasts with little to distract them from the pain except a bit to chew or a handkerchief to stifle their screams.

There are, understandably, few firsthand accounts of the procedure from the

patient’s perspective, but one German surgeon warned physicians, “Many females can stand the operation with the greatest courage and without hardly moaning at all. Others, however, make such a clamor that they may dishearten even the most undaunted surgeon and hinder the operation.”

Abigail Adams Smith, the only daughter of American revolutionaries John and Abigail Adams, was one of these unlucky women. Nabby, as she was known to most, first noticed her cancer in May 1810, when she felt a lump in her right breast, just above the nipple. It was painful, she wrote in a letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush months later, and felt “like a burning some times an itching & at time a deep darting pain through the Breast, but without any discolouration at all.” Within a few weeks, the most talented surgeons in the young country were assembled in the upstairs bedroom of the Adams’ residence. With Nabby Smith fully awake, the men held her down and cut her open, digging out the breast and cauterizing the wound with a hot iron as they worked. In all, the procedure took no more than 20 minutes, but dressing the wound took another hour. Unfortunately, though her health at first seemed to ameliorate, Nabby fell ill and died that spring.

Grisly breast amputations like these continued in a variety of ways until the late 19th century, when Dr. William Halsted, Yale College class of 1874, pioneered a

new method. The surgery, known as the Halsted Radical Mastectomy, utilized new technologies (including, mercifully, general anesthesia), to remove the cancer “at its root” (thus the “radical” aspect, from the Latin radix). Halsted, who noted that some women would die of cancer even after a mastectomy, thought it was necessary to remove more than just a woman’s breast tissue — the pectoral muscles underneath had to go as well.

While these surgeries were less psychologically traumatic than a waking procedure, women would leave Halsted’s table disfigured, nothing but a thin layer of skin covering their ribs. But the surgery seemed to work, at least at first, and so it became a canonical operation — so much so that even in the mid-1970s, the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer were condensed into the “onestep process.” A woman who might have cancer would come in for a biopsy, and if her tissue sample came back cancerous, would awaken to find one or both breasts gone.

Women’s bodies lay naked under the harsh surgical lamps, while men decided autocratically: remove the breast, or let it stay?

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n Nov. 8, 2001, just one month after her doctor diagnosed her with a “bad breast,” Andrea was waking up from surgery.

The procedure she had received was a unilateral mastectomy, or the Yale Daily News Magazine | 19

nonfiction removal of one breast, leaving the other, noncancerous breast in place (except in preventative surgeries, doctors do not perform bilateral mastectomies unless both breasts are cancerous).

Andrea was surprised at first at the lack of physical pain; her doctors informed her that once the breast is gone, there aren’t very many nerve endings left in the chest cavity.

Another surprise: the surgery’s emotional effect.

The hospital supplied her with a pocketed camisole and a cotton puff to fill the space where her breast had been.

Andrea, who had leapt eagerly at the opportunity to distance herself from the cancer, who had insisted on the earliest possible date for her mastectomy, now found herself avoiding her reflection.

Home from the hospital, it took her two or three days to take a shower or change the bandages. Looking at or touching her flattened chest meant confronting what was missing.

Technically speaking, she could have lost more — her other breast or even her life, if the cancer had metastasized and spread to her bones or her brain or her blood before it was discovered — but this didn’t make it easier to cope with her flattened chest in those first weeks.

It took Andrea two months to come to Lady Olga’s for her prosthesis.

Jeniene, as always, gave her a onceover to evaluate her size.

“Pretty bad, huh?” Andrea remembered saying with a chuckle.

Jeniene waved her off, made a few measurements, and disappeared into the closet. A few minutes later, she returned with a few boxes.

“Let’s see what you like best.”

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lga’s most famous sales move was to eyeball a woman and hand her the bra that would fit her perfectly, no measurements required.

When the customer would ask to know the size of the bra, Lady O would reply: Your size. If the customer asked again, Olga let her in on the golden rule of bra ownership: Listen, if it fits you, just tear 20 | Wallace Prize 2016

off the tag. Jeniene, who wears a size 36B like I do, says no one wants to be the size they are. Olga’s knowledge of this — and of each customer’s individual insecurities — was one of the many things that made her so good at her job.

Another facet of it was that Olga didn’t really care who her customers were.

She didn’t care where they came from, or if even if they had been born as women in the first place. In the era before online shopping, men who liked to dress in drag had limited options; Olga was a reliable one. The only questions she ever asked were: “In a bag or a box? Cash or charge?” And over time, Olga became the gatekeeper for a small cadre of men around town — professors, businessmen, pastors’ sons — who had no one else to consult.

Jeniene knew these men only by their first names — John, Dan or Mike — but would intercept their calls and help them schedule a visit. Olga’s male customers came early in the morning or late at night for bra fittings or just for advice.

Olga was more than happy to sit and flip through Spiegel catalogue, pointing out the dresses that would flatter his frame and circling the ones he wanted to order.

The clothing would then ship to Lady Olga’s and Jeniene would call to let him know his parcel had arrived. He, in turn, would swing by — looking the part of a husband picking up a negligee for his wife — and return home to unwrap his new clothing in private. Every year on Oct. 28, Olga’s birthday, the thank-you gifts would arrive.

Not too long after Lady Olga’s opened its doors, Lady O received her own diagnosis: stage 4 bladder cancer.

Her doctors recommended a complete bladder removal, but Olga politely declined. She could not go without something so functional and essential.

Instead, she chose a rigorous schedule of chemotherapy, and contrary to her doctors’ expectations, the cancer began to retreat. Olga’s tumor, which was about the size of a grapefruit when it was discovered, had shrunk to the circumference of a silver dollar. Jeniene,

heavily pregnant with her second child, breathed a sigh of relief.

On July 25, 1993, not long after receiving the good news of her shrinking tumor, Olga collapsed at home. At the age of 73, she was dead of a massive heart attack.

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eniene is crouched at the back wall, calling out long strings of numbers to her assistant, who scribbles them down on a piece of printer paper — the usual Saturday afternoon inventory check.

In their code, each cup size is signified by a word: B-cups are Boy, C-cups are Charlie, D-cups are David, DD-cups are Double Davids.

Things aren’t the way they used to be, Jeniene tells me. The stores used to send salesmen out to do inventory for you. You

nonfiction got to know each other, to have a personal bond with the companies.

When Olga died, there wasn’t enough room for the mourners in the chapel.

Everyone showed up: friends, customers, neighbors … Even the sales reps who supplied the store. Jeniene buried Olga like the true corsetiere she was, a pink measuring tape draped around her shoulders.

Lady Olga’s Lingerie was always meant to be a mother-daughter business, and in many ways, despite Lady O’s long absence, it still is. These days, Olga sits in a blackand-gold frame behind the cash register, watching over the store with a bemused smile like she’s the patron saint of breast encasement. Every now and then, Jeniene puts a new obituary in the New Haven Register, something short and rhyming

like the 2013 entry, published on the 20th anniversary of Lady O’s death: I strive in life to do the things worthwhile, and looking up I see your smile.

Always In My Thoughts Forever In My Heart JENIENE Nowadays, it’s Jeniene who receives the gifts from thankful customers: flowers — big mums — arrive every year on Mother’s Day from her mastectomy patients. Women call, stop by just to say hi, remember to ask about Jeniene’s children. Doctors and nurses will jot down the address to Lady Olga’s and direct new patients right to her door.

These days, Jeniene says, lots of women get reconstructive surgery, but not as many as you might expect. It’s hard to go back to the hospital that took

your breast away — sometimes the same hospital that gave you painful doses of poison to cure you. The body tends to hold on to traumatic memories like that, and Jeniene says many women decide not to go back, even those like Andrea, who are bothered by their asymmetry.

But nothing is permanent. Now that she’s divorced, Andrea says she’s considering dating again, and jokes that she might finally schedule the reconstruction she was promised 15 years ago. Maybe. Until she decides, Andrea does what she’s done each morning for the past decade and a half: She slips her prosthesis into the sleeve of her mastectomy bra and clips it behind her back. And each day she leaves home, she follows Jeniene’s go-to advice: Head up, shoulders out.

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fiction

[JUNIOR YEAR (FOR SCOTT FRANCIS McNAMARA), LATE MAY SEMI-FINISHED BASEMENT $940,000 HOME; DAKOTA HILLS NEIGHBORHOOD; GLASGO, MN 554—]

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second-place fiction

!"#$!% &'%

by Micah Osler illustration by Sonia Ruiz

22 | Wallace Prize 2016

insburg was picking at the corner of the red foam couch with his pocketknife. It was late, but not too late, and the sun had only set a few hours ago. You could see starlight out the basement window, if you craned your neck a little, like Scott was.

He was sitting on the other side of the couch. It was Juliet’s basement, Juliet “No-I’m-Not-Named-AfterThe-Damn-Play-You-Know-She-Kills-Herself-AtThe-End-Right?-It’s-Actually-Not-That-Romantic” O’Leary’s basement that Scott and the people he Knew had commandeered for the night. Juliet’s parents were out of town. They were both insurance claims adjusters, and each year the insurance claims adjusters of the upper Midwest had a convention “in Minot or wherever,” per Juliet. Juliet didn’t throw parties. She had “gatherings,” as she called them in the messages she sent the whole group. Gatherings. She hated the word party. “Makes it seem like you’ve got a future frat asshole nude on the front lawn swilling vodka and Gatorade or whatever,” she said. It was a gathering now. There were ten or eleven of them in the basement. They were in the Couch Room now, and the Couch Room was connected to the CDs and Bullshit room, where the O’Leary-Stinson family kept their CDs and most of their bullshit, then there was a passage to what the people Scott Knew ironically called the Solarium (it had two tiny slit windows instead

fiction of one), then the Chamber, elided from Execution Chamber after they’d decided that it wasn’t actually a funny joke but had already got used to saying the name, so called because it was a windowless cinderblock room with a blood-red pool table and a black-and-white checked floor and Juliet swore there had been mob movies shot there in the Seventies.

Scott knew all the names. He’d learned them early on. He’d actually been the one to coin Solarium, and he was proud of it.

It really didn’t help the whole thing with Juliet’s name that she was in theater and had a thing for always doing Shakespeare for her auditions. Maybe that was why she never got callbacks, at least not for Main Stage Shows at GHS. She got roles in weird productions in basement theaters uptown; it was always her and a couple of creeps in some show a sixthyear Lit/Anthro/General Marxism triple major up at the U had written. They’d gone to see her a few times. She had a flair for underperforming. One director had called her the most natural actor he’d ever met, which might have been because she wasn’t acting. When she performed, it was just like she was talking on stage. She didn’t believe in stage acting. Now that Scott considered it, maybe she’d never got a GHS Main Stage role because she refused to act. Did she know how to act? He doubted it. The khnick-khnickkhnick-khnick of Ginsburg’s knife along the other side of the couch was starting to get to Scott. The way Scott was lying hurt his back. Berlin said it was the way you lie when you kiss the Blarney Stone.

But you could see the stars. Scott didn’t believe it, that here, on the outer fringes of an inner-ring suburb of a pretty damn big metro, you could see stars. But there they were. The only girlfriend he’d ever had had taught him to recognize Orion by his belt. It was easy. Orion’s Belt was shining, shimmering above them in the sky. Juliet was dating Berlin. Everyone called him Berlin because he’d gone to Berlin over spring break. Before that, he was Todd, because his parents had named him Todd. Ginsburg, from the sound of it, was getting beneath the foam layer.

The sound was harder and sharper.

“The fuck are you doing, Ginsburg?” asked Berlin, finally.

“Whittling,” Ginsburg said without looking up. Ginsburg was the sculptor.

He wore sunglasses indoors and spent some of his weekends with his Finnish grandfather, firing pottery. He had a beard so terrible that some of its terribleness had to be intentional.

Scott lifted his head up. The others were watching some movie on the grainy old cathode ray TV, twice as deep as it was long or wide; they were watching some movie Juliet had on DVD. There was a guy smoking a cigarette as he drove.

Chicago was crisp in the deadening rain.

The music was purposeful. It was fuzzedout and sad.

“I have to say — ” Kate said.

“Christ,” muttered Berlin.

“I have to say,” Kate said, glancing darkly at Berlin, “this whole movie’d be a whole lot more affecting if they hadn’t sold out.”

“Don’t think you know what it means to sell out,” Juliet said.

“What do you mean?”

“Who’d they sell out to?” Juliet was sitting between Scott and Ginsburg on the red foam couch Ginsburg was intent on stripping to its bare bones. Berlin was sprawled on the floor. He was slowly glaciating down from a sitting position.

Half an hour ago, he’d been holding Juliet’s hand. Now, he was kind of clinging onto the toe of her bright orange running shoes, as if that was an adequate substitute. “They were the ones who got sold out. They founded their own label; if that’s selling out …” She trailed off.

“Sellout doesn’t just mean you go to some crossroads and give some asshole in a suit your soul in exchange for a magic guitar or whatever,” Kate said.

“You’re thinking of Robert Johnson,” Juliet answered. “I don’t think a Mephistophelian bargain makes you a sellout.”

Scott wondered idly if it was because his friends used words like Mephistophelian that he assumed they Knew him.

Juliet didn’t throw parties.

She had “gatherings,” as she called them in the messages she sent the whole group.

Gatherings. She hated the word party. “Makes it seem like you’ve got a future frat asshole nude on the front lawn swilling vodka and Gatorade or whatever,” she said.

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fiction “Huh,” Kate said, ending the conversation.

The only light in the room was the flickering from the TV screen.

The motionless group made a nice tableau: the lost kids, the dead-eyed ones, swimming in a blue ethereal ocean one moment, the next light and dark flickering across their faces, casting momentary shadows, alpine thunderstorm shadows, around the room.

Juliet stood up. She stood up in one fluid motion, which didn’t give Berlin enough time to get his hand off of her toes. His face took on a Cubist quality as his fingers got smashed. Juliet walked over to one of the four mini fridges that lined the back wall of the Couch Room, humming and rattling, and got out a beer with a cutely drawn owl on the label.

“Try some,” Juliet said to Myra, who didn’t like beer. “It’s from Chicago.

Microbrewed.” Myra, who was lying nearly prostrate on the Couch of Many Colors, took the bottle without a word.

She took a sip, shook her head, and handed it back to Juliet immediately.

“Microbrewed isn’t a verb,” Lindsay said.

“The English language is a dynamic thing,” Juliet said as she took the bottle back from Myra and settled back onto the couch.

or maybe a month thereafter, during lunch every day, the two of them would go to a practice room where the school kept its bottom-of-the-shelf electric pianos. One of them would sit on the edge of the piano bench and the other would occupy more of it, and that one would play a song. He could sing. She couldn’t sing, but she gave it a try, and he appreciated it. They were terrible at piano, or at least at the songs they were playing, but it was more fun that way.

That was all it took to constitute a Thing in eighth grade. It never went beyond the occasional brush of a hand when they tried ill-conceived duets. It dissolved when she went on a family trip to London and missed school for a week; when she came back, they ate lunch in the cafeteria, with others.

Scott didn’t miss Juliet, but he missed the innocence of Things. He loathed himself for thinking this way, but he missed the weirdly Victorian ethos of it all.

Nothing happened, of course. This wasn’t a movie where things happened.

They disapproved of those sorts of movies, except for Annie Hall and once in a while something in French. They much preferred movies that mirrored their own lives, where disaffected young people sat around and talked about how disaffected they were.

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cott felt it coming on early enough. He had no idea what the trigger was. Trigger — of course that was the word. It was an either/or proposition. Now it was happening. And like every other time it happened, he would try and fight it off, and it wouldn’t work.

“He’s caught in traffic,” Lindsay announced a few minutes later.

“It’s ten-thirty,” said Mattias, incredulous.

Lindsay’s face was backlit by her phone. “He’s out past Lake Minnetonka, and everything’s closed for construction.

He doesn’t know if he’ll make it here hey barely got five minutes of before midnight,” she said, forlorn. silent movie-watching in before Nobody else seemed to care very Lindsay declared, in not quite much. so many words, that the group might Anxiety was such an insufficient benefit from getting really stoned, and word. What happened to Scott was asked who’d be interested. more like demonic possession. That Nobody spoke up immediately. was how he explained it to people who Ginsburg raised his pocketknife in lieu were willing to listen. It seized his body of raising his hand. Berlin shot him an and his soul. It tightened his chest and acid look. Berlin hated Ginsburg. He his veins and tensed his nerves. It made uliet. In eighth grade, she and thought that Ginsburg only got to hang him feel as if the whole world was Scott had had, in the parlance of out with them because they needed a spinning and caving in all at once, and the time, a Thing. A Thing was silent artistic type to balance out the yet there was never any cathartic fall. It as ambiguous as its name suggested. group. His opinion wasn’t a secret; didn’t stop at the physical, though. It It was the precursor to a relationship, Berlin told everyone who’d listen. took over his mind, and it was such a maybe. It was tangible. It was an object.

“I’m not calling Dave unless it’s more good mimic of him. It knew what he They had become friends in English than just me and Ginsburg,” Lindsay sounded like. It could tell him the most class, from a group project (that was said. Dave was Lindsay’s dealer, a vile, the most disgusting things, and yet how middle school was). They had friend of her older brother, a semi- it would sound as if he himself were the superficial similarities in taste, so burnout with a Master’s in Philosophy one thinking them. they would chat. One day, during an who (to his immense pride) lived in the The opening tremors were coming especially boring lecture, he noticed only apartment building in his faraway on. her absentmindedly waving her hands; exurb.

The perpetual soft conversation she was playing an invisible piano, he “Fine,” said Elaine. continued over the film. It turned, surmised. So, he asked her what she “I guess,” said Mattias. eventually, to the dead romantics, to was playing. As it turned out, it was a “I’ll call him up,” said Lindsay. the people (mostly singers) who’d killed song that he also knew. For a few weeks They kept watching their movie. themselves, shot themselves or stabbed

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fiction themselves or stopped their hearts with pills. It was unspoken, that suicide was what tied together these people (mostly young and male and horribly thin), but from listening even for a few seconds it was clear.

In Scott’s head, the pressure was building. He wanted it to go away, and he knew that it wasn’t helping anything to sit in the corner stewing, so he figured it might help if he spoke: “What do you figure it’s like,” he asked them, regarding a suicide who’d released five beloved albums then died locked in the bathroom, “having that much inside?”

“Huh?” asked Berlin, who had been discussing the merits of this singer’s third album, the one that had brought him the kind of scratchy-throated near-fame that came to some in the late Nineties.

“To feel that deeply,” Scott said. He was slouched against the couch, and his feet were on the coffee table, pretending at being comfortable. “To see beauty like that.”

“Don’t think it’s worth it to have that sense of beauty if it makes you jump off a cliff,” said Kate.

Scott was silent for a few moments.

He looked glassy-eyed toward the TV but didn’t watch it. “Still, though. Being able to know that not everything’s shit — that’s worth something, right? Being able to love? Being able to worry and anger and love?”

“Sure,” Kate replied. “Still don’t think it’s worth it.”

“That’s not what I’m — ” Scott stopped himself before he finished. He told himself, sometimes, that it was when he was nervous that he forgot how to talk. Other times, he told himself he’d never learned how to talk anyway, how to pass the right signals along.

In his mind, he nearly said: Look.

It’s tragic. There’s nothing romantic about killing yourself. I just wish there was, uh … I wish there was a medium, I guess.

Something between being so acutely aware of the despairs and joys of the world that

you get whiplash and just not being able to understand that there’s authenticity on Earth.

In real life, in the basement, he said nothing more. He stayed silent and watched the disaffected people on TV. And the conversation moved on, floating in and out of his consciousness.

The Panic was coming on in earnest now. Scott shuffled around on the couch,

but he couldn’t get comfortable. It was disturbing. He would shift from side to side, but there was this impossible desire gripping him not to be in one place, to be somewhere else. When he would sit down, it would say, soft and sinister, This isn’t right. This is wrong.

Try something else. This isn’t right. This is wrong. Try something else.

“Are we still gonna be around at one?”

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Ginsburg: that was easy. He mattered. Myra played guitar and wrote sad jagged songs, and she mattered, and Mattias sketched so perfectly, and Jesus Christ Lindsay was smart, and Elaine when she was fifteen stole her mother’s car.

Lindsay asked. “He’s not gonna come unless he can get a guarantee that we’ll be here at one.”

“Thought you said midnight,” said Berlin.

Scott asked himself: do you remember when you were here last?

Remember it. Remember it now.

Remember how you were all lying on the floor of the Solarium, which made no sense because the carpet was thin there and there were plenty of couches over here. Remember how you were a gear. Remember how the teeth meshed.

Remember how simple it seemed then.

Remember when you could make them laugh.

You can’t make them laugh now, Scott told himself, unless it’s laughing at you. They do that, of course. They do that when you leave. You don’t see them do it, but they do it. They laugh at your face and your body and the way you stammer when you talk, the way that you are unable to say what you want to say, the way that you don’t really know what you want to say.

You’re irrational, he told himself in an attempt to talk himself down.

How do you know? he replied.

wear almost-torn-up clothing and listen to vinyl records and disdain just about everything, but by God, they’re still Midwesterners, and you can’t take the Midwest out of someone. You can’t take that reeking politeness away, and you can’t take away the things that calcified in your brain when you grew up in the Midwest: first and foremost, the idea, the inescapable fact, the foundational truth of social interactions up here that just because someone is being nice to you doesn’t mean that they like you; in fact, if they’re being overly nice, that probably means you’ve done something wrong.

There was a kid named Kevin who had hung around with Scott’s group during the midwinter. Every day, they’d be sitting together for lunch, and he’d come and join them. Kevin would sit and eat, and he’d offer commentaries like Oh my God, that’s so fucking gay and What a pussy and I don’t know, I think Matchbox Twenty is pretty sick. And they would tolerate him in their rough Midwestern approximation of the Golden Rule. They listened, and after everything he said, they gave nice little uh-huhs and sures, betraying only to the ear that was willing to listen their disdain for Kevin. he air conditioner switched on. It Scott never did figure out what began to hum lightly a few feet happened to Kevin. from Scott’s ear. It blew cold air Scott shifted back and forth in his across his forehead, which was getting seat compulsively. He figured that hot. Strange how he noticed these these days, he was Kevin. things, these background vibrations, “Fuck!” Berlin yelled. He was only when the Panic was setting in. clutching his face around his right eye Strange how the world seemed to have and holding something small in his left a rhythm to it. hand. Clearly furious, he sat straight You don’t know why they let you stay up and looked right at Ginsburg, who around with them. It might be because was now whittling away at the wood they’re goddamn Midwesterners. They beneath the foam of the couch. “You

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got a goddamn woodchip in my eye!”

“Sorry,” Ginsburg muttered. He went right on whittling. He didn’t even look at Berlin. You could see the TV screen reflected in his sunglasses.

Juliet, who’d been sitting next to Ginsburg this whole time, finally stood up and looked at what he was doing, upon which she also yelled “Fuck!”

“What?” Ginsburg asked.

“That’s my couch!”

“Yeah,” Ginsburg said in acknowledgment. He looked at her for a few more seconds, then turned around and went back to whittling her couch.

“The fuck are you doing, man?” she asked Ginsburg.

“He’s been doing this for, like, an hour,” Mattias said. “Didn’t you notice?”

“He just said he was whittling,” Juliet said, indignant. “I was watching the movie. I assumed he’d brought some whittling from home, like a normal person or whatever.”

“Shhh,” Myra muttered loudly. She was actually watching the movie.

“I don’t know what’s going on with my eye,” Berlin moaned, his hand quivering.

“It’s fine,” Elaine, who’d seen the incident happen, said.

Ginsburg was bored. He returned to his whittling.

“Stop,” Juliet said, suddenly weary.

“Stop.” Ginsburg sat with his knife upraised, statue-still, apparently processing what Juliet said. Then, shoulders slumped in resignation, he folded the knife up and stuck it back in the pocket of his paint-stained jeans.

Juliet. She acted now. She acted in plays that people paid to see. She

fiction acted uptown, where the people who mattered lived. She acted by refusing to act, sure, but goddamnit, she knew how to do something. She had a craft, an art.

She mattered.

Berlin — he was a writer. He carried around a weathered notebook, and he observed. He was a meaningful person.

He mattered.

Ginsburg: that was easy. He mattered. Myra played guitar and wrote sad jagged songs, and she mattered, and Mattias sketched so perfectly, and Jesus Christ Lindsay was smart, and Elaine when she was fifteen stole her mother’s car and drove to Chicago because she was so fed up with the provincial world she knew, and they all mattered, and Scott didn’t. He didn’t have anything.

Everything he’d ever got was by luck, filthy luck.

He shook and shivered in place.

They’re all noticing you, he thought.

They all know what’s going on inside your head. They understand these things. Christ, what a fucking joke: they can figure you out, but you can’t figure them out. Beyond the disdain you know they feel towards you, they’re enigmas, they’re on a higher plane, they don’t care about you.

The air conditioner stopped, and without the stream of cold air across his forehead Scott soon felt even worse.

Lindsay and Elaine were talking about a really strange party Elaine had gone to the night before. It was way out in Minnetonka, she said, and it was hosted by the school’s almost-hippies, the socialists in male ponytails who hadn’t stopped believing in love when they were supposed to. “ — and we’re all on the floor, right, because it’s this beatnik shit and apparently in the Sixties they hadn’t invented chairs yet or whatever, and then Ken turns off the lights. It’s in the basement, so it’s really goddamn dark, and he waits, like, fifteen seconds.

It’s just the sound of people breathing, echoing off the tile. And then Ken starts playing guitar really slowly but very loudly, so you know that he’s

Trying His Hardest. He’s playing ‘The Sound of Silence,’ and everyone starts singing, and by the end, like half of them are crying.”

“That’s so fucking weird,” Lindsay said.

Scott lay back down, breaking his back over the one still-intact arm of the couch to see out the window again, because that had worked earlier, he had been looking at the stars and it hadn’t felt wrong. And Orion’s belt had moved, it wasn’t up there any more, you could barely see starlight now. The girlfriend who’d showed him Orion — she hadn’t liked him. She’d never liked him. She was the one who asked him on the dates, but she’d never liked him. She’d broken up with him after three months, and her breakup speech seemed so poorly rehearsed. It was like listening to a bad audition. She’d written the damned thing out in her mind, but hadn’t even cared enough about Scott to read it with feeling. She was the only girlfriend he’d ever had, and they’d never even kissed.

They would be on a date, and he would be faced with a dilemma: kiss her and be a creep, or stay put and be a loser? And he always chose to be a loser. He always chose to be a loser. That was the worst thing, that it was always a goddamn choice. He would pace around his room on a Friday night, and he could either go to a party and hate himself there or stay home and hate himself and be a loser besides, and he’d always choose to be a loser.

Breathe. Breathe. That was the mantra, that was supposed to be the cure-all for the Panic, but trying to draw in breath slowly and with purpose just felt so wrong when Scott was lying with his back at the wrong angle trying to glimpse the stars and feeling like everyone hated him with good cause. Breathe. It didn’t help. The tightness in his chest was horrible, and the tightness in his skull was horrible, and everyone hated him and the eyes that were looking at him when they looked at him they saw the ugly bastard he was and when they looked away

they didn’t give a damn either way he was screwed either way he was such a loser such a loser such a loser such a loser either way he wasn’t able to be happy everyone else knew how and he didn’t and he didn’t know how to be happy and fuck he was a loser he was a creep he was a nightmare he was awful JESUS CHRIST WAS HE AWFUL it was a storm that was it that was how he pictured it sometimes when he closed his eyes and shook and it was such a goddamn cliché but so was he and yeah storms were romantic like wandererabove-the-sea-of-fog romantic but only to people who had the luxury of watching from the outside and Christ Scott could almost see the lightning and once in a while he wished it would just fucking hit him and ———

S

cott got up. In a practiced imitation of calmness, he stood up and walked carefully across the Couch Room. He walked over Berlin, who was still clutching his eye, and he snaked his way through where Mattias and Kelsey were sitting in folding chairs.

He stood in the stairwell, and he almost made some grand pronouncement, like: Hey! I’m leaving! See you guys tomorrow or whenever, but after a sharp intake of breath, he changed his mind and left before anyone knew.

He got his shoes from near the front door, waved goodbye to Juliet’s older brother, who was filling out some sort of paperwork on the dining room table, and tried to walk across Juliet’s enormous, perfectly manicured lawn to the place where his beat-up hatchback was parked by the curb.

Scott made it maybe twenty yards.

He sank to his knees, there, on the grass wet in the May dew. He’d left, he’d smelled night air, but the Panic hadn’t stopped tightening.

On his back in the grass, hoping to God nobody saw him like this, Scott glimpsed Orion again. It was on the edge of the suburban horizon, about to slip under the row of budding trees, to fall off the world and be gone.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 27

nonfiction

first-place nonfiction

LET’S TALK ABOUT

!"#$%&'(

BY RACHEL CALNEK-SUGIN PHOTOS BY ELINOR HILLS

A

rielle was raped at a party while Cal and I made out in the other room. The kitchen was perfect. In the fluorescent light, the surfaces sparkled: the microwave, the stovetop, Cal’s lightbrown body.

T

hree years earlier, Dan, my writing teacher, asked me a question that has stayed with me ever since. He asked:

28 | Wallace Prize 2016

“Do you think all acts of intimacy in adolescence are a kind of violence?”

I was fourteen and knew little of intimacy or adolescence or violence. I had just sent Dan a piece about Charlie — an eighteen-year-old I liked for his weirdness and his mania and his age — forcing his penis into my mouth. I pretended that this was ultimately an empowering experience of my sexual liberation. It wasn’t. It was shitty and confusing. I don’t think there is

any larger Truth to Charlie. I bring it up because it happened.

I thought by now I would be able to answer Dan’s question. I have gone through the laundry list of intimacy: have fallen in love, woken up next to somebody, and have almost exhausted my adolescence. I thought by now I would be able to turn to Dan and to my fourteenyear-old self, and say, Here. This is your meaning.

nonfiction

A

t the beginning of the party we had Jose Cuervo and The Beatles and it seemed like it was going to be a good night. I discovered tequila with salt and lime and that after two years, Cal finally wanted to kiss me back.

This must have been miraculous when it first happened, but retrospectively I can’t imagine me and Cal in the kitchen without also imagining Michael and Arielle on the other side of the wall.

Two adjacent rooms and four desperate, drunken bodies.

I think we were there for a long time because when Alec came in to tell me he didn’t think Arielle wanted to be in the bedroom with Michael, it took me a moment to remember that we were at a party where there were other people.

With Alec there, the kitchen seemed suddenly sickeningly bright, like being caught on stage. Of course, he was completely unfazed to find us in such a position. It was not about us.

I untangled my body from Cal’s and took it to the doorway of Alec’s parents’ room. I was afraid to open this door. I registered a stomachache, a jabbing panic that I could not tie to one event.

When I finally opened the door, Michael yelled, “Get out!” and Arielle said, “Please, help,” and I said, “Get off of her,” and I flipped on the lights. I was surprised by the lights again. Everyone seemed to be. They were very bright.

They were like waking up early in the morning to catch a plane. They were like accidentally walking into a pane of glass that had been air just moments before.

Arielle ran past me to where her friends were taking body shots in the other room. Maybe she ran past Cal, standing alone by the refrigerator, if she took the route through the kitchen. I looked at all of Alec’s mom’s little trinkets while Michael buttoned his jeans. There was a Moulin Rouge poster and a Kandinsky print. I stood with my hands on my hips.

I walked Michael to the entryway, and waited an inch from him while he put on his shoes. It took him an eternity to tie them.

T

here is a terrible irony to all this, which is that just a few weeks earlier, Arielle had told me, over a bottle of wine, that she had been raped while she was in Israel that summer, and I had not entirely believed her. I always said that if a girl said she had been raped, she had been raped, no questions asked.

I came to this in eighth grade, when a girl named Maya was raped and people didn’t believe her. They said she was a liar and that they had heard other sides of the story and she was just out for the attention. I hardly knew Maya and I definitely didn’t know what happened but I told anyone who said she hadn’t been raped that if she said she had been, she had been.

So when I didn’t believe Arielle I

Yale Daily News Magazine | 29

nonfiction

“Do you think all acts of intimacy in adolescence are a kind of violence?” couldn’t quite forgive myself for it. Of course I said I was so, so sorry and I kissed her forehead, but even when she told me the boy’s name, which was Eli, I couldn’t believe her, and I kissed her forehead again, and she called me a good friend, and I felt terrible. I was so, so sorry, but I was sorry that Arielle had to make up a rape. I was sorry because something had happened to her, and I didn’t know if it was another person or if it was herself or if it was something else, but she was very hurt and I didn’t believe that being raped was the right explanation for it. And then I thought, well maybe that’s just me saying that if I were going to write the story of Arielle, being raped wouldn’t be quite the right ending to it, being raped wouldn’t tie together all the loose ends, and maybe it’s wrong to read Arielle like a story because people are not made of symbols, it is the other way around. And then I kept on thinking, and I thought if I were going to write the story of Arielle the way I would end it, the way I would justify and explain it would be with a rape, but it wouldn’t be right. It would be easy; it would be a cheap way out. And then I kept on thinking that even if it was not the truth maybe it was the Truth or much worse, that maybe I was just wrong and that even if it wasn’t the Truth that it was the truth, and then I was angry with myself for being so obsessed with the truth and the Truth.

M

y mother waited up for me to get home. “How was the party?” she asked, and I wanted to tell her about Michael holding Arielle down in one room and me holding Cal in the next, but when I looked at her, I

30 | Wallace Prize 2016

couldn’t, so I said, “It was fine,” and she kissed me goodnight.

Cal came over after my mother went to bed. When he stepped out of the elevator I remember we said nothing, only picked up where we’d left off, transplanted from Alec’s kitchen to my vestibule. I remember being very afraid to hold him. We only kissed each other hard. We were covering up some terrible softness. I kept opening my mouth to try to bring up Arielle and not being able to and kissing him instead. There are only so many things that can be done with an open mouth. It was very scary in those moments when we simply clutched each other and there was no music and no party and the alcohol was starting to fade and we were only two bodies that had very little to do with each other except for right now.

When Cal left, I was filled with an overwhelming sense of guilt. I called Arielle and she cried on the phone but she was “with people” and “gonna be fine” and I tried to apologize but I didn’t know for what, exactly. Maybe Michael would not have raped Arielle if I had not been making out with Cal in the other room.

Maybe Michael would not have raped Arielle if I had just believed her about that time in Israel last summer, and she didn’t even know I didn’t believe her, but I didn’t, and that was the crime.

was raped and we were making out in the other room and you are the only person I want to talk to about it.

It is hard to talk about sex, and harder to talk about shame, and the hardest still to talk about vulnerability.

So I just said, “Is this your sock?” and he laughed uncomfortably and took it. It embarrassed me, the way he pocketed it so surreptitiously, as if he were shooting down some secret communication I had started about all the disturbing parallels of that evening. Retrospectively, I don’t think he read anything into it. I was a girl giving him his sock back. That was all.

“W

C

al and I never talked about that night, except for when I found his one black sock under my bed, and brought it to him in school. He wanted our relationship to be purely physical, which left little room for the thing I wanted to say, which was, Arielle

hat do you like?”

“Like?” I knew what he was asking. It was a Friday night maybe a month and a half after Alec’s party, and my parents were out.

We sat in my bed, half-clothed by the comforter. I had been talking about an article I’d read in The New Yorker about this kid who literally could not feel pain, but Cal wasn’t listening. He had been concentrating on forming the question, and had put all of his energy into getting it out of his mouth.

“Like, sex-wise.”

“I like what we do.”

I liked being with him. I liked simply lying in a bed next to him, or sitting on a couch, or at a counter, touching elbows.

That wasn’t what he meant, and I couldn’t say it anyway. The deal was that this was about sex. It wasn’t, but that was the deal.

“But you don’t — ” He meant orgasm.

“Very often.”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy it.”

He could accept this. Cal was as selfabsorbed in bed as one would imagine

nonfiction such an exquisitely beautiful person would be. His newfound determination to make me orgasm was all about his own self-fulfillment, anyway. He wanted to prove that he could.

“I read this article about how rape is the second most common female fantasy,” I said. It came out ultra-casual. I didn’t mean to say it but of course I did mean to say it, because it is not just like a seventeen-year-old can talk about sex without even thinking about it.

“What?”

“I read this article about how rape is the second most common female fantasy.”

“Where’d you read that?”

“I don’t know, online or something.”

“Oh.” He took a fistful of blanket in his fist and released it, and then did it again.

There was a very long pause that made me pay attention to things that were very far away, the whirring of the fan in the living room and a car trying to parallel park on the street outside.

“Do … you?”

“Sorry?”

“Do you have a rape fantasy?”

“No, I mean, no, I don’t.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, I’m just saying, I understand —” “You understand why people do?”

“It’s not like a rape fantasy like a rape fantasy.”

“I’m lost.”

“I mean, the article called it a rape fantasy but I don’t think that’s what it meant. I definitely don’t have a rape fantasy. I’m not talking about real rape at all. I wish I hadn’t used the word rape. I’m not talking about, like, a nonconsensual fantasy, or assault, or harassment, that goes without saying, I just …”

“What?”

“I want you to — ” I wanted to tell Cal to tie me up or to throw me against a wall. I couldn’t. I wanted to tell him about Charlie, but I didn’t know what moral to draw from Charlie, and it would come out sounding like rape or sounding like nothing. I wanted to tell him about two adjacent rooms and four desperate, drunken bodies. I wanted gentleness and roughness. I wanted to be able to talk about anything except nothing.

“What?”

“Never mind.”

I kissed him because I didn’t know what else to say. I was in love with Cal

and he was not in love with me. That was the fundamental problem with this conversation. But “I love you and you don’t love me” is harder to say than “I want you to throw me against a wall” and even that was too much for me.

My fantasy was that he would want me so badly he wouldn’t even be able to control himself, that he would feel a need so overwhelmingly intense that he would do things to me that people aren’t even supposed to think about doing.

I had spent so many years wanting him. “I love you and you don’t love me,” I wish I had said. And then, maybe, we could have talked.

S

o what about the meaning?

The meaning?

Are all acts of intimacy in adolescence a kind of violence?

Oh, no, I don’t think so.

But what about the stories?

Which stories?

The ones you just told. They’re all about how violent adolescent intimacy is.

But what about this? This is intimacy.

What’s this?

Talking.

Yes. Talking.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 31

fiction

H

e is so old that you can see Heaven in his eyes.

The fat doctor calls it cataracts, but the psychic at the bus stop says his eyes have forsaken this world. He trusts the psychic. His pupils are murky islands floating in murkier seas. If you look carefully into the brine, you can see the faint silhouette of children laughing.

At least that’s what the neighborhood kids say. They’ve made it a game: get close enough to see his eyes, and you win three dollars. A kid could do big

32 | Wallace Prize 2016

things with three dollars; they all know this.

He knows this too because he was a child once, and better yet he was a banker’s child. He knew his times tables at age six. He understood money before he understood rain or school or why flowers poked out of the earth.

The old man doesn’t remember his mother’s nose or his father’s laugh, but he remembers his first three dollars.

His skin is a crinkled paper bag, so thin it might tear off his cheekbones.

fiction

first-place fiction

The Last Snow

by Deleine Lee illustration by Catherine Bui

His eyes are slits beneath folds of skin so tired they must drip down his chin when it’s hot out. His mouth is a tight line where threads of sound crawl out, tumble over his lips, and fall dead to the ground.

He walks hunched forward, as if he is continually falling, falling, falling …

Only the momentum of his shuffling steps keeps his nose from brushing the asphalt. His long tapering fingers are mere slabs of flesh stretched across bone. They shake. His whole body

shakes. He is so very old.

Old men are either very happy or very sad. They rarely enjoy an average temperament. Life has a way of pushing the old to the edges. Is he shaking from joy or sorrow, from age or the cold? It is the first snow of the season, and the old man is maybe the only old man outside.

He stands by the old ice cream shop, waiting for a very old friend. It is a good thing he’s meeting her now, this winter, this snowfall because he has a feeling this will be his last.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 33

fiction

S

he was mentally unbalanced. When she squeezed the bloody lump out into the world, they didn’t let her hold it. It was hers. It belonged to her.

Nine months of fatness and hunger and blood, and they wouldn’t let her hold it.

She was never angrier in her life.

She squeezed the filthy once-white bedsheets in tight fists until her fingers went numb. Her sweaty face stuck to the pillow, oily hair plastered to her cheek, mascara-black tears crossing her lips and landing salty on her tongue.

“Let me see it,” she demanded. The nurses pursed their lips and glanced frantically from their hands to the bedpost to the ceiling. “Let me see it,” she repeated, louder. Her voice, hoarse from screaming all night, flew from her throat like a lodged projectile.

The beak-nosed doctor recoiled, wiped the words off his shoulder, and murmured to the nurses: “She’s getting back on the meds n e x t week.”

They

34 | Wallace Prize 2016

nodded rapidly, like caged chickens.

What a worthless man, she thought.

What worthless women.

The doctor smiled tightly and scooped the lump into her arms. She startled. The lump was warm and wet and gurgling, and she didn’t want this. The lump opened his father’s eyes and his mother’s lips, let in a shaky breath and howled.

She pulled back, heart frozen against her rib cage, but then the voices in her mind pulled back, too. They clapped hands over their ears and crawled into faraway corners. She blinked, smiled, laughed in delight. She wanted her lump to scream forever, if only to silence those other screams.

Her small bent body cradled the smaller bent baby. Mother and son, in a stinky room with too-bright lights.

Outside, snow fell.

O

n snowy days, Stanley’s mother used to say that God had bad dandruff. She rummaged through the bathroom cabinets, retrieved Dr. Whizz’s #1 Renewing Shampoo for Dry ScalpsTM, and placed it on the porch like an offering. It was on one of these days that Stanley first met Atticus Ramona.

She was a ratty, wide-eyed girl with skin brown from the sun — even in the winter.

She was on their porch, inspecting the shampoo bottles like museum exhibits.

“Hey, what’re you doing!” Stanley shouted — but it was more like a whisper-shout, head poking out the door, fingers numb from the cold.

“My mom’s got dandruff. Can I take this?” she asked.

“No! Definitely not!”

She shrugged and then pinned him down with a stare, looked him up and down. Took her time doing it, too. She laughed. “Why’re you so scared?”

“I’m not scared of you!”

“I’m not talking about that,” she said — and she bounced off. She took the shampoo bottle, too, but he wouldn’t notice that until hours later, when his mom was yelling about the angels who took her shampoo to Heaven.

He saw Atty often after that. He didn’t

know why he talked to her. She was too loud and nosy, and her eyes saw too much. She chewed too much gum and stuck it on trees as they trudged through the snow. She liked money, though, and so did he. She lived in the shack at the far end of town with two brothers whom she didn’t particularly like, but one of them — the older one — had recently bought three French vanilla ice cream cones with one green paper.

Stanley thought his lemonade stand last summer was a good idea, but Atty was far more innovative. She had flair, a secret smile that made you want to believe in her. Her mom was a psychic, she said — that meant people paid her money to hear make-believe stories. Atty thought this was brilliant, so they set up the booth, right in front of the ice cream store for motivation’s sake. Stanley spread the word, and Atty read palms for 50 cents. The neighborhood kids lined up like her disciples, coins jangling in pudgy, greasy fingertips. They made six dollars that first day, and they split it halfway.

“We’re buying our French vanilla today!”

Atty said afterward, beaming until her eyes disappeared behind her cheeks.

“Meet at noon, kay?”

Atty was always late, but he always waited for her. This time, though, he waited for hours. He waited so long that the cold burned his temples and his ears went numb. He sat in the snow and curled into himself and rocked and waited. Rocked and waited. When Atty showed up finally, a distasteful look crossed her brow and crinkled her nose.

“Why’re you so late?” demanded Stanley.

She shrugged. “I wanted to see how long you’d wait for me.”

“What?” Stanley shouted. He had never been so furious in his life.

“You’re always waiting for me. You shouldn’t do that. I mean, you shouldn’t wait for anyone that long — even me.

Kay?” She said this all in the all-knowing, matter-of-fact tone of a mother berating her child.

Stanley shrugged, let the anger blow out his nose in puffs of steam, and freeze into the afternoon air. They went inside

fiction and ate their French vanilla, and it certainly tasted like three dollars.

T

he banker was an aggressively mannish man. He was very tall with a booming voice and suits that stretched wide across his shoulders.

He had always been big, so he was used to looking down on people. He carried himself with the swagger of someone who had never been doubted or slighted or cast off in his life.

The banker did not understand his son Stanley. His son hid away in corners at dinner parties and stared at the ground while he talked. His son drew little flowers on his hands and ate french fries with a fork. The banker did not understand Stanley, and Stanley did not understand the banker, but they both understood numbers — so this is how they talked.

“Nine times three is what, Stanley?” he asked him on their way to Pebble Beach. The road stretched out, long and lazy before them, and the radio was broken, leaving the air pregnant with the unspoken.

“Twenty-seven,” Stanley replied.

“Twenty-seven divided by two?”

“Thirteen-and-a-half.”

At Pebble Beach, Stanley’s father parked the car as close to the dock as possible and handed Stanley the fishing rod. The rod felt like an executioner’s ax in his clammy palms, and he shifted it nervously from hand to hand.

Stanley’s father hooked a couple of limp worms onto the metal and cast his line into the water. “Wait for the tug, then yank it out — ah! Like this.” His arm catapulted backward and his line flew out of the water, fat flounder hooked on the other end. “That was damn fast. Most days you don’t get one that fast. You must be my lucky charm, kid.” Stanley couldn’t decide whether to smile or throw up. The flounder’s eyes were wide and bulging, as if paralyzed in a state of shock. The hook protruded from spotted, sickly skin and tiny little teeth flashed in and out of view.

It was the saddest thing Stanley had ever seen.

“Ischemic stroke,” the doctor told them over her stale corpse the next day.

As if that meant anything.

His father threw another line in and handed the rod to Stanley. A few minutes passed in silence before the rod jerked. His father jumped up. “Pull, Stan, c’mon!” he barked.

He hesitated. But then his father yelled again, and he pulled, and the flounder came flying through the air, and Stanley’s entire body froze as he screamed. The flounder landed with a smack on the warm plywood. There it was again — the spotted skin, the teeth, the sad eyes. Stanley swallowed down his vomit, and before his father could react, he kicked it back into the sea foam.

It was over. Stanley’s ears roared with his panicked breaths. He hid his head between his knees.

“Stanley, what the hell was that for?” his father murmured into the silence.

Stanley said nothing. So they packed up the rods quietly and clambered into the car, and the radio was still broken. They drove for a while in silence, and Stanley’s cheeks were still burning in shame when his father spoke.

“Eleven times twelve is what?” his father asked the dashboard; it was almost a song.

Stanley sighed in relief. “One hundred thirty-two.”

W

hen his mother died, he was the only one in the room.

He was fourteen, but he still crawled into her bed in the mornings after nights filled with bad dreams.

His dad hardly came home anymore, anyways, and she loved holding Stanley close to her, singing soft lullabies like he was still a small child. He was fourteen,

and at school he wore leather jackets and whistled at girls, but at home he hugged his mother tight and cried into her hair.

She never asked why.

He was there the moment the breath froze in her mouth and fell flat against her dry tongue. She was talking about doing laundry later that day, and then she paused mid-sentence. The right side of her face fell flat and her eyes clicked shut. He thought she had just fallen asleep, and he did, too, but when he woke up she was colder than snowfall and her breath smelled of death.

“Ischemic stroke,” the doctor told them over her stale corpse the next day.

As if that meant anything.

Stanley cried often. He cried over beautiful songs and bad headaches and good books that came to an end — but he did not cry at his mother’s funeral.

Instead he stood at the back of the stuffy church and tried his hardest not to scream as the wrinkled, red-nosed mourners lined up to pat his back and say the damn same thing: “I’m sorry for your loss, Stanley. Stay strong. She would be proud of you.”

He did not cry even when he was alone at home, on the tire swing, swinging as hard as he could, thinking that today might be the day the rope finally snapped.

This is where Atty found him, two days after he woke up to his mother’s frozen corpse.

She watched him on the swing for a good minute before she called out.

“Wanna learn how to knit?” she hollered.

He paused, dug his shoe into the dirt until the tire, too, paused in its wild, haphazard path.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 35

fiction She called him to the stone bench and gave him a pair of needles. A ball of old yellow yarn, too. “Over, under, through,” she murmured, and her needles waltzed through the thread like dancers. When he tried imitating her, his feet tapped to his racing heart and his needles got tangled up in the yellow.

“Calm down,” she said. “Don’t know why you’re so wound up.”

She didn’t talk about Heaven or how beautiful and strong and proud his mom was. Or how sorry she was for his loss. She didn’t talk about his mom at all. She just clinked her needles quietly, guided her yarn into little squares, and hummed Brother Can You Spare a Dime.

He breathed in, breathed out, pulled the yarn over, under, through. Over, under, through. And it was only then that he began to cry, with yarn wound about his fingers on a stone bench and Atty Ramona beside him, humming off-key show tunes under her breath.

He sobbed for so long that the sun dipped below the trees, and he couldn’t see where the needles ended and his fingers began. When his aunt peeled back the screen door and called him inside for supper, Atty squeezed his hand and walked back home. He was alone, but not alone. The wind tasted

like winter and the cheerful little scrap of knitted yellow yarn rippled against his fingertips.

stood by his bed, all leaning casually against the bedpost and sporting the same roguish half-smile. One of them snatched a needle from his fingers and n October 1941, Stanley was drafted stuck it in his mouth like a cigar. into the army and shipped off to He pictured himself standing Germany. up, socking the guy in the nose, and There was an air of feverish snarling a devilishly witty reply. He expectation at the base; impatience was pictured himself looming over the laced into their oversalted meals and meatheads and bouncing their heads scrubbed into their shiny new helmets. together like Newton’s balls. He was Every soldier was itching for some tall, after all. Skinny and gangly, but tall ammo, a gun, and a German to shoot at. like his father. Instead he pursed his Stanley was scared. He remembered lips and stared very hard at his hands, fishing for flounders on Pebble Beach bony and cracked. He imagined his with his father, and he suddenly wanted heart must look very similar. to vomit all over the shiny floors of the “This ain’t gonna stop Hitler,” sang army base. He frantically scoured his one of the soldiers, snatching the yarn bag for the needles and yarn and almost away. “Momma’s boy, aren’t ya?” cried in relief when he felt the familiar Of course I fucking am, Stanley cool metal against his feverish skin. He thought automatically. Then he looked knit and knit and felt his lungs expand up at the soldiers and realized he had in shaky, steady breaths. He pictured said it aloud. They pummeled him until Atty guiding his fingers and let the his ears rang and his blood ached and memory of her cool breath and warm his bones turned black and blue. He kisses wash over the fear. Over, under, didn’t cry out. Instead he replayed through. Over, under, through. his memories like old TV reruns and “Look at this queer! What’re you, a found his dad’s shoulders, his mom’s fucking broad?” tapioca eyes, Atty’s mud-caked palms.

Stanley’s fingers froze. His whole He latched onto her hands a million body froze, except for his cheeks which times, and he didn’t report the beating burned his flesh to a crisp. Three men to anyone. They must’ve known he wouldn’t; he didn’t want any trouble.

The others caught on, and they took his yarn, his gum, his cigarettes. He took on their shifts. When they were bored a few of them took turns landing punches on his flesh — anywhere but the face, or the officers would notice.

He was straw-haired and blue-eyed and looked enough like a German, anyway.

By the time they entered the battlefield in earnest, Stanley was tired.

His skin was a blue ocean, quickly fading to purple and green and yellow.

It hurt to breathe. He was so tired that he only hesitated for a brief, panicked, light-headed minute. Then a crying officer seized his shoulders and screamed words he could not hear over gunfire. Men fell like dominoes on either side of him. The gun slid

I

There was an air of feverish expectation at the base; impatience was laced into their oversalted meals and scrubbed into their shiny new helmets. Every

soldier was itching for some ammo, a gun, and a German to shoot at.

36 | Wallace Prize 2016

fiction between his fingers, sticky with sweat, and when he fired, he pictured his bullet like his needles, weaving through blood and smoke and bodies that convulsed on the ground like flounders on Pebble Beach. Over crouching men, under black skies, through flesh and bone. Over, under, through. Over, under, through.

was a different kind of woman: less bouncy, less loud, and infinitely more hollow. They held each other on the second-hand mattress, and Addy stared hard at the little wrinkles by Stanley’s eyes, traced them with her fingers, exhaled and felt herself grow smaller.

She couldn’t describe it, she told him.

She cried for no reason. She looked at the baby sometimes, and its eyes were he summer that Atty changed her telescopes. She gazed into its pupils name was the hottest summer in and saw time scratching canyons into decades. The heat pooled in their her skin. She saw herself growing into breaths and chafed their lungs, flickered her mother, gray and croaky and beerinto flames at the bottoms of their breathed, reading palms in a leaky shack. bellies — especially Atty’s, which grew She traced Stanley’s wrinkles with a big and round and warm as an embrace. shaky finger, and she wasn’t a warrior She’d never liked being an Atticus, knight like she always told him she’d be.

Atty told him, folding the water bill She wasn’t even a damsel-in-distress. into a flimsy fan. It looked misleading She was just a tired accountant’s wife on paper. People thought she was a with stretch marks on her belly. transvestite or something complicated When Addy moved away, she left like that, she said, and she just wanted behind nothing but a brief note and her to live her life with a normal-ass name. Joy. He didn’t even get to say goodbye.

She changed her name to Addison, and Atty became Addy. oy went through phases, like Stanley was an accountant. He the planets. She liked dinosaurs, picked a safe job, a safe home, a safe stars, antelopes, pirates. Chefs, health care plan. The summer heat skateboards, horoscopes, karate, rock ’n’ changed things between them. They roll. Stanley took her to the big roller grew snappier. When she first told him coaster park every Sunday, and she only about the heartbeat living within her, ever tried one ride a day. She picked one he nearly jumped, he was so happy. He and rode it twenty, thirty, forty times, held her close to him, and crinkled his back-to-back, ran straight from the nose when he felt his shoulder grow exit back to the line, her hair a frizzy wet with her tears. She didn’t want the windswept nest around her flushed baby, she murmured. She never wanted cheeks. He didn’t know why she did a baby. Soon her belly grew so big that this; never asked. Stanley didn’t want they couldn’t hold each other. to vomit in front of her, so he always She released life into the damp, waited right outside. Brought his sterile hospital room, and when he needles sometimes, or a asked her what they’d name the child, good book, or and she said she didn’t really care. He could decide. The baby was the happiest thing he’d ever seen. It giggled at the sound of warm blankets and crickets and snow-packed shoes against linoleum. He was convinced that all of Addy’s joy had sunk to her womb and wrapped itself into the newborn’s veins.

He named her Joy. For when Joy left Addy’s body, Addy

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his paperwork, which flew out of his lap every time the roller coaster flashed by.

He squinted into the blur sometimes, tried to pick out which young, gleeful, squealing face was his little girl’s. Most days it was too fast.

When she was nine-and-a-half years old, Joy abandoned piano and latched onto fishing. She liked watching the nature channel, where wild-eyed Australian adventurers caught angry fish in roaring river rapids, sometimes with their bare hands. She liked the idea of almost dying.

When Stanley drove her to the pier, she rolled back the windows and stuck her head out the whole way, grinning like a lazy dog. “Roll them up,” he told her. She’d catch a cold. She pretended she didn’t hear him.

At the pier, the ocean slept. The waves were soft and muted. If he didn’t know any better, Stanley would’ve thought they were gazing out at a vast, somber lake. When he handed Joy the rod, her eyebrows dropped into terse little furrows. “We don’t catch them with our hands?”

“Of course not.”

“Oh,” said Joy. She pursed her lips; in her hands the rod might as well have been a foam finger.

“The flounders are actually quite frightening,” assured Stanley.

Her head jerked up. “Really?” She threw her line in, and she wasn’t a child on a fishing trip. She was a deadly, barefoot beast killer sent to the distant Pacific to cleanse the sea of monsters.

When she flung a small halibut by their feet, Stanley flinched a bit.

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taught her how to throw it back into the water, and she flung it as far as she could. It sailed across the water, sunshine glinting off its scales, and landed with a faraway splash. She fished like this for hours, but the waters were too still, and darkness descended early. They didn’t find any flounders, but she kept one of the halibuts. Named it Hallie. He promised they’d come back next week.

“Seatbelt,” murmured Stanley as they climbed into the car.

“For Hallie too?”

“She’s already dead, Joy.” She cradled the halibut against her chest on the way home, stroked its gills, stuck its head out the window, and the whole car smelled like fish.

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he hated him. Joy looked very much like her mother, but she looked the most like Addy when she said she hated him.

She hovered by the door, fingers cradling the doorknob like a threat, back ramrod straight, just like he’d taught her. Soldier straight.

She stood in front of the refrigerator, plastered two-layers deep in her mother’s postcards.

Look, here I am in Barbados. Here I am, going on adventures without you.

Here I am, happy. The sunshine lit her hair on fire, and if it weren’t for her freckles and gangly legs, he would have thought she was Addy herself.

He was a control freak. He was a coward. He was afraid of

38 | Wallace Prize 2016

everything. He didn’t let her do anything. He wouldn’t let her go.

He lied to her. He lied to her about everything. She hated him.

Stanley stood frozen by the toaster as his daughter peeled away his happiness. She opened the door and stepped out. tanley had always expected that someone so similar to Addy would marry someone like him. Instead Joy fell in love with the striking, no-nonsense woman who sold car insurance down the street. On her wedding day, Joy wore a poppy blue dress, and he walked her down the little path in their backyard, both their hands sweaty, clenched tight in one another. e woke up at 6:45 and poured himself cornflakes.

He watched the news, read her letters, filled in the crossword, called Joy. Made a sandwich, took a walk, wrote her letters. Cleaned the house, microwaved yesterday’s pizza, took a shower. Then he went to bed.

When you are waiting you are not really living. You are expecting life to happen. So Stanley was dying and waking up at 6:45 and waiting.

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t the old ice cream shop, the very old man eats French vanilla ice cream with a very old friend. They talk for hours.

Outside, snow falls.

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