by Sarah Heady
It’s too late for any of us to have upbringings other than the ones we had, but we can begin to actively speculate about what could have been different, to reveal what was actually true all along, and to hope for new futures.
8:49 pm[1] | a quaint village that shuts down at six on weeknights[2] | rainy autumnal wednesday | two girls[3] stand on the corner | middle-aged people emerge from the movie theater | resume their dull domestic lives[4] | underpaid immigrants leave their dishwashing jobs and bicycle home[5] | then a noise[6] | (nothing more than a church’s carillon) | but soft![7] | a young man[8] sits heavily on a bench | longish, messy locks—check | guitar[9]—check | alone on the bench next to foster’s[10] | he lightly restrains the guitar case on his lap | shakes beads of water from his in-a-band hair | the girls skip shyly down the street | fingering leaves on the trees above them and giggling | taking their time | running red lights in their minds | (neither of them have a car)[11] | and when they return to the bench, he is gone[12] | what kind of ghostly greyhound has snatched him away?[13] | they mourn him in the village’s darkened store windows, its motionless shadows | wishing they’d had the courage to approach | to ask | do you have a light?[14]
[2003]
[1] bedtime for a high schooler, if the first bell rings at 7:20 am and the torturous rural school bus journey begins an hour before.
[2] when i go home now, i do fawn over its dutch taverns and washington-really-did-sleep-here character. its cheese shops in place of pawn. i am no longer a resident but a consumer of the town and its whiteness, which i can only see from a distance.
[3] she was blonde to my brunette. we liked to believe there was a betty-and-veronica fantasy trope circulating around school, and perhaps there was.
[4] what i’m leaving out is the image of those adult couples getting into their cars and returning home. the terrors of dullness and domesticity are much sharper for me now; i am much closer to those “boring” people huddled under umbrellas than i am to my teenage self.
[5] i learned a few years later, waiting tables over college summers, that there was a restaurant owner who functioned doubly as employer and slumlord, presiding over rundown houses on the outskirts of town where dozens of his employees, all latino men, lived five-to-a-bedroom and worked sixteen-hour days, rotating between his three establishments (“concepts,” as they say in the business). later, one of those restaurants burned to the ground (no one was hurt). its charred shell still stands on route 9.
[6] apparently, strange noises used to be thrilling, functioning as markers of change or art.
[7] i was a stagehand for local youth shakespeare productions: sites of unbridled sexuality such as i have not seen before or since. i fetishized the image of myself all in black, whispering into the headset, blue clamp light on my face.
[8] he must have been old enough that we felt a dangerous lift in our stomachs at the thought of speaking to him, but young enough to be intrigued, or at the very least, amused, by the sight of two seventeen-year-olds fawning over him. let’s say he was twenty-one.
[9] the ultimate marker of virility, we thought at the time.
[10] owned by a notorious racist, though i can’t point to a specific incident. (and how could i truly know, given my white face?)
[11] i would buy my first car that spring (red ’91 mazda protégé), hit my first deer in the fall, and get rear-ended one black-iced morning on the way to school the following january. these largely cosmetic injuries never jeopardized my life or my livelihood, as both occurred at well under 30 mph: one of the many ways in which a certain brand of rural living carries privilege in its evasion of high-speed, high-density driving. our town was never severed by an interstate.
[12] it is said that there are only two kinds of stories: one where a stranger comes to town, the other where a journey is taken. both exist in this particular narrative. only, as a teenager, i could not see the boy’s suddenly leaving as part of his journey. he was a prop in the story of my short life; when he left the bench next to foster’s, he ceased to exist. just as a quaint village consumes everything around it, a black hole nullifying alternative narratives, futures.
[13] of course, no buses stop in rhinebeck, new york, and they probably never will. such x-factor arrivals, unfulfilled needs and difficulties in tow, would be intolerable to the village. if this were written after all the greyhound trips i’ve taken since—from cleveland to albany, from nashville to cleveland, from cleveland to philadelphia—i would have understood that.
[14] who are you, really? who would i be now if i’d gone away with you that night, if i’d left that sleepy (unawake) town? if i’d let you illuminate what i didn’t even know was illegible?
In annotating this piece of writing from high school, I’m attempting to tell my young self things that nobody else told her. I’ve been writing about growing up in New York’s Hudson Valley region, a place prized for its pastoral beauty, its “cute” towns, its “peacefulness”—which are all code for a certain type of white rural society. In this case, it’s one that can be quite self-congratulatory about its supposed open-mindedness. I think a lot about Robin DiAngelo’s articulation, in White Fragility, to the effect that the very existence of a segregated white community implies that “everything we need is already here; there is nothing of value outside of this place.” This message conflicts with the superficial celebration of diversity that got communicated in my 1990s-era schooling, and it’s certainly an erasure—a moral and spiritual impoverishment that mirrors and feeds the literal impoverishment of communities of color. It’s too late for any of us to have upbringings other than the ones we had, but we can begin to actively speculate about what could have been different, to reveal what was actually true all along, and to hope for new futures. How would places like my hometown be altered if racial justice were fully realized? Would its existence even be possible?
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Sarah Heady is a poet and essayist interested in place, history, and the built environment. She is the author of Corduroy Road (dancing girl press, forthcoming 2020), Niagara Transnational (Fourteen Hills, 2013), and Tatted Insertion, a letterpress chapbook with artist Leah Virsik. She is also the librettist of Halcyon, a new opera about the death and life of a women’s college, with composer Joshua Groffman. Her manuscript “Comfort” was a finalist for the 2019 Ahsahta Press Sawtooth Poetry Prize and the 2017 National Poetry Series. Sarah is a co-editor of Drop Leaf Press, a small women-run poetry collective. More at sarahheady.com.