You'd Be Home Now (100)
My mother is with them. She starts to cry when she sees us pull up.
She doesn’t say anything when my dad helps Joey out of the car. She just wraps him in her arms, tightly.
When she’s done, one of the counselors, a gentle-looking old man, says, “I’m Barry. Are you ready to go inside, Joe?”
My brother doesn’t say anything for a long time. I’m afraid he’s going to do what my dad said. Change his mind. Run. Walk away.
“What’s going to happen?” he asks.
“We’ll get you rested,” the counselor says. “In detox for a week or so, then general, and then we’ll see. We’ll go very slowly, Joe. Does that sound all right to you?”
We wait, my mother gripping my arm.
“Yes,” my brother says finally. “But I don’t need that.” He gestures to the wheelchair.
He begins walking.
We follow my brother into the bright light.
Emory Ward
American Classics
December 21, 2020
The Portrait of a Lady
Dear Mr. Watson,
First, let me start by saying that I understand this is not the paper you wanted me to write. I know what grade I will receive and I’m fine with that. Wait, I don’t want to use the word “fine.” I’ve been thinking about that word so much for the past year and a half. How we say we are “fine” when we really aren’t. How we use it to accept a situation we don’t know how to deal with. “It’s fine.” When really, in our heads, if you could see, would be these words, scrawled in giant permanent marker: “Help me.” I don’t want a poor grade, but I also realize that I don’t have a lot left in me at this moment in my life and that this paper, as my brother Joey might say, “is what it is.”
I first read The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James last year, for another class. (Is that cheating if I reread something I read for another class? It can’t be, can it, since teachers assign us some of the same books for years on end; remember, I’ve been reading The Scarlet Letter for about four years now. Maybe it’s not that we don’t want to read it, but that by now, we’re bored of it. Something for you to think about when you plan the book list for the future.) Now, as then, I don’t know if I fully understand what happens in the novel, but I loved it anyway. Isn’t that strange? To love something you can’t fully grasp? It isn’t even something I can attach one of your required literary terms to. I just felt a sensation while reading it—I felt swept up, transported, enveloped, comforted, even. I sank into the book. Isabel Archer is batted about not necessarily by any choice of her own, but by what is expected of her: to conform, to belong, to be married, to take her place as a woman of privilege and intelligence, regardless of her own dreams and wishes. Forces that shaped her life long before she was even born. I guess I identified with that because of who I am in my family, in this town, even this high school. I don’t feel like I get to make many choices on my own. They were set out for me before I was even a thought to my parents, polished and gleaming. They were set out for me the moment the first brick was laid for the Mill.
Do you want me to talk about the Mill? I’m sure you’ve heard that my mother is going to sell the buildings and the land to a nonprofit, instead of a ritzy condo developer. There’s going to be a big fight, probably. Zoning things I don’t quite understand. It took my mother some time to make this decision and I hope Mill Haven, as a whole, accepts what she’s trying to do. Did you know, long ago, that the whole idea behind the Mill, besides money, was also one of benevolence? I think that’s a fantastic word, by the way. Build the Mill, the foundry, and fan out, across the town, with dormitories for the workers (who were, in the beginning, farm girls), and then, because the workers needed it, build the school, give them a hospital, a library, houses, and on and on. And when the Mill closed, a part of the town died. The river was dead. It just sat there, for years and years, a ghost at the end of town. If I stand in my brother’s attic room, on our hill off Aster Avenue, did you know I can see practically the whole town? All the big houses on our hill, and then down to Main Street, and to the east Polish Town, where the houses are smaller, and the west, where they are smaller still. From my hill, I see everything, and at the very end of it, always, is my beginning: the Mill. I think my mother is grappling with that. How to be benevolent again. But you can’t push her; I’ve learned that. I might be getting ahead of myself, here. But I’m thinking of that word, benevolence, a lot. We could all probably be a little more benevolent in life. We all live here, after all. We all share the same mighty good company of the stars at night, and everyone deserves kindness, and survival. Everyone deserves to be seen.
You know who I am. Or you think you do, much like people think they know Isabel in the book. Presumptions based on her appearance, her background. I’m quiet, I like to read, my family has a lot of money, my life will be safe. I am a good and safe girl, is what you probably think, and your job is to guide me through my intellectual development. But (and no offense intended here), as Isabel says in the book, “I don’t need the aid of a clever man to teach me how to live. I can find it out for myself.” And for better or worse, that’s what I’m doing right now.
I think that might have been one of the problems with your book list. You chose that list because those are the books that you loved, that you know, that you think we should read (and also, Lolita is completely inappropriate for high school; I don’t know why you thought you could sneak it in there. Plus, do not underestimate Liza Hernandez; if anyone from Mill Haven is going to make their mark in the outside world, it’s Liza). You didn’t really look at us as individuals when you made that list. You just probably saw us as one seething mass of hormones and cell phones and memes and sighs and boredom that could be whipped into shape with a healthy dose of symbolism, allegory, and foreshadowing, just to name a few of the literary terms you asked us to use in this paper.