Sue lives in the country now, on a farm outside a small town not far from Barneveld, where she and her second husband raise Red and Black Angus cattle. Way out past the county centers, they can’t always hear tornado sirens when they go off.
“It depends upon the way the wind is blowing,” she says. I ask her if this scares her, and she says it does. But her husband, Pat, always says he’ll protect her. She looks me in the eye when she tells me this, that familiar smile back on her face.
“And I say, ‘You can’t promise that, buddy.’”
When I left the Midwest and moved to New York, there was a thunderstorm in the spring. I called my landlord and asked if we could have access to the basement in case of tornadoes.
“Honey,” he said with a laugh and a thick Irish accent, “we don’t get tornadoes here.” A tornado struck Queens the following summer.
When I first heard the Friday-night siren in Brooklyn signaling the start of Shabbat—the same siren that sounds in Wisconsin to signal a coming tornado—I ducked for cover. Once, while walking back from a park with friends as the sky turned dark, as the wind began to whip in such a way that the leaves were blown from their branches and spun, midair, in small cyclones, none of my companions listened when I said we should run.
It turns out, people who grow up on the coasts—those who don’t call March through July tornado season—don’t share the same thrilling fear that haunts me each spring. With coastal climates come hurricanes, but also an advanced warning system—with days or even weeks to prepare. By comparison, the average warning time for tornadoes is thirteen minutes. And sometimes, there’s no warning at all. I’ve lived through two hurricanes in New York, and in both cases I watched people scramble in the days leading up to the storm, pillaging grocery-store shelves of every last loaf of bread, packing cars in a panic and hurrying out of town, their apartment windows taped in large blue Xs like a cross, like some desperate act of faith, like something already gone. Despite living in a mandatory evacuation zone, despite having family in New Orleans whose house was destroyed by Katrina, despite knowing that hurricanes can be just as deadly as tornadoes, I stayed. My decision wasn’t wise, but I was never really afraid.
Fear, for me, is an unpredictable force—an unknowable, volatile thing that strikes suddenly, at any time. Fear, for me, is living in the annual path of destruction, where tree trunks are permanently twisted and silos wear cracks like reminders, where shallow ditches along empty rural highways are the only place to hide if you get caught on the road in a storm. Fear is the knowledge that you can be asleep one second, safe in your bed, and with a single clap of thunder your house can collapse around you. It’s in the ghostly quiet that heralds sudden devastation. It’s waiting for the wail of sirens, or worse—knowing they might never go off. It’s a fear born in every Midwesterner, and no matter how far away you move, it never really leaves you.
I wonder, sometimes, if I believed in God, would I still feel so afraid?
On the first Wednesday of March, as winter turns to spring, the sirens in southern Wisconsin are tested for the first time of the year. Their wail starts out low, and then grows louder, each massive, oscillating horn creating a cyclical fade and roar, so loud at each peak it can be heard across county lines. They are tested this way every Wednesday at noon through November. But on that first day, when the season’s first siren sounds, this is when people remember. They might remember the moments after a storm, pushing open cellar doors and climbing old stone steps to survey the damage on their farm. They might recall stepping among the ruins of their town, pulling up boards and unearthing belongings that once comprised a home, touching the twisted branches of trees, crouching to scratch crying cats. They might remember broken glass, a crumbled staircase, a roof caved in. They might remember a blanket. And they will remember this way every time a low growl of thunder rolls across the sky. They will remember when the clouds begin to build, when they billow and hum; when the leaves of maples start to whip and the branches of birches bend in the wind. They will remember when the air becomes so thick and electric they can feel it in their teeth, when the sky turns from blue to gray to green.
They don’t test sirens where I live now, a thousand miles away from Mount Horeb, from Barneveld, from home. But sometimes, in early June, when the wind kicks up from the west, I think I can still hear them.
TOMBOY
I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into me—to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks.
—Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
A few years ago, I went out for drinks with a new friend. We’d met at a mutual friend’s birthday party, and this was our first time out alone. When I showed up to the bar, a dimly lit oyster spot in Brooklyn, I quickly realized she thought we were on a date. She wore a semitransparent white shirt and bright-red lipstick, her long hair falling in dark curls around her shoulders. She was attractive. We sat at the bar and talked; she flirted, and I tried not to. I downed a drink and some oysters, then ordered another round. The bar was packed and hot. I peeled off my sweater, and dabbing the sweat off my neck, worked up the nerve to say what I needed to.
“So,” I started, “I should tell you.” She leaned in closer. When we’d first arrived, she had pulled my chair, with me on top of it, closer to hers. It was a bold move, and one I couldn’t help but admire. Our knees were almost touching.
“I’m in a relationship,” I said with a grimace. “A committed one.”
“Ah,” she said, leaning back a little. A flash of disappointment in her eyes, her chin dipped in a slow nod of recognition. But she smiled. “Well, that’s OK,” she said.
“The thing is,” I went on, procrastinating, searching the bottom of my glass for any sweet remnant of whiskey that might be hiding in the ice, “it’s with a man.”
To say I watched her face fall would be an understatement. It plummeted headlong off a cliff into a swamp of disbelief and despair.
“No,” she said, stretching out the moan of the oh as she turned from me toward her drink, poured what was left of it down her throat, then planted her elbows on the bar and held her head in her hands. It was an inflated gesture, partly for comic effect—my new friend was funny—but her surprise was genuine.
“No way,” she said, shaking her head.
I nodded, my stomach tight with regret—not for the fact itself but for the thought of disappointing this new person whom I liked so much, this funny queer woman who I hoped might be my friend. I felt an old, familiar fear: that she would no longer want anything to do with me now that she knew the truth.
She looked at me, shook her head, and said:
“I can’t believe you’re straight.”
The night we first met, my partner, John, was sure I was gay. (And for what it’s worth, I assumed the same of him, which makes for a pretty funny story to tell at parties.) I don’t talk about my sexuality or gender identity much; I’ve never felt particularly connected to a certain identity, nor has any language ever quite seemed to fit. And where I come from, we’re not raised to talk about ourselves—let alone our sexual proclivities or gender identities. I had never even heard the term gender identity until late in college, when I took a bold leap and enrolled in a women’s studies class. It hadn’t occurred to me a person had a gender identity, let alone that it might be in conflict with their biological sex.