Our Country Friends(67)
On the face of it, the essay was hardly a lit match thrown into a gassy oven. It started out by first laying out all the obvious things wrong with the movie, beginning with the servile portrayals of its Black characters. But then the essay pivoted to the poverty of its viewers (the Cameron family included) and a longing for a fabled, romantic past these Scots-Irish folk had been forced to live off after everything else (the jobs, the hope) had been taken away.
The essay danced along these lines, gently herding the reader in one direction and then surprising her with a shunt in the opposite. Throughout, one could find Dee’s patented bare-knuckle tone directed toward the moneyed reader of leisure. How dare this reader not consider the sources of Dee’s poverty and her own complicity within the scope of rent-seeking capital? How dare she condescend to young Dee for her love of the only narrative in her life that wasn’t disposable trash bought at the “Facial Care” aisle of the Piggly Wiggly?
At several junctures, Dee referred to her impoverished compatriots as “my people,” including at one point a long descriptive list of her kinfolk. (As Senderovsky used to say in his graduate-school class, “When you run out of ideas, just write down a list. Readers love lists.”)
Dee’s list included “…Part-time coyote skinners, drummed-out Fort Bragg PFCs, psoriasis-covered Bible-school lunch ladies, social security disability regs thumpers, racist cops just itching for the right motorist to pull off the tarmac…” Concluding with the line: “As much as you might hate them, as much as you would loathe sharing the aisles of a big-box store with them (you’re more into small, well-scented shops in formerly Black neighborhoods, anyway) and their screaming, undereducated children (my nieces and nephews), these are all my people.”
A screenshot of that passage appeared in mention after mention now colonizing her feed, the words “racist cops” highlighted next to the rubric “mypeople.”
To make matters worse, in The Grand Book of Self-Compromise and Surrender, she had twice featured a racial epithet issuing from an uncle’s mouth (“I wanted it to explode across the page,” she had said in a previous interview), which now too was part of a screenshot next to “mypeople” and “ShitDeeSays.”
And then there were the photos of her next to miscreants from the questionable right during her provocative “I’ll defend to the death your right to say it” phase. And then quotes from those khaki-and-cropped-hair far-right types commenting in the most obviously disgusting ways about what was happening on the streets of the country after the recent murders and the uprisings, followed by the words “another Dee Cameron approved quotation” and, of course, “mypeople, mypeople, mypeople.”
* * *
—
The air had gone out of her, and when it returned she smelled morning breath and sweat. She felt disassociated from her body, one leg cold as roadkill against the other. She sat there, with the laptop jammed against her crotch, both her right eye, a frequent victim of eyestrain, and the cursor on the screen blinking away.
Again, what the hell was happening?
She had been found out, exposed. But for what? All of this had been allowed just weeks before. Everything she had written came with just the right amount of nuance. It had been lab tested and publicist approved.
It was like the time the Laotian American had corrected her during her book tour, but that was a private moment. This was on social media, which meant it had been imprinted on the face of God.
Some of the new missives had attached the name of his three-million-followers-plus account. “Have you been following your girlfriend lately?” “Not a good look for you, babes.” “Maybe you can do GlenRacist Glen Ross next.” “Stick that baby squash up your GF’s ass.” She continued to sit there, paralyzed. Soon his footsteps would echo up the stairs, and they would commence another day of farm-stand hopping and posing for pictures. Would he laugh it off? Would he claim that nothing could happen to the First Couple of Quarantine? That they were too cute to fail?
But there was no such thing anymore. She had been thrust beyond the cordon sanitaire and now interred on the wrong side of history.
No, it could not be!
She would not allow it!
She did not know how she had gotten there, how her legs had gained the agency, but she was now standing naked in front of the bathroom mirror, brushing her teeth. She opened the door to the medicine cabinet so that she wouldn’t have to look at her face, at the white toothpaste frothing at the corner of her mouth like the final effects of a hemlock intake. Senderovsky had cleared out most of his voluminous medicine, but there was still a shelf stocked with a stool softener and a stool hardener named ExitPro and Carpathium Plus, respectively. If she swallowed all of those pills at once, might she implode?
She rinsed and flossed, everything by the book. Now she would get in the shower and clean, clean, clean, the steaming hot water of the newly fixed shower making her skin rosy and dappled, anything but white. She did not hear him enter and only registered his presence after he had slipped his arms around her waist, his breath full of caffeine and the nonpareil sesame bagels his agency had sent him from Montreal. “Get away from me!” she screamed.
“What?” He had put on his hurt, bewildered baby face.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I need to shower first. I’m gross.”