Anxious Attachments

Beth Alvarado

• Publisher: Autumn House Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781938769382
• eBook ISBN: 9781938769481
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

The stunning, intimate essays in Anxious Attachments take us through the life stages of a woman living in the American Southwest from the 1970s to the present. As she moves from adolescence into adulthood, the narrator grapples with attachments that develop through her family and her ties to the wider world around her while she works as a teacher, writer, and caregiver. Though written from a single woman's perspective, these essays invite us to reflect on the many roles women play and the social factors that touch upon them. Alvarado's stories portray a broad world of experience, reflecting on class, race, and poverty in America with emotional depth and sensitivity.
 

Die Die Die

It was 1980, I’m going to guess. I had the news on while I was making dinner, so I must have been listening while I cooked and then peering into the living room to see specific coverage. We had a very small black-­and-­white TV then, one I could put into the closet when I got tired of its noise. I remember Michael was sitting rock-­still in front of it. He turned to me and asked, with quite a bit of anguish for a five-­year-­old, “Why is it men who always do the bad things?”

This was long before any of us could ever have imagined someone going into a school with an assault weapon and shooting children. I mean, there was that one white guy in 1966 who’d climbed up the bell tower in Austin and opened fire on the students, killing fourteen and wounding more, and then in 1970 the National Guard had killed four student protestors at Kent State, and the Mississippi State Police had killed two at Jackson State. Still, those seemed isolated incidents, nothing like the regular fare since Columbine.

Now we say: Where? How many this time? How old?

Yesterday, as Kathryn and I were watching the footage of the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, where seventeen people were murdered, I told her that story about her brother. I said, “Little boys are so sweet.”

We were both thinking, of course, of her twin toddlers, not even eighteen months old, and how when you hold them, they gaze into your eyes and twirl your hair with their fingers, how they rub their faces against yours in affection. I was also thinking of Michael’s sons, nine and twelve, and of Michael, himself. Five sweet boys.

As a friend of mine says: boys wear their hearts outside of their bodies.

———

In November 2016, when Michael came with his family to visit for Thanksgiving, I kept hearing the older boy, as they were playing video games, saying to the younger one that he would sacrifice himself. Every time I heard him say this, even though I knew it was his character he was talking about, I felt he was being noble and sweet. They take their games very seriously, after all, and disputes can erupt in fistfights. This Thanksgiving, as I sat down next to William and watched him play, I realized his character—or avatar?—was really a suicide bomber.

This game, I don’t know how to explain it if you’ve never played one, is not realistic. It’s like you are in the world of the game—not watching from outside, but inside the head of the avatar, a first-­person protagonist. You see only what the avatar sees so, generally, down the sights of the barrel of a weapon. As the avatar rushes down a street, the landscape rushes by as if in your peripheral vision. In this particular game, what the avatar sees is a bunch of blocks rushing by or, more accurately, buildings suggested by line drawings. Your mind has to fill in the details and this must draw you even more deeply into the imaginary because you participate in creating it.

“Where are we?” I ask William.

“In a mall,” he says.

“A shopping mall?”

“Yeah,” he says, not missing a beat. We are hurrying, scurrying on, staying close to what I guess are walls for cover.

“So, this is about urban warfare?” I ask.

“No,” he says.

“But we’re in a shopping mall,” I say.

William is smart. Only twelve, he’s been reading at the high school level for a few years. He can read a thick novel a day, two if he doesn’t have to go to school or is on restriction from electronics. He has been saying to me, since he was two years old, “Well, actually, Nana. . .” and thus, politely, correcting my errors in many matters, even physics and the anatomy of birds.

“Okay,” he says, “Yeah. I guess you could call it urban warfare.”

“What are we doing?” I ask him.

“Well, we want to get in a crowd before we detonate. We want to take out at least four or five others.”

“We’re a suicide bomber?”

“Well, it’s just, technically, the more we take out, the more points we get.”

“But we die, too, so we’re a suicide bomber.”

“Okay. Yeah.” He shrugs. Then, “Watch out! See that guy up there? He’s a sniper. Snipers are the bane of our existence.”

I did some research on suicide bombings for a book. They cause a lot of eye injuries, I wanted to tell him, because when people hear the noise, they turn to look in that direction. They open their mouths to scream and, sometimes, bone fragments from the bomber get lodged in their lungs.

———

When I was a child, I would not have known what a suicide bomber or even a sniper was. Now I cannot see a video game except for through the lens of reality and, therefore, the lens of suffering. I cannot divorce the game from the events that gave rise to it in the first place. But William can because, to him, I guess, it’s just a game. A video game may not be art, but it is mimetic in its own way.

When Michael was little, I made him “stun guns” out of clothespins. I told him they would just put the enemy to sleep, so he could get away. This seemed to satisfy him. When he had little plastic cowboys and Indians, and his cowboys, the good guys, were dispatching the Indians, I tried to explain the history of the West. But how do you explain genocide to a four-­year-­old? Soon the Indians were retaliating and winning. When I asked my mother-­in-­law what she thought about giving him toy guns, she said, “He knows it’s just make-­believe.” And so I let his fourteen-­year-­old uncle, who often babysat him, make them guns out of wood and sticks and they, along with Michael’s aunt, who was eight, would chase one another around in elaborate games of hide-­and-­seek.

Now, when I watch Michael’s sons, they argue about who gets the Nerf gun that holds the most “bullets,” so essentially the dispute is about the magazine, the firepower. Why is it that their worst fights erupt over guns or video games? That Gavin’s worst nightmares happen after he watches movies like Star Wars? They don’t watch the news, so I’m not sure if they’re even aware that our country has been involved in a war for longer than they’ve been alive, but they do know what suicide bombers are and snipers.

Am I overthinking it? But I wonder, sometimes, what kind of inchoate messages are coming down to them? Something about dominance. Something about violence as a form of power. Something about anger as a thing that makes you strong and even excuses aggressive behavior. Something about masculinity that, for Michael, took the form of the question: “Why is it men who always do the bad things?”

———

Emma González’s body was vibrating with anger in her first speech after the mass murder in Parkland, Florida. Her head shaved, her expressive face, her voice hoarse, she was wiping away tears as she spoke. When she addressed those who had criticized the students, saying they had ostracized the shooter, her voice became even more raw with anger. Still, she spoke: “You didn’t know this kid. We did.”

If you are a parent, chances are you know this kid. When Kathryn was a young teenager, probably fourteen, her boyfriend, who was older, was one of those kids. When she broke up with him, he came into our house, while she was alone, and slit his wrists in front of her. They weren’t deep cuts, but she felt threatened, afraid he would turn the X-­Acto knife on her. She remembers embracing him and telling him that she loved him while she slowly walked him to the door, thinking, the entire time, please don’t cut me, and then she shoved him out of the house and locked the door between them.

When she still refused to see him, he got three of her girlfriends to break into the house with him, again when she was alone, and threaten her. She locked herself in our bedroom and wouldn’t ...

Table of contents

• In a Town Ringed by Missiles
• Shelter
• The Motherhood Poems
• Clarity
• Notes from Prague
• Days of the Dead
• Stars and Moons and Comets
• Anxious Attachments
• Water in the Desert
• Los Perdidos
• Ordinary Devotions
• Cautionary Tales
• Die Die Die
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at Grief
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• NOTES FOR “Water in the Desert”
• NOTES FOR “Los Perdidos”
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR