By Callie Feyen
@calliefeyen 

I am reading a poem about January and Jesse has a toothache that I think might kill him.

“It could go to your brain or your heart,” I say. “Or BOTH,” I express as I twirl my wedding ring around and around my finger. “And you’ll die.”

“Callie, that’s not going to happen,” Jesse tells me.

“It DOES happen,” I tell him. “It happened to somebody in my family.”

“Who?”

“I can’t remember his name, but he was a dentist.”

Jesse says nothing, but closes his eyes and puts his head against the chair he’s sitting on. He can’t lie down. The pain gets worse if he lies down.

“I mean, can you even believe that, Jesse? He was a dentist. That’s like you not being able to tell what a hurricane is going to do, or, I don’t know, something important about the Great Lakes.”

“Callie,” he says. It’s a sigh; a plea for me to stop talking.

“What I’m saying is,” I continue, “you should know how to do your job and in this case it cost him his life.”

I think the poem is about want. There’s talk about yearning for a cigarette, in the first few lines. I don’t know anything about wanting a cigarette, but if I’m honest, I do miss the mixture of smoke and beer in bars. I’d get home and smell like I’d been somewhere. That’s back in the time when smoking was allowed inside. Back then, Oak Park, the town I grew up in was dry and so we went to Forest Park, the next town over. “The Street of Broken Dreams,” is what we called this strip of avenue with bar after bar after bar on it. We had some great times there.

Once, I ran into an old English teacher at a place called Doc Ryans. It was strange, standing face–to-face holding a beer with a guy who busted me on more than one occasion for leaving school at times when I was supposed to be in it.

“So how about that persuasive essay from ’94?” is what I asked him, raising my pint as a cheers. I could’ve led with, “How are you?” Or, “What are you up to these days?” I could’ve told him I was a teacher. THAT would’ve been a story starter. Instead, I chose to embark on a conversation about the most intense, difficult assignment I’ve ever been given.

About a decade before I came to high school, there was a custodian who was loved by everyone in the school—a fact I found unbelievable because the only custodians I knew hated us, and we weren’t too fond of them, either. Once, one literally took an apple out of my mouth when I was sneaking food in between classes.

“Only in the lunchroom, and only at lunch,” she said holding the apple she’d just taken.

“But I’m starving and I think I’m anemic,” I told her.

“Do you have a note?” she demanded.

“For my apple?”

“For your anemia,” she clarified.

“No, but I can see stars right now, and I am pretty sure I’m going to faint.”

She threw my apple in the trash, then turned and walked away—her rolling garbage can at her side.

Anyway, at some point it became known that this beloved custodian was an SS Guard, and the school and community were torn apart. Should he stay? Should he stand trial? Should he stay in the States and stand trial? Should he be sent back to Germany? Nobody could agree. Everyone was in pain. Everyone was angry.

A decade later, our assignment was to write a persuasive essay about what the fate of this man should be. We read The Diary of Anne Frank, and Night by Elie Wiesel. We went to the theatre and watched Schindler’s List. We wrote and we debated. It was brutal, and this was the topic I broached on a Saturday night in an Irish pub that claimed to have the most incredible nightlife in the Western suburbs of Chicago.

“I’ve been doing more research on him,” my old English teacher told me. “That guy was guilty as hell.”

The poet also wants snow, and goes so far as to suggest that this is what’s supposed to happen in January. I completely agree. I get what some might say “irrationally angry” when it’s suppose to snow and doesn’t.

“That’s the world we are living in now,” Jesse has told me. “Because of climate change,” he’ll add. And then he’ll send me like five-six links to essays written by scientists proving his point. I’m not arguing with him, and I’m not reading the articles because science writing is boring. Have you seen a scientist ever give a PowerPoint presentation? You don’t read directly from the slides is all I’m saying. If you know something, you need to make it interesting like what I did when I told Jesse about my relative whose name I’ve forgotten but died from a toothache and he was a dentist. All facts. But I’ve made them startling.

Jesse’s toothache was really bad on the day of the insurrection at the Capitol. Can I call it that? Is that offensive? Too political? Or, is that what it is? I have a hard time distinguishing between facts and emotions. I think it’s because some facts are emotional: a noose outside the Capitol and signs that read, “Hang Pence.” Guns drawn. A husband who slams his spoon down and holds his hand to his mouth because it hurts to even eat veggie chili that I’ve used an immersion blender on as if he’s 103 and has no teeth.

“Is this a movie?” I asked, while we watched TV, the same question I asked on September 11, 2001.

“No,” Jesse said. “People broke into the Capitol,” he added, holding a bag of ice to his mouth.

Jesse loves facts, and it’s not that I don’t, it’s just that he and I approach the relaying of the facts differently. At our worst, I come across as melodramatic and irrational, and he comes across as patronizing and arrogant. Lately, with the pandemic, virtual everything, the election, and now this, Jesse and I have been pushed to our worst.

“You really need to call the dentist,” I said to him as we both leaned toward the TV to study a picture of Secret Service with their guns drawn. “Seriously,” I said. “I need you not to die right now.”

He said nothing.

Hours later I was scrolling through Facebook and saw he had updated his status.

“My girls are scared,” he wrote, which surprised me because this was totally out of character for him to express feelings. He must’ve really been in physical pain.

That’s not all he wrote. He had words—fighting words—about the then POTUS and asked why people voted for him. My stomach twisted as I waited to read replies.

One woman explained that our girls were scared because we were raising liberals. Someone told him to be careful. Someone I love and admire, calmly and thoughtfully told him off. Another person said it was good we weren’t living there anymore.

I thought about the night we went to see an IMAX movie with friends then walked to a nearby pub, the Capitol a backdrop to our laughter and conversation. I thought about how we could go for a drive and in 30 minutes be somewhere totally different: the busy streets of Georgetown, or standing on a bridge at Harper’s Ferry, at the edge of where the Civil War broke out. On the banks of the Chesapeake Bay ordering oysters at a bar that smelled of Old Bay Seasoning and ocean—the oysters were still wet from the bay and my lips were doused in salty sand as I slurped up what was inside. This is where our children were born, where they took their first steps, and spoke their first words.

“I wish you hadn’t posted that,” I told Jesse.

“I’m sorry you are uncomfortable,” was his reply.

“That is not an apology,” I said.

“I know,” he said, shifting the bag of ice so it pressed harder on his jaw.

Back in high school, while we were studying persuasion, our teacher had us debate about the SS Guard’s future, weekly. We would debate the side we were on, and then he made us switch sides and argue for the side we disagreed with. I was sick to my stomach and sweating for the entire hour. Many students cried. Several yelled. Nobody ever left the classroom, though. We all stayed.

“This is not the place to have an intelligent, vulnerable conversation,” I ended up writing in the comments of Jesse’s post.

“Where is then?” a friend of mine commented back.

I have yet to answer her, but I’ve thought about the sycamore tree in the poem I am reading. It falls across two streets. It falls because it’s parched and cannot stand in the January wind, so it gives up and lands on an intersection, and now nobody can get anywhere.

My friend is right. We can’t go into bars or coffee shops. We can’t go into each other’s homes. Words are all we have. We have lost the ability to touch. We have lost subtext and tone. We are no longer able to stand in nuance. We have all fallen, lovesick and broken, at a crossroads I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to pass.  

I am finished reading this poem, and Jesse’s mouth has swelled up so that he looks like he’s holding a golf ball on one side of it. I don’t want him to be in pain anymore, but I am thinking that perhaps the physical pain has been a relief for the other broken and fragmented pieces he’s been embracing lately.

I want him to get better. I want our country to figure out a way to heal. I want my family and friends who I disagree with and who disagree with me to come over and have dinner with me.

I want for so much, but reading this poem I am wondering if wanting something is the more aggressive—and courageous—form of hope.