My dad barreled through the front door in his rumpled T-shirt. His engine cut on, his wheels crunched over the pavement, a nighttime silence filling the street as he drove away.
We didn’t talk about what this meant for their jobs. My mom reached for the empty bowl on the table. “Clean those kernels off the floor, please.” I’d never heard her sound so exhausted. I didn’t even argue that she was the one who’d dropped kernels everywhere and collapsed onto the rug to pick them up while she trudged upstairs.
Cameras cut to Howard’s campus with salacious timing, panning across faces with stony stares, women in pink, crestfallen. Music played in the background, but no one was dancing anymore. MiniatureAmerican flags people had waved earlier were left on the grass. My shock was swallowed by a violent embarrassment. How embarrassing to believe there was any other outcome but this. How embarrassing to believe I could have more when I couldn’t even have the minimum. To have believed anything different about my place in this country. I was too embarrassed to even cry about it.
By the time T*ump appeared, grimace-grinning under a thin billow of yellow hair, I was alone on the sofa. He promised not just a wall but mass deportations. He promised the end of DEI. He promised to root out his liberal opponents. He promised to support Israel. He promised the police one violent, really rough hour. He promised to make America great, again.
PART IIAmerica Has a Problem
Chapter 20
Joel St. Clair and Dorinda Donovan met on the street. This was Memphis in the late eighties, their hair how it is now except when they met their hair was in style.
Dorinda, a college student, was walking home from school when she passed Joel leaning against a beat-up Volvo. He reached for her dangling hand. This move never worked for him, but to his surprise she stopped. The sun was reflected in her dark eyes, an impenetrable expression in them. “Nigga, don’t touch me again.”
Their first date was at a seafood spot. Over crab legs, she told him about the social work degree she was getting, about her desire to help families in need. He told her about the crawfish restaurant he planned to open, about his desire to fill people’s stomachs.
In his tiny living room (glass coffee table, dingy yellow carpet, busy floral drapes, busted AC unit), he fingered through his record collection. Dorinda chanted, “Lu-ther! Lu-ther!” bending and cracking her toes on his couch. Pressed against each other, they danced to Luther.
She didn’t discover his drinking problem until she moved in a year later. She’d find empty bottles stuffed in drawers, others rolling from under the bed. He never put his hands on her. According to her mother, that was supposed to mean something.
He lost his job for being drunk. But Dori found a new one, a good one, in DC with the Department of Housing and Urban Development. They packed their things (glass coffee table, record collection, not the floral drapes) and drove to a city not far from her childhood home in Maryland, but which Joel had seen only on the news.
By their fifth year in the District, they’d saved enough to buy a modest home. For a while, Joel had stopped drinking, had started working again. To say they were happy would be pat; they were making it work.
The new millennium wasn’t the end of the world but the beginning of one. It brought the internet (“Look, Joel! I can buy slippers On Line!”) and something called globalization. Collapsing towers, its brutal retaliation. Endless wars that would end too late. Katrina to Joel’s home state. It also brought me.
Dorinda’s bulging stomach was a sign that things were finally happening for them after years of trying. Joel did all the shopping, all the cooking, while she was pregnant. When she was in labor for fifteen hours, he circled the room with a hawk’s intensity, too awake for his own good. He left, returning with a dozen pink balloons and a basket of stale fruit dipped in bitter, hardened chocolate.
He refused to give me a name. He refused to let anyone else name me too. (“What do you mean you don’t wanna name her? Have you lost your mind? Fine, I’m naming her without you. Lisa’s pretty. What do youmeanyou’re not naming your child after my sister?”)
He was raised to believe if you didn’t name a thing, it couldn’t hurt you. Yet there I was with his head of hair too thick to comb; his eyes, wide and deep; his sharp nose that rounded suddenly to a stop. There I was, half him.
The night they brought me home, my cries were unending.
The night they brought me home, he got in his even-more-beat-up-than-before Volvo and drove to King Liquor.
In the end, they named me Catherine Elise after the grandmother who told stories on her sofa when I was a kid spending the stray summer month in New Orleans. She had these hazel-green eyes that made me believe she was a snake; when I was running in the house, she’d flash them at me like flinging a stone. She died when I turned eight. We never went back there. It was like she took the idea of home with her to the grave.
Chapter 21
The faces of my classmates unnerved me postelection, like they’d morphed slightly overnight. No one mentioned the results, but the air was dense with the knowledge of it. We sat in that dank basement while Milken railed against semicolons. I recalled a similar surreality after October 7: students waxing about Israel having no choice, professors decrying Hamas, pro-Palestinian students sending out a letter that was soon rescinded, that resulted in quiet suspensions, disappearing adjunct professors. The death toll in Gaza jumped like numbers on a timer but instead of time it measured stolen lives. Now it was like a dark fabric had fallen over everything again with no way to shake it off. But maybe we would survive this term like we’d done the last.
We discussed Edgar’s novel about three Afghan refugee women, then we pivoted to my piece.
“Would you talk about your chapter, please?” Milken said.
I hadn’t brought a copy. Or my laptop. “Okay.”
“Go on, then.”
“It’s about a love that turns sour.”
He watched me, expectant, before turning to the class. “What’s working here?”
“There’s a musicality to the writing,” Edgar said. “Not heavy-handed, but just enough. It worked for me.”
Chloe said, “I thought there were some funny parts, like when Dorinda tells Joel not to touch her but then they go on a date.”
