The Best American Essays 2015 Read online

  As always, I appreciate all the assistance I regularly receive from my editor, Nicole Angeloro. I was fortunate that Liz Duvall once again handled production. I appreciate, too, the assistance of Megan Wilson, Mary Dalton-Hoffman, and Carla Gray. It was a pleasure to work this year with Ariel Levy, who has put together an impressive collection of essays that vividly shows why the genre is so difficult to define. Readers will find here an engaging diversity of moods, voices, stances, and tones, but all with a unifying spirit that reflects the special qualities of her own essays—the seamless dialogue of intimacy and ideas, the creative convergence of public issues and personal identity.

  R.A.

  Introduction

  THE PROBLEM WITH ideas is that you can’t decide to have them.

  Certain kinds of nonfiction can be made to happen. The writer who is diligent, observant, and inquisitive enough can always find a story: you read the paper, you watch the world, you ask enough questions, and sooner or later, there it is. You have to write it, of course, but it exists with or without you. There are decisions to be made—how best to unfurl the information, what to prioritize, whose perspective to privilege. But you do not have to invent the story, you just have to tell it. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m just saying it can be done.

  An essay is another matter. Because whatever its narrative shape, an essay must have an idea as its beating heart. And ideas come to you on their own terms. Searching for an idea is like resolving to have a dream.

  At least that’s been my experience as a writer. Once in a while—a very extended while—an idea is there in my head, ready to become an essay, and I feel lucky and elated. (So long as I have a pen in my purse, that is. “I am always disturbed,” as the composer Igor Stravinsky said of his ideas for musical compositions, “if they come to my ear when my pencil is missing and I am obliged to keep them in my memory.” If he was forced to wait too long to write down his idea, Stravinsky went on, “I am in danger of losing the freshness of first contact and I will have difficulty in recapturing its attractiveness.”) For me, writing an essay is more pleasurable than any other kind of writing. Usually producing prose is like swimming: a test of will and discipline and fitness that feels good after you’ve finished doing it. But writing an essay is like catching a wave.

  That ideas come as they please is just one of the challenges of writing essays, of course. To catch a wave, you need skill and nerve, not just moving water. As anyone can tell you who has paddled belly-down on a surfboard—frantic and futile as a windup tub toy pulled out of the bath—it is by no means a given that you’ll be able to stand up and ride just because the perfect wave comes along. It takes practice and finesse and, not least of all, courage. Because falling off can make you look foolish, and it can hurt. Crafting a piece of writing around an idea you think is worthwhile—an idea you suspect is an insight—requires real audacity. It is an act of daring.

  The pleasure of reading essays is that you don’t have to wait for the waves. (And you don’t have to paddle out and get dragged under and bonked in the face with your surfboard over and over until you’re dizzy and bedraggled and enraged—which may have happened to me once or thrice.) You just lie back on your towel and gaze out toward the horizon.

  There goes Roger Angell, whizzing across the sea! I am no less impressed that he can write an essay as brilliant as “This Old Man” at ninety-three years of age than I would be if I saw him shredding a ten-foot wave—when, as he is the first to admit, “the lower-middle sector of my spine twists and jogs like a Connecticut country road, thanks to a herniated disk seven or eight years ago. This has cost me two or three inches of height, transforming me from Gary Cooper to Geppetto.” Angell’s accomplishment here is significant: he has managed to turn kvetching about aging into a page-turner. (As he quite accurately puts it, “I am a world-class complainer.”) Ultimately, though, his essay isn’t stunning because he wrote it in his tenth decade; it’s just an astoundingly wonderful piece of writing. “‘How great you’re looking! Wow, tell me your secret!’ they kindly cry when they happen upon me crossing the street or exiting a dinghy or departing an X-ray room,” he writes, “while the little balloon over their heads reads ‘Holy shit—he’s still vertical!’” But it’s not all funny. Looming over the essay is the “oceanic force and mystery” of loss. Angell’s oldest daughter, Callie, took her own life. He has outlived most of his friends and contemporaries. Angell’s wife of forty-eight years, Carol, died in 2012, and he still hears her voice in his head. Propelling the reader from Angell’s first sentence to his last is an insight we are desperate to follow until it crashes on the sand: the amazing thing about getting old, Angell tells us, is that the “accruing weight of these departures doesn’t bury us, and that even the pain of an almost unbearable loss gives way quite quickly to something more distant but still stubbornly gleaming.”

  Aging was a big topic in the essays submitted this year, possibly because the baby boomers are doing so much of it. Mark Jacobson, a champion word surfer, has the insight that becoming an alte kaker is no different from becoming middle-aged when you’re accustomed to being a young adult, or from turning into a young adult when you’ve just gotten the hang of hormone-riddled adolescence. At sixty-five, “ear hair and all, I remain resolutely myself. I am the same me from my baby pictures, the same me who got laid for the first time in the bushes behind the high school field in Queens, the same me who drove a taxi through Harlem during the Frank Lucas days, the same me my children recognize as their father, the same me I was yesterday, except only more so by virtue of surviving yet another spin of the earth upon its axis. I was at the beginning again,” Jacobson writes. “A Magellan of me.”

  Those are the ideas and words of two men who have been writing for a long time, and it’s great fun sitting on the shore watching the pros do what they’ve been practicing for decades. But it’s joyous in a different way to see someone who’s just starting out get it right. That’s how I felt reading Kelly Sundberg’s elegant, haunting “It Will Look Like a Sunset.” The insight she gives us is that domestic violence happens “so slowly, then so fast.” (Which is to say that it is not as inconceivable as we—I—might imagine.) She spent years married to someone she found impressive and beautiful: “When our elderly neighbor developed dementia and one night thought a boy was hiding under her bed, Caleb stayed with her. When the child of an administrative assistant in Caleb’s department needed a heart transplant, Caleb went to the assistant’s house and helped him put down wood floors in his basement to create a playroom for the little boy.” Violence enters their life in little flashes—forgivable, far apart. “First he pushed me against a wall. It was two more years before he hit me, and another year after that before he hit me again.” Along the way, there was the creation of a home, the birth of a child, the invention of a shared adult life. And Sundberg takes us inside it. We are with her, in the texture of her days, in the sparkling intimacy of her early relationship with a young man who lived in a cabin in the woods that he built with his own hands. We experience her isolation when they move to be near his parents, and her disbelief as her only friend, the father of her child, becomes increasingly dangerous.

  Her idea—like Angell’s and Jacobson’s and all the writers’ ideas in this book—teaches us something, offers us a new way of thinking about a subject we may imagine we already understand. But her writing also lets us feel what it is like to be her. (An essay need not be in the first person, of course, and not all of these are. In Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Crooked Ladder,” there is no “I”; the writer’s presence is never acknowledged in the writing. But we feel him there all the same—his intellect and his empathy. His idea is enlightening, but it’s his writing that makes us experience it as truth.)

  For me, reading the essays in this anthology was as satisfying and invigorating as glimpsing a school of dolphins rippling in and out of the water: a privilege.

  ARIEL LEVY

  HILTON ALS

  Islands

/>   FROM Transition

  Written on the occasion of Peter Doig’s exhibition

  at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

  for Peter

  I AM WRITING this some time after standing at the edge of the bay for the first time. The bay’s edge runs parallel to the water, from east to west in a not-at-all-straight line. For students of master prints and drawings, a line occurring in nature is the original mark or beginning, inspiring artists from Da Vinci to Picasso and one or two hundred others to wonder how to approximate that line’s naturalness on the page, in an artificial medium, just as I am trying to use another artificial medium—prose—to describe what I see: the water’s edge, little white pebbles embedded in light brown sand at the lip, sand that turns brown and then browner as baby waves wash up and over a little sandy beach like the one I stood on this evening. There was a moon, not full and not at all poetical; on the surface of the water, a small craft hobbled back and forth on the black bay water, like a legless man rocking back and forth on an expanse of black. I could not find irony in anything I saw. There was a bit of moon in the night sky. It killed me. That sky’s largeness and generosity reminded me of how pitiful I can feel on islands, where one’s ideas about the place amount to so much sentimental or ideological bullshit next to shoeless island dwellers with rust-colored heels tramping through pig shit putting pigs to bed, or other island dwellers sitting, legs spread, on a concrete step leading to a little tin-roofed house, a house with one or two rooms and black people coupling and talking their coupling in a bedroom in that house, maybe under a window crammed with stars. I like it here. I stay on this island on weekends, when I visit a friend who lives here, a friend I love like no other. It’s far north of the island my family came from originally, which is smaller, mean, and turned in on itself, like an evil-smelling root. Looking down at the black wavelets in the black night bay—the patterns were visible to me because of that piece of moon—I could not help but think of lines—lines made in nature, and then lines on a canvas or in a drawing, and how those lines were not really very different from lines of writing brought together to describe sensations such as the love I feel on this island with its bay, and my friend, whom I love like no other.

  Earlier in the day, my friend and I came down to the bay with a picnic. After a while, my companion rolled his trouser cuffs up; he walked to the water’s edge and then put his feet in the water. I did not join him. In my mind’s eye I could see his flat, skeletal feet in clear bay water and suddenly I felt such sadness: he could walk away from me at any moment, walk across the water like Jesus or Robinson Crusoe and set up shop on another island, with some other island dweller. Love can make you feel as though you’re shipwrecked; love can make you feel as lonely as an island. Watching my friend standing in the bay water, I wanted to call out to him: Come back! Come back! But he had not left. And yet I feared he would, leaving me behind with all that love and potential and bay water.

  The ripples, not waves, made by the turn of the water near my feet at the edge of the night bay sounded like a dog’s tongue lapping in a bowl half-filled with water, or perhaps the waves lapping sounded like two human tongues meeting inside mouths joined together less out of comfort than boredom, saying, We might as well, what else is there for us on this island but the tedium of being ourselves alone, our jawbones snap into place as we stretch our mouths open, not to accept one another but to accept the hope that can sometimes happen between two people sitting on a bed in a house on an island, let’s call it Barbados, in 1970 or 1971, years before I stood at the wide-open mouth of the bay.

  I am not predisposed to the tenets of geography. East and west remain, for me, abstractions that my mind and body cannot make real, since east and west do not relate to the experience of where I am standing in my mind just now, which is near a bay on another island looking into water as if I have a right to it; Marianne Moore said that. In any case, I don’t have a right to anything, certainly not an island, which cannot be owned, its citizens can only lease it. Islands belong to themselves. In any case. But I cleave to knowing my friend’s island as a way of protecting myself against the memory of other islands I had no choice but to visit at one time or another, like Barbados, which has bays, too. When I am not standing at the edge of the bay on this northern island, I live on another island—Manhattan. Unlike other islands, Manhattan is not a cloud dump. That’s how Elizabeth Bishop described Crusoe’s Caribbean island—as a “sort of cloud dump”—in her brilliant 1971 poem “Crusoe in England.” She goes on:

  Was that why it rained so much?

  And why sometimes the whole place hissed?

  Manhattan hisses—with savagery. It’s an island of bodies while other islands steam with the hissing of volcanoes—volcanoes that dare you to forget that some islands came into being because of volcanic eruptions or tectonic shifts. But no matter how islands like Barbados and Trinidad, say, came to be formed, you can feel them percolating beneath your feet as you walk to market, or up to the graveyard, or on your way to meet a lover. They bubble with impermanence. The whole thing might sink in a minute just as volcanoes erupt in a minute, and it’s that potential impermanence, I think, that contributes to an island’s lonely feel, even in Manhattan, where you have to fight to be alone even if you’re lonely.

  Standing at the edge of the bay, which is a body of water that’s connected to an ocean or a sea, and formed by an inlet of land—standing by the edge of the bay for the first time, I didn’t want to think about all I’d left behind in Manhattan, which is to say I didn’t want to think about my life without my true friend, he whom I love like no other and who introduced me to that northern bay in the first place. To think about my life in the city would be like creating an island that excluded him—an island composed of streets that don’t lead to the edge of a bay but end in rivers, and not to get all Langston Hughes about it, but my whole life I have known rivers but not bays, and not love, not like this. My friend’s love can feel like the best part of islands and its various intensities, its occasional lushness and aridity, colors that hurt your eyes and skin, smells—peppers, onions, frangipani—that can hurt your skin, too, while shattering any idea you might have had about your own originality: the smells and colors on certain islands in the Caribbean, say, are you and you are the smells and colors because for the most part island life is small and intense and no one who lives there or spends any time in that part of the world escapes being absorbed in the din of its colors, the orchestra of its smells, the horizon line where sea and sky meet and go on and on, seemingly forever.

  I want to go on with my friend forever, not least because he wants to know who I am; he wants to see me, and that includes knowing something about my past, and that past includes, of course, my first experiences on islands. He wants to connect my past of water and tectonic shifts with his island, and the bay. One memory: my younger brother and I were sent to visit our mother’s enormous family in 1970 or 1971, when we were around ten and eight, respectively. Being sent away on summer holiday meant leaving behind our social lives in Brooklyn, where we grew up, and where pebbles were embedded in concrete and streetlights relieved the darkness and one would see and smell, on summer nights, acrid children in striped T-shirts, musty earth in vacant lots, rusting car parts in vacant lots, older children sitting in those non-automotive cars smoking cigarettes and pinching the small nipples on small-tittied girls whose long legs in their Bermuda shorts or denim cutoffs were like osprey legs in that they would have trod delicately through bay water, had there been any as lapidary as the bay water edging toward my feet moments before I recalled visiting Barbados as a child, which was not the great adventure some parents, like my own, expect their children to have, especially if those parents are interested in geography and are familiar with the terrain they are sending their children off to see, partially in the hope that their past experience will make their children, whom they cannot see, behave in a way that is responsible to the landscape that the parents themselves used to h
ave their wildest dreams of escape on, but won’t admit to, needing to believe in the fiction of family, of geography, in order to maintain some sense of who they are. The mind unfamiliar with geography does not know how to define any one place. That summer in Barbados: I could only make sense of it through the character of the people, various someones I could touch or sit with at the foot of a stunted coconut tree, people who smelled of themselves, their island. Nevertheless, the homesickness my brother and I felt in Barbados (our first long trip away from everything) could not be assuaged by anything, nor was it in the least modified by knowing one another. Our loneliness cast us further apart than we had ever been and could ever be again. We were guests, charges, therefore our behavior had to contain a certain forced humility. This further emphasized our separateness. The only way we could be in the least bold was to reject one another. We refused to share any experience and agree on its value. The dust on the road rising and settling on concrete walls, on the fronts of houses and in our hair, did not affect us the same. When we had to accompany one of our mother’s relatives to market to buy blowfish, or pork for stew, or something equally foreign, one of us resolutely “liked” this experience while the other did not. Until we arrived in Barbados, my brother and I had wanted to be as much like one another as two people can be. In Barbados, one thing in particular was different: my brother did not dream of one of our older male cousins swallowing my tongue whole and then spitting it out on a plate, then commanding me to lick my own tongue up, which I couldn’t, being tongueless. In short, my brother abandoned me to myself on that island, he who knew what an island was, as though I did not, starting and staring at the water. At home, our mother and sisters had protected our natural timidity. On this trip to that place neither of us could ever call home, my brother had to be as different from me as he could allow. He became less timid and more afraid to be thought unconventional. On that island—where blue, really violet-colored seawater stretched to points east, west, north, and south, points I had seen written in various books but could not make any sense of—he became what he is now: mindful of the fact that he cannot look his girlish brother in the eye. Before Barbados, I had never seen so many black people who disliked one another, or who did not have photographs in their homes. The people we saw quarreled with one another in the streets, in front of their homes. They kicked skinny dogs that hung around their yards with heads bowed; the dogs took as much hurt as those hurt people took from one another. Their fucking sounded like hurt, too. The fucking my brother and I heard those people do occurred after lunch, after they had eaten their strange food and the sun was so hot it was ugly. My brother and I sat not-together on opposite sides of whatever house we were staying in, listening to their bodies breed more misery. There was nothing else for those people to do in that place except dissect one another in the cruelest language imaginable, and breed more people who would behave the same way everyone else did. My brother’s hairline hair was a dark blond that was nearly the color of the sand shifting beneath my feet at the mouth of the bay I stood at so many years later. In Barbados, my brother wanted to join that community of men who talked their sex as much as they performed it. At least in Barbados, his thinking went, he would be recognized as a male (and overvalued as such), not just as the brother or son of so many girls (in Brooklyn we lived with our four sisters, our mother, and Mother’s mother), girls who talked and talked to men as if they weren’t there. Late into our stay, my brother invited two girls into our aunt’s home, where we were staying. My brother invited these two girls in when my aunt was out being unkind to people. I can recall the two young girls looking as thin and vulnerable as my brother and I must have looked then. My brother demanded that I lie on top of one of the girls as he lay on top of the other, on the floor. He wanted me to be less the girl I had become and more of the boy he was inventing himself as, right before my very eyes. I stood over the girl my brother had chosen for me as my brother lay on top of the other girl, both of us writhing in imitation of all we had ever heard other men say to women, listening outside their bedroom windows. The young girl lying beneath me wore a green school uniform and a brown beret. I stood over her for what felt like forever, as forever as standing at the edge of the bay felt, years later. No words came out of my mouth as I lay on top of the young girl not speaking, not daring to move, since what I wanted, she wanted, which was a fatter, bigger, larger tongue that would swallow her own whole, just as I began to be afraid of this: that my brother would never leave the family we were born into, doing everything, including fucking, just as they all have, and perhaps always will. The only photographs I took back from Barbados that summer were photographs of the young girl I could not kiss, photographs I took moments after our non-exchange, since I couldn’t really touch her, she being myself. Once the photographs were developed and installed in my mother’s photograph album, I could not write this girl’s name on the back of the image. I never looked at them again. Labeling photographs was a habit I had developed in Brooklyn, where the people I lived with or my parents’ relatives kept photographs of relatives from Barbados they had never met, keepsakes that didn’t mean a thing. They kept those passport-size portraits taken in a photographer’s studio, against backgrounds meant to resemble small churches, or a bamboo grove, in plastic binders whose covers showed brightly colored flowers in 3-D, or bay water at midnight, with boats on it. The photographs were arranged by my mother in a haphazard way; she was the least sentimental person I have ever known. I wrote the names of the people I could identify on the surface of the pictures my mother had collected because I feared, somehow, that unless I did, everyone connected to my family would be forgotten, long before I began to want to forget them. There was one photograph my mother owned that never ceased to interest me, though. It was oval-shaped and framed in fake gold leaf. Originally, the frame and the image it contained had belonged to my grandmother—my father’s mother. The image was of my grandmother’s nephew, after whom I was named. Hilton Rolston was the name written in faint black script at the bottom of the photograph. In it, one could see his full lips and straight black hair parted in the middle. One could also see his wing collar, tie, and jacket with fairly wide lapels. It was taken sometime in the 1890s, just before Hilton Rolston left Barbados to pan for gold in California nearly sixty years after the gold rush had taken place. I don’t think he knew where he was going, except toward a dream. He was pretty. Perhaps going to California and dying in the gold rush that kept never happening for him was a way to be himself, far from the horror of feigned intimacy that defines family life in Barbados, like most other places. I don’t know a thing about him except what my grandmother told me. Hilton’s portrait is one of the few things she brought with her when she emigrated from Barbados to Brooklyn—that and another large painted photograph, of my grandmother with her father and brother, that was destroyed, along with everything else she owned, in a fire in a house she had bought for her children long before I came along. My mother was given Hilton as a gift, shortly after his namesake was born. In that portrait of Hilton, he appears to be more dead than alive, even though he was photographed and painted when he was alive. The photograph is a memento mori, really, which is a quality that all painted photographs share. And it is what I might have looked like—another memento mori—had I been photographed recently, and the photograph had been painted over, standing at the edge of the bay.