The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019 Page 2

  I was not disappointed. This book is by turns wise, brutal, funny, elegiac, informative, beguiling, and beautiful.

  As varied as the pieces in this anthology are, there’s connective tissue. The foremost motif is the way in which personal experience is not detached from larger political or socioeconomic forces, or from historical context, but inextricable. I tend to hate how words like “intersectionality” and “patriarchy” get tossed around like empty catch-phrases, as if using them absolves the speaker of complicity in damaging power structures. Overuse of these words prevents us from expressing or understanding the specificity and messiness of human lives, or from figuring out how to fix real problems. Reading many of these pieces was an antidote to my language-fatigue, for they manage to vividly capture an individual experience, while also showing how that experience is always webbed to something larger. Pain and joy and love and grief don’t exist in a vacuum.

  For instance, in her essay “Almost Human,” Deborah Taffa investigates how familial dysfunction, particularly for a mixed-tribe Native American family, can’t be excised from larger societal and historical oppression. She is writing about her childhood and her father, but she’s also grappling with government policies that shaped her family’s past, present, and future. She writes, “Injustice is when someone privileged like me, someone who has reaped the benefits of electricity and national security, turns around and vilifies a poor indigenous man for taking the only job he had available to him.”

  In her poem “Curse for the American Dream,” Jane Wong depicts her father’s gambling addiction not as an isolated problem that only affects her family, but one that hurts the community at large. She writes, “Casino buses roll into Chinatowns across the country like ice cream trucks for a reason.” Just because the speaker’s wish, “May the casino turn into a window, a seat at the dinner table,” is shot through with intimate longing doesn’t mean it isn’t also the wish of many, many other people.

  I was reminded of this with “I Worked with Avital Ronell. I Believe Her Accuser,” when Andrea Long Chu writes, “Structural problems are problems because real people hurt real people.”

  Let us not forget that. We aren’t merely labels, or victims of larger forces we barely understand. We are human, and we suffer.

  There’s also terrific, off-kilter humor in this collection. For instance, the comic “It’s Natural” features, to my great delight, drawings of various butt shapes. Butt shapes!

  In “The BabyLand Diaries,” which chronicles “the birth” of a Cabbage Patch Doll, writer Angela Garbes asks, “Does Mother Cabbage have a mucus plug?” Reader, I laughed out loud.

  In David Drury’s short story “The Lake and the Onion,” there were amusing lines like, “When we ran the numbers through spellcheck and presented them to our finest sketch artist, he snapped all his pencils and took his estranged daughter to lunch.”

  The poetry of Britteney Black Rose Kapri is urgent and serious, but the surprising comedy of everyday life persists as well. In her poem “Black Queer Hoe,” I loved the image of the speaker recently home, drunk after a night at the club, making sure her lesson plans for the next day are ready. She even checks her email “before the room starts spinning.” It’s an accurate, and thus comic, portrayal of life, and it’s what makes the speaker, the eponymous “Black Queer Hoe,” a multifaceted human being, despite the world’s attempts to flatten and stifle her.

  This year’s Best American Nonrequired Reading also values formal daring. In my first meeting, student Huckleberry said part of the committee’s mission was to find unusual pieces that weren’t “within the general accepted literary sphere.” They’ve succeeded. Before reading this anthology, for instance, I’d never read, let alone heard of, “sound translation” poetry, which is Keith Donnell’s project with “The Gettysburg Address.” Donnell’s two poems echo the sounds and rhythms of Lincoln’s original speech, but without an attachment to content. After reading them, I revisited the president’s words. Then I circled back to the poems. This feedback loop had me ruminating on the ghost of hope that our country “shall have a new birth of freedom,” which made Donnell’s question, “Who’ll weed our graves?” all the more haunting.

  On this question of what might belong in “the literary sphere,” I was surprised by the committee’s inclusion of a letter to Congress. This letter, signed by members of the Holton Arms Class of 1984, calls for support of their classmate, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, attesting that “her decision to provide information pertaining to a sexual assault is not a partisan act.” At first, I was puzzled to see this letter among the other accepted pieces. Then again, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings bled into all aspects of my own life, from my marriage to my friendships to my parenting to my work—and, yes, to my reading. Why shouldn’t a historical document be read alongside poetry and comics? I loved the choice to include it here.

  Last, I will say that so many sentences in this collection knocked me out; they were poetic, unexpected, and true. In the story “Barbara from Florida,” about a female pizza delivery boy, Maddy Raskulinecz writes that the pizzeria’s “small square television nestled into the ceiling corner like a hornet’s nest.” In Patricia Sammon’s “Hill Country,” gas station convenience store worker Lynelle listens to the “fisted shape of traffic on the highway.” Margaret Ross, in her poem “Macho,” describes “cigarette butts gone tender, floating” in coffee cans of water. In “The Brothers Aguayo,” Devin Gordon writes of Tallahassee’s humidity, “so thick you can write your name in it.” Gordon’s essay is about two football-playing brothers (they’re placekickers, actually), a subject I did not care about whatsoever—until his sentences made me realize that, in fact, I did.

  Again and again, I was dazzled by this collection. I experienced a little zing imagining the teenagers—Althea, Annette, Coco, Hannah, Hayden, Huckleberry, Juliana, Liv, Max, Mimoh, and Xuan—being dazzled, too.

  Or, well, at least some of them were, some of the time. Remember: they’re opinionated.

  If there’s a piece in this collection that leaves you underwhelmed or confused to even downright annoyed, take comfort: there was probably someone in that basement conference room who felt similarly.

  And when you discover among these pages—and you will—that story, or that poem, or that essay, or that comic, that raises your pulse, gives you that tingly feeling in your arms, that makes you want to read faster and slower at once, know that there was another person on the committee who felt that love and connection too, that need to share what they’ve read with another human being.

  To share it with you, it turns out. That piece is for you.

  Teenagers! Aren’t they great?

  EDAN LEPUCKI

  PATRICIA SAMMON

  ■

  Hill Country

  FROM december

  The convenience store was in Tennessee, but only just. Customers, pumping gas, often seemed transfixed by the sameness of the clover beneath the WELCOME TO ALABAMA sign. Travelers who paid at the pump and who had no reason to go inside the store never discovered that the store’s metal door scraped hard against its doorframe. But store regulars knew to clench their teeth when pulling open the door, and again when leaving, clutching their paper sacks filled with predictable secrets: a can of Coke, a roll of Life Savers, a pepperoni Hot Pocket, hot from the store’s microwave. Some of the regulars were long-distance truckers traveling the New Orleans/Chicago route. They didn’t know the cashier’s name but they called her Darlin’, or Sugar, or Ma’am.

  Lynelle thought her name was the prettiest thing about her and she had once suggested to her boss that he should require her to wear a name tag. But her boss told her that name tags were the kind of foolishness that national chains like Stop n’ Shop or 7-Eleven required of their franchisees.

  His own name appeared in large neon letters on a sign by the side of the highway: HENRY’S STATE LINE EXPRESS. In order to claim the attention of drivers, he had lined the store windows with strands of purple
Christmas lights that flashed night and day. He had set a timer so that they sometimes blinked in unison, and sometimes raced up and over and down and across, never tiring.

  Most of the regulars whom Lynelle saw were locals: plumbers and electricians stopping by the store before their first appointment of the day; landscaping crews who worked for the highway department or for the wealthy family that kept Tennessee Walkers; shift workers on their way to the chicken processing plant up the road. Hispanic, black, white—the narrow aisles of the store made a family of them.

  At 7:15 every weekday morning a green station wagon pulled up to the store. And in would come Deshaundra, who had a singing way of speaking, and Tammy, who never spoke and had long, straight hair and the build of a teenage boy. Tammy always had exact change for two packs of Pall Mall Orange. And because Mr. Henry had no rule about smoking, Tammy would light a cigarette and listen while Deshaundra sipped a blue Ice Slurpee and told Lynelle about the places they’d be cleaning that day: that house in New Bethel where the lawyer and his wife had a bay window with glass shelves for all their violets; or the senior center whose activity rooms would have glitter in between the linoleum tiles no matter how often they were mopped. Deshaundra knew Lynelle’s name but she called her Baby because she called everyone Baby. To the electrician who dropped his dollar bill—“Here you go, Baby.” To Lynelle: “Baby, tell that Mr. Henry to get you one of them high-up, swivel stools to sit on. Good-sized woman like you, standin’ all day, you gonna blow out your knees.” And at the mention of them, Lynelle’s knees, as if touched by the bluish lips, briefly ached. More recently Deshaundra had told her, “Baby, don’t you worry ’bout your hair. It’ll even out in a week or two.” Lynelle had smiled, but ahead of her smile, she had lifted her hand to cover her smile. Deshaundra had never said, “Baby, don’t worry ’bout your teeth.” Because no customer, not even regular ones, had ever glimpsed the gaps where the decayed ones had been pulled.

  Lynelle’s boyfriend Cory had taken a trucking job four years earlier, when little Brandi was born. By the time Brandi was learning to crawl, his routes no longer included middle Tennessee, but he still sent money orders from time to time. Each morning, in the predawn darkness, Lynelle carried Brandi across the parking lot joining the apartment complex and the convenience store, Brandi’s heavy head riding the rise and fall of her shoulder as she walked.

  Every morning, at the squawk of the door to the doorframe, the night cashier would get up to leave. His report, and the words of his report, had become smoothed into oneness: “Same like always.” Then Lynelle would settle Brandi on the fold-out cot behind the counter and let her sleep till Cory’s mother came to bring her to the daycare center she ran. Cory’s mother had several times curdled her lips and complained, “Church says she’s not my real granddaughter.” But she never charged for the daycare.

  Over the years Lynelle had gotten to know the preferences of her regulars. The traveling home healthcare aides liked Diet Pepsi and Lorna Doone cookies and pocket-size bottles of Kleen! hand sanitizer. High-schoolers skipping class favored Doritos and Salem menthols. The very thin guy who worked with the landscaping crew stole a Milky Way every time he came by the store. Lynelle had gotten to recognize the flow of his gestures as he slipped the candy into his pocket while dropping a knee to the floor, pretending to tie a shoelace. When he stood up again he would always pick out a few other items to buy. At the cash register Lynelle simply added, without ever mentioning it, the cost of the Milky Way. And he had never pretended shock at the total or asked for a receipt. Lynelle decided he was probably no better at math than she would be if she didn’t have the cash register to calculate change.

  The previous week a group of middle-aged women had come to the store announcing that they would become regulars. They had just discovered how easy it was to drive across the state line and buy a ticket for that month’s lottery. Before the women made their shared purchase, they performed a little ceremony that involved a jump, a clap and a hug and a wish: “The Ritz in Cancun!” Lynelle longed to ask them if Cancun was another kind of saltine, like a Ritz. And why would such a snack mean so much to them. But she just wished the women luck. She had learned not to ask questions. One time Lynelle had phoned Cory’s mother to tell her that Brandi didn’t feel well enough for daycare. “Well, did you give her 7 Up and saltines?” and Lynelle, who knew exactly where in the store to find 7 Up and saltines, asked how those things would help. “Well, you knew enough to get yourself pregnant. What did you do for morning sickness?” And at that remark Lynelle had just stared at the phone in her hand, unable to say anything because she was abruptly back in the tenth grade, gripping the edges of the desktop and not knowing why she was thinking of a ship at sea when she had never been on a ship.

  After the lottery women left, a long-haul trucker who’d been helping himself to a bowl of chili from the Crock-Pot shook his head with gentlemanly decorum and said, “I hate to see people throwing away their money like that.” Lynelle asked the trucker what kind of things he was hauling that day. But in order to make sure he wouldn’t mistake her question for flirting, she added, “My husband drives a semi.” She not only made up the part about Cory being her husband, but she also gave him a place to be, somewhere not so very far away—Kansas. And she gave him a bill of lading—logs. The trucker teased her, Well, Sugar, there can’t be too many of those in Kansas. In a smiling instant, the correction came to her. “No. I said, hogs.” Because right there by the Crock-Pot was an advertisement for pork rinds that featured a cheerful little pig wearing an apron and a chef’s hat.

  Cory’s most recent money order had been sent from a 7-Eleven in Bend, Oregon. After Lynelle cashed it, she studied the receipt. The amount was for $72.63. She closed her eyes and tried to see Cory. But he’d always been quick in his bashfulness, turning away from a kiss or her whispered words. She wished she could ask the 7-Eleven cashier if he had seemed tired as he was paying for the money order. Or if maybe he had looked proud to have so much cash. Maybe he had been uncharacteristically talkative, saying, “I have a wife and baby in Tennessee.” She studied the receipt another moment longer and then the whole transaction made itself known to her: he had set down four twenty-dollar bills and a five, and he’d bought a pouch of chewing tobacco—Red Man Select—and he had used the balance for the money order. And he had not lingered. And he had not called the cashier Sugar.

  Lynelle put the receipt and the cash in her purse and then walked over to the store shelf that was stacked with travel aids. She picked up the spiral-bound State-by-State Atlas. After a lot of looking she found Oregon and then she finger-found the city of Bend. It was next to a big forest named Willamette. Maybe he really was hauling logs. She returned the atlas to the rack. Outside, just beyond the gas pumps, a work crew was positioning a historical marker beside the black walnut tree. She carried out a tray loaded with paper cups filled with chili. She wanted to ask the men why they were putting up the marker. Weren’t all good-sized walnut trees anywhere in the state at least a hundred and fifty or two hundred years old? But she didn’t have to ask the men why this particular tree was being identified as special because the men, thanking her for the chili, joked that the only reason they were there was because Mr. Henry had pestered the Tennessee Historical Society about having a very old tree.

  The person who knew well the motion of a ship at sea was named Mvemba. With every ocean swell, the people, bolted to one another below-decks, slid and slammed into the screaming darkness.

  The solitary Tennessee farmer who bought Mvemba at auction gave him the name Cicero. The farmer taught him some English words: Walnut tree. Garden. Hogs. In April when everything was in blossom, the farmer joined the militia to bash the Yanks.

  At the end of the lane, as he climbed up onto the militia wagon, he had yelled over his shoulder that he’d be back in a month. “See to things, Cicero.”

  Lynelle gathered up the pleated, empty paper cups, dumped them in the garbage can, and walked around to the
back of the store to clean the bathroom. She held up her can of Lysol as Deshaundra had taught her, as if writing on air. But just as she was about to press the nozzle on the aerosol can, she noticed that someone had scrawled an angry remark on the comment sheet taped to the back of the bathroom door. Filthy. And above it, A stinking disgrace. Lynelle stared in confusion. Was grace really inside that word? Whenever Cory’s mother pronounced it, she said dis-crace. Who would have written such criticism? The women with their lottery ticket? The long-haul trucker? Perhaps it had been some traveler who had paid at the pumps but had not gone into the store to buy anything? Lynelle strode back inside the store, grabbed one of the Sharpie markers from the display rack, went back out to the bathroom, and joined the comments together so their angry meaning drained away to politeness. I seen some places along this hi way that was a stinking disgrace. Thank U that this place is kleen! and not Filthy.

  The day that a bandaged man with a crutch came stabbing along the road, Mvemba happened to be seated beneath the young tree, smashing open walnuts with a flat rock. When the man called out “Cicero!” Mvemba guided him up the lane, into the farmhouse, and positioned him on a pallet of straw, spooned him some bone broth, and sat with him as he died that evening.

  Mvemba dug him a grave against the hogs, then marked the location by placing the smashing rock upright. Then he took up a sharp stone and joined the blotches of walnut stains to secure the image of a hippo:

  It had been a hippo at the mouth of the Congo River that had shrieked its outrage that Mvemba was being led in chains up the gangplank. Those wide-hinged jaws, that roaring jury—the last that Mvemba ever saw of home.