Five Years Before the First Lady Launched Her Be Best Campaign

I moved to Colorado and began living like the graduate students I’d long envied. I bought a table and bookshelf at Ikea, then hung a crystal in my window, so every morning, rainbow spots danced across the plain walls of the studio apartment I’d rented in what some called the popular neighborhood. The university was near the mountains, in a city that boasted of its altitude. Everyone there liked to drink, and the lack of oxygen increased the alcohol’s impact on the body, so one drink felt like two, and two effected four. In this way, it was easy to become quite drunk.

I had just turned thirty-seven years old, the first irregular prime, but during that first year in Colorado I frequently had hangovers like I did when I was fifteen in Western Michigan and would binge drink Bacardi 151 in a light blue Volkswagen rabbit with three other girls, one of whom was usually my friend. We drank in the parking lot of an all-ages dance club, Top of the Rock, always on Thursdays, alternative night, where we could meet other punks, skaters, and still-closeted teen queers, our bodies thrumming with everything we could not say or see for fear of eternal damnation and abandonment. In high school, the hangovers began the next day at school, a headache settling in during third or fourth period, which meant only a few hours of misery before I could nap at home, pleased that I had not been caught by my religious mother. In Colorado, the hangovers sometimes stretched into early evening when I would finally and gingerly take the dogs for a walk at the nearby park, worrying, as I often did, that I had wasted my day sleeping and aching instead of reading and writing. I would sigh, then, about my lack of friends and invitations, my headache wrapped in a familiar accusation of being not enough. Except for when I was too much: too tense, too critical, too desirous. And then I was feeling sorry for myself, another no-no as no one, not even a mother, likes a whiner.

I remember mine standing before the make-up mirror she kept on the tall bedroom dresser, her pale face glowing from the pink filtered lights set into the mirror’s sides. She was applying eye shadow and blush for a rare evening out; maybe she was going with my father to a Buick Club meeting at the pancake restaurant, while I was trying to tell her of my loneliness. I was six or seven years old and my older siblings, all four of them, did not like me. They called me annoying, selfish, gullible, weird. They would not let me join their board games or sit under the blanket with them as they whispered scary stories in the dark. You’re too sensitive, they said. No one likes me, I confided to my mother, who paused, leaned over, her bright eyes even brighter. Self-pity, she whispered, is a sin.

I did not want to be a sinner.

Later, when I wrote a story about that memory, I let the mother invite her daughter to the Buick Club meeting where the mother hated herself while making small talk with the other women while the men drank and spoke cars and the daughter, the only child present, ordered blueberry pancakes with whipped cream and became, by herself, a giant-mouthed God, punishing each berry for its blueness.

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In Colorado, I began eating like the locals. I bought dried foods from bulk bins at the natural grocery store, filled cloudy plastic bags with trail mix, granola, wasabi peas, and organic popcorn. The graduate program was in writing and literature, and knowing my own proclivity for pettiness, I tacked a note on the inside of my apartment door, which I sometimes read before leaving, though not when I was hungover and taking out the trash or checking the laundry in the basement. Those times I barely remembered my keys and quarters, much less to pause before the 3x5 notecard where I’d written, in black sharpie: Remember the best parts.

Because my tendency, I knew, was to fixate on the problems. Like one of my classmates, a young white man nearly two decades my junior who declared Pope Paul John II his intellectual hero and whose research focused on Flannery O’Connor, as she was Southern and Catholic. Like him. We were in the same entering cohort and had at least one literature course together every semester, where he argued with everything we read, not to better understand what the writer meant, but to measure his interpretation of the text against his idea of moral righteousness and capital-T truth. I recognized a younger version of myself in this behavior, for I, too, had worried about moral pollution and how environments seep into you, so that even as I was inexplicably drawn to lesbians, non-binary feminists, and artsy queers, I had for years attributed my own gay arousals to influence rather than an intuitive self-knowing. Sadly, my classmate was not gay, which may help to explain why he found the church a more comfortable fit. He was also fond of St. Augustine, quoting this man with great regularity, and while I never asked my classmate directly, I suspect he embraced Augustine’s idea of original sin as embodied fact rather than a fiction imagined during a time when the Catholic church was solidifying its empire and needed methods of subjugation. If they get inside your head, they can rule you from the inside out; make people believe they are worthless and they will attach themselves to the person or institution declared the best-and-only-worthy, thus offering their energetic life force, freely it seems, toward this best-and-only-worthy’s increased power and gain. In the classroom, this young man always had a question or comment, and when he spoke, the other students shifted in their seats as a dispersed and unfocused atmosphere filled the room. Sometimes, I argued with the young man. One time, I told him to stop talking. But usually, like the other students, I disengaged.

Later, I wondered if he played this role for us, became a primary distraction and excuse for ceding the learning space and thus avoiding more vulnerable or difficult questions, ones we could not answer or maybe even articulate. Am I lovable? From whence comes my real authority? What is true but not mutually exclusive? The young Catholic gave us someone to hate, or more accurately, he gave me someone to hide behind and gossip about as I rolled my eyes at his narrow views and exuded sense of white innocence. He appeared so out of step with the times that he became, in some ways, like the buffoonish celebrity running for president—another person I did not take seriously, for surely that would not be our future. Such blatant racism and sexism were too frowned upon, I erroneously thought, and how could an entertainer with no government experience win the highest political office in the land. So as my young, conservative classmate compared and contrasted his own theological notions against the writings of Maurice Blanchot or Herman Melville, the rest of us doodled, checked our email, fantasized about a large raven pecking his head. And all too often, the classroom conversation became a back and forth between this young man and—given the faculty demographics of this and many English departments—a white male professor, possibly well-intentioned, often middle-aged. A professor who might have known something was off, but not how to fix it. A teaching professor who became grateful, even, for this one student he could count on for in-class discussions. The young man who always had something to say.