Photo by Andrzej Kryszpiniuk on Unsplash
“So that’s who you want to side with? You feel some sort of Italian brotherhood with Christopher Columbus?” She knew the scorn in her voice wasn’t helping her case, but come on. Seriously? He was the icon? The role model? Christopher fucking Columbus? “The Niña? The Pinta? The fucking Santa Maria?”
“Just stop.” He sighed and rolled his eyes. She hated his dismissiveness. She felt her jaw tighten and heat rise in her face as she tried to regulate her breathing.
“So why did we send him to a bilingual school?” Lena crossed her arms and glared at her husband. Who the fuck was she married to? Fox News? Obviously, relationships were about compromise, but this felt ridiculous. She forced herself to turn and carry on with dinner preparations, refusing to look at the asshole who she, shockingly, had married, and borne a child with.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” His pompous, superior calm irked her beyond belief. Did nothing upset this man? Were three little birds perpetually perched beyond his doorstep? Lena sighed, suddenly feeling like a hypocrite. She was the one constantly espousing de-escalation to her clients. Calm was good. But with Ray, she often had this niggling feeling it was a costume he slid on in order to prove a point, a zen jacket, in contrast to the fiery anger that surged through her veins like some kind of accelerant. What would a zen jacket look like? She pictured Ray draped in a kimono-like robe, all lumped up over his plaid button-down, chanting passive aggressive oms, side-eyeing her clenched fists and red face with satisfaction. Lena closed her eyes for a moment, gathered herself, arranged her features into a pleasant expression, and reluctantly turned from her cooking once again to face Ray, who sat glued to his phone, apparently still prioritizing work after returning home a mere thirty minutes prior. A flame shot from her belly and ignited her body again.
“Ray!” she said sharply. He looked up with a world weariness that threatened to blow her hard-won calm. She carefully set the knife down on the counter, inhaled through her nose, exhaled through her mouth, and counted to three before she spoke. “I assumed a bilingual school would be a touch more liberal than genocidal colonizer worship when disseminating historical information.”
Jack had proudly waved his paper cut-out of a ship, painted purple and glued to a double popsicle stick, when she picked him up at 2:00 that afternoon. “It’s the Pinta!” Jack wriggled, patting Lena’s arm and gazing up at her, thrilled to display his preschool creation.
“Oh! Que lindo!”
Jack scowled. “Mommy, no Spanish!”
Lena sighed, and asked about his new artwork. In English. Jack was happy to comply. In English. Christopher Columbus sailed across the ocean blue. He had three ships: the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. He discovered America. He was brave. He was bold. He was an adventurer.
“Hmmm. Well. Uh. So—okay. He, uh—” Could she? Should she? Fuck it. No way was she shutting up and raising a happy little colonizer. “Can I tell you something?” she asked.
“Yeh, heh, heh, heh, hesssss!!!!!!” sang Jack, and he sailed his colorful ship through the air while she strapped him into the stroller.
“Imagine this,” Lena began. She and Jack started their mile and a half walk from preschool to the house. Well, Lena walked. Jack rolled, twisting sideways in his little seat to gaze back at his mother. “Christopher Columbus probably was brave,” she affirmed, “because traveling on a ship across the ocean would be really scary!”
“Yeah!” Jack nodded earnestly.
“You would be far from home, and you would go up and down on huge waves with no land in sight!”
“That’s scary!” shouted Jack, rapt at his mother’s description, sailing his ship violently up and down on the imaginary sea. Lena gazed at her small son and felt the magnetic pull that drew her into his orbit on a daily basis.
“Want a snack?” Lena pulled a string cheese out of her purse. Jack made a stinker face. “Wow,” laughed Lena. She started to tuck it back in her bag. “Tough crowd!”
“Mommy I want it I want it!” he insisted, then he poked at her with his grubby little fingers. She grabbed a wet wipe out of her to-go pack and swiped at his sticky hands before peeling the plastic off the mozzarella and handing it over.
“What if someone showed up here on a big boat and said they discovered this place?” Lena asked her son. She ducked, avoiding a low hanging bougainvillea poking dangerously over the sidewalk.
“But we’re already here!” Jack’s freckled nose wrinkled with confusion.
“Exactly! You are SO smart! That is what happened with Christopher Columbus. There were people here way before Christopher Columbus—different tribes of people—we call them indigenous people. Say indigenous.”
“Indijaluss.”
“Indigenous, baby—nuss—with an n.” Lena loved Jack’s eagerness to learn, his ability to process complex information, his incredible retention. She secretly reveled in her belief that Jack was a superior child. He slept through the night at ten weeks. He ate salmon. He could catch a ball. Lena would listen to the other preschool moms bemoan their child’s pickiness, or wonder how long they were going to co-sleep, or she would watch a little boy at the park flail his feet awkwardly at a soccer ball, and sudden stinging judgments would surge through her brain. Stop offering macaroni and cheese at every meal. Take your child to the park and practice. And for god’s sake, put them in their own bed! What was wrong with people, Lena would wonder, before noticing her judgments, and forcing herself to reframe with a compassionate, therapeutic perspective. Maybe the child is going through a growth spurt, she would imagine, and experiencing an uncoordinated phrase. Maybe the child has allergies, and salmon gives them hives. The co-sleeping though, mystified her. Any sex life that wasn’t severely diminished by the arrival of a newborn would surely be completely dead with a three-year-old in the bed.
Lena suspected that many of these supposedly well-educated adults were creating unfortunate deficiencies in their children. But Jack. She gazed at his smooth baby skin, lightly dusted with freckles, and his long, thick lashes. And if potty training was taking a bit longer than expected, he was certainly still well within the normal range. No one was perfect. He was so intelligent, soaking up concepts and vocabulary so effortlessly. Sometimes he would pretend to read, recite entire picture books. The other day he did Room on the Broom word-perfect from memory, and that was over twenty pages. She supposed though, if her mind was as uncluttered as that of a healthy, happy, well-fed three-year-old, she would probably remember more too.
Sometimes Lena pictured the inside of her brain like an art installation she had seen at least a decade ago. Where had she been? Which museum? Something about the piece had resonated deeply, and still evoked a vague foreboding, an image of the brain as a honeycomb, secrets tucked in tidy compartments, each crowding up to the next, stacked and layered in a cluttered, cryptic pattern of interconnectedness. Lena loved art, but museums weren’t her thing. They tended to rankle a bit, in the way of the literary canon. The question of who got to decide that this portrait, that sculpture, was the preeminent work, the museum quality loot, was always at the forefront of her consciousness, and got in the way of true enjoyment. She often felt vaguely performative. Other museum-goers seemed to possess a natural rhythm, strolling through the galleries, knowing exactly where to stop, and how long to gaze, drifting effortlessly, lost on a tide of fascination. Lena, on the other hand, always felt itchy and self-conscious. She wanted to look at the few pieces that drew her in, then was eager to ignore the rest, and move briskly from room to room. Museums disarmed Lena, made her feel immature and impatient, and so she would stare with false interest at art she disliked, and remain longer than she wanted in front of the few pieces she actually did like. She could happily make it in and out of any museum in under an hour, but this did not fit with the sophisticated image she wished to project to the world.
And yet for some reason, Lena could still picture that one brain-like art piece in great detail. Probably because it had become connected, in her mind, to her sporadic bouts of intense insomnia. For a few months each year, Lena would endure endless nights where her body ached for sleep, but her overactive mind refused to shut down, and instead, visited room after room, jumped from box to box, sending Lena down a rabbit hole of anxiety. The boxes must have been in a contemporary museum, because they were part of a large installation, a sculpture of sorts, three dimensional, experimental. The basic structure was a series of boxes, hundreds of small wooden boxes in different sizes, lacquered a monochromatic prison gray, in something of a triangulation—the boxes faced outwards on every side, and the viewer could circle around and inspect the sculpture from all angles. Inside every box was something—or a variety of somethings—carved shapes, attached objects—but few were recognizable. The gray paint, the shadows, the sheer volume of boxes and shapes made it difficult to see any one thing in particular. Lena remembered thinking the installation would make a great set piece for a Shakespearean tragedy—perhaps Macbeth, or Hamlet, or Lear—any of the plays that took place inside the brain of a problematic protagonist descending into madness.
Lena shook her head slightly, dispelling the strange gray image, and refocused on Jack, who was now singing the seven continents song. At least they were teaching him something useful.
“Columbus wasn’t nice to the indigenous people,” Lena continued, as Jack got to Antarctica, and trailed off.
“What did he do?” asked Jack. He kicked his little blue velcro sneakers against the base of the stroller.
Lena took a breath. “Well, he made them work as slaves. He made a lot of them work so hard that they died.” Jack twisted around to look at her, eyes wide with astonishment.
“That’s not fair!”
“Not fair at all,” agreed Lena, “and that’s why I don’t think we should celebrate Christopher Columbus.”
“I hate Christopher Columbus.”
“He’s not my favorite person either, bud.”
The minute Ray got home that night, Jack couldn’t wait to share his new historical perspective. “Daddy,” gushed Jack, “I know all about Christopher Columbus!”
“Really kiddo?” Ray took off his coat, loosened his tie, and dumped his bag on the table. “Tell me everything!” He scooped Jack up in the air, tossing him towards the ceiling. Jack shrieked with pleasure and begged for more. “Okay,” said Ray, when they finally settled down. “What’d you learn today?”
“Well, Christopher Columbus took a big ship across the sea!”
“He did?”
“Yes! And he was very brave because that was very scary!”
“I know I’d be scared.” Ray grabbed a beer from the fridge, cracked it open, and took a deep swallow.
“And then he discovered America,” continued Jack, “but he really didn’t because there were already people here. Indijaluss people! So that’s silly!” Ray glanced at Lena with raised eyebrows. She busied herself snapping asparagus, avoiding his look as Jack continued. “And then he made them be slaves, and he just sat there and relaxed, and they did all the hard work until they died!”
“Wow,” said Ray, momentarily at a loss for words. Lena looked down and swallowed her grin.
“Christopher Columbus is a baddie, daddy,” said Jack. Then he giggled, and did a silly dance. “That rhymed! Baddie daddy! Baddie daddy!”
“I’ll baddie daddy you!” shouted Ray, and threw Jack over his shoulder again.
The minute Lena kissed Jack goodnight and quietly closed the door behind her, the argument resumed. Why do you have to ruin everything? he said. Christopher Columbus? He’s Italian, he continued. So was Mussolini. You’re ridiculous, he scoffed. Don’t you want our son to know the truth about the world instead of some fake Disney version? Why can’t he just have fun? he argued. And round and round and on and on it went. Hours later, Lena lay sleepless next to her snoring husband, rigid with tension at the edge of the mattress, disquiet churning in the pit of her stomach. Insomnia in full effect, her anxious brain careened from box to box, but as the clock ticked away the interminable minutes, she kept returning to one shadowy gray compartment tucked deep in a hidden recess that housed the breath of a secret fear she had never spoken out loud to another living soul. Maybe—just maybe—Lena might have married the wrong man.
After earning an English Literature degree in San Francisco, Lindsay Michele spent ten years in the classroom, teaching teenagers how to write. Since completing her MFA in Creative Fiction from Mills at Northeastern, she focuses on her own craft, and supports other professional writers through her business, Finesse Editing. Lindsay is the recipient of the Amanda Davis MFA Thesis in Fiction Prize, and the Melody Clarke Teppola Creative Writing Prize in Fiction. Lindsay recently completed her first novel, Riding the Curves, and is hard at work on the sequel. You can read her writing at The Stardust Review and HerStry. Excerpts from her novel are forthcoming this fall at Half and One.