The day after the 2016 presidential election, I see someone walking toward me on the sidewalk after I drop off my son at preschool, and I flinch. We are the only two people out walking on our block, and at first the person is too far away for me to see who she is. As she comes closer I realize that it’s my neighbor. “Oh,” I think. “It’s just Joy.” I ask her how she is, and she starts crying. I hug her and feel her body stiffen at first and then relax. We chat for a moment. Joy did the middle school carpool that morning. She’d had to hold it together for some kids. Now she isn’t holding it together. We part ways after talking for a short time. I go back into my house and lock the door.
*
In the days after the election, large trucks and SUVs tailgate me. There’s a free-floating aggression on the roads. “Unleashed” is a word I could use. I am reporting this calmly. I did not feel calm while it was happening. After 9/11, some of us had an exaggerated startle reflex. Some of that comes back for me. Out of my peripheral vision, I see a plastic bag being blown by the wind and I jump.
*
When I lived in New York City, some men on the subway would take up three seats by spreading their legs. “Manspreading.” More than once in my last trimester of pregnancy, I stood up holding onto a pole in front of a man who did not offer me his seat. Women were more likely to offer. Later, I read that body language is a recursive cycle—holding yourself in aggressive ways causes your body to release hormones that reinforce aggression. How does that work at a political rally? Through television? If one is already feeling aggression, does watching aggressive displays of powerful men reinforce that aggression? My feeling is that, yes, it does.
*
Sometimes when I am driving on a desolate stretch of road and I see an old but still inhabited farmhouse, I wonder what is happening behind that exterior. During the Progressive era of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, Americans became fascinated by the potential moral decay of the rural poor. Would this decay infect the nation? How could the nation contain it? The offshoot of this was a complex net of social programs such as universal education and forced sterilization. Which people are the “respectable” people? What are their exteriors hiding?
*
(Here I will reveal that I come from a people who have been concerned both with being able to move among the “respectable” and with staying on the edges, keeping our interiors to ourselves. At least, this is one way to present the narrative of the last couple generations. But even that is incomplete. An inheritance is always a partly concealed narrative.)
*
During the 2016 presidential debates, a large, ostensibly wealthy white man who was his party’s candidate followed a smaller, also wealthy, white woman candidate around an open stage, looming behind her in each shot as she spoke. Like much else about the last year, it would have been comical if it didn’t speak to real violence, real menace. The women I know who watched this on television felt it in their bodies. They reported being unable to catch their breath, tightness in the chest. Headaches. Nausea.
*
Before the election, I imagined women going into the semi-private space of the voting booth and revealing their private anger and repudiation of menace. Fifty-three percent of white women who voted voted for Trump. What is happening in the private spaces of the home? The private space inside another human’s skull? It’s impossible to tell from the outside.
*
The fall after the presidential election, my son starts a new school. On the first day, he reports that he was asked to sit in a rocking chair and read a book after being too loud. He eventually reveals that he was talking loudly about guns, and then, when asked not to do that, he was talking loudly about cannons.
Sometimes he will overhear conversations I don’t realize he is listening to. He will pipe up from the backseat that the president is not a very nice person.
At bedtime he tells me that if any bad guys come, he will do karate on them with a knife, and then he will call the police to finish them off. Finish them off? I ask. Kill them, he replies. I explain the idea of rehabilitation to him. What if the bad guys can stop being bad guys and stop doing crimes? OK, he says. I will tell the police to rehabilitate them.
*
The war is in our hearts. I read this in a Buddhist text, and the idea recurs throughout the day. I imagine I am a Buddhist monk with a shaved head and a robe. Or I imagine Mary with her arms outstretched, draped in blue.
In Myanmar, Buddhists are slaughtering Muslim children.
In my nation, Christians debate what kind of Nazis are the kind we should oppose.
My mother visits from Florida, having evacuated that state before a hurricane. In the car I tell her about this thought I have—I shave my head and drape myself in robes. Put a cross around my neck. I go into a church and scream, This is not Christianity! I knock shit over.
Well …, she replies. I’ll visit you in the hospital.
*
These days, phrases such as “inevitable collapse” bubble up in my mind, and I wonder, “Whose collapse? Mine? Or everyone’s?” It is still the same old never-ceasing transformation business, but this time on a mythic scale. Entire systems battle one another. Is synthesis possible? Some as-yet-unimagined peace?
At around age ten, I knew who I was for a time. A period of equilibrium. Then came hormones, Reagan’s Cold War, the capitalist death spiral. Now, in middle age, I feel myself spinning back out of their systems to some extent. Systems? Net? Web? It is important to choose the right model at this time, but words and analogies took on a newly ominous feeling.
At dinner one day, a nervous little girl makes a face at me like a hissing demon. The child holds the face for such a long time that she became an uncanny thing. What would it be like, I wondered, to be so viscerally direct?
*
I speak on the phone with an artist I was involved with ten years ago. Or fifteen years ago? Fifteen. Toward the end of the conversation, he remarks, There’s going to be conflict. It happens in every single relationship. We never did well with that. The phrase that comes to mind for me is brooks no opposition. I often find myself in the company of people who are demonstrably loving and thoughtful, often kind, but who at other times will brook no opposition about simple things. Who will, in fact, not back down. In writing this, I realize I have often been the same type of person. Digging in one’s heels, is another phrase that comes to mind.
*
When the artist friend and I were no longer involved, he visited a new apartment of mine. He had been cleaning out his studio, and started to throw away a piece, but decided to give it to me instead. It was a poster like the large pieces of paper used at shooting ranges, with an outline of a human being on it, with a target in the center. Stamped into the paper were letters made of tiny holes, spelling out the words FUCKIN-A TOLD YOU SO over and over, down the length of the body. I read the piece as hostile and possibly as a repudiation of hostility. See this aggression? It’s quite something, isn’t it? Still, I felt it in my body, a shakiness. An internal shrinking. Taken aback is how I felt. I threw it in a dumpster as soon as he left.
*
I am planning another writing workshop on mystery. Approaching mystery. The unsolvable everyday. Before bed, I read a couple pages in an Anne Lamott book in which she notes that you should put your biggest ethical concern at the center of your work, otherwise you will lose focus and drift away from what you’re doing. What is my biggest ethical concern? How and whether to be a dove.
*
Sometimes a small child will explain something simple in detail, causing you to slow down and ponder what the simple act really means on a larger scale. He asked what kind of chocolate I had, so I broke off a piece of my chocolate and gave it to him. He ate it and was glad.
Another time, the child hears of a hurricane. Then rain comes to your town, even though you are far from the ocean. He looks up into the overcast sky and ask if a tornado is about to come. No, you say. Not at all. Then you’ll learn that a few towns over, they’ve spotted a tornado.
*
Evasions and anxieties emerge in other ways. The small child dreams that a fountain overflows and he and some other kids have to run. They must squeeze through a small space, but he is too big to squeeze through. I lost you, he will say, when telling you the dream. I’m glad you’re here with me, you’ll say back. You act, for now, as if you will always be there for him, as if your whole life and his whole life will exactly overlap.
*
You hide the children’s book about the Middle Passage in another room for a later year. The first picture shows humans’ living bodies stacked in a ship like cords of wood. You already turn off the news when he comes into the room. You begin turning off the weather.
Joanna Penn Cooper is the author of The Itinerant Girl’s Guide to Self-Hypnosis (Brooklyn Arts Press), a book of lyrical prose shorts, and What Is a Domicile (Noctuary Press), a book of poems. Mud Woman, a collaborative poetry collection with Rebecca Bratten Weiss, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press in fall 2018. Joanna lives in Durham, North Carolina.