Hisret’s face lights up when Mrs. Romo talks about how well-liked he is in class, how much the other fifth graders want to dance near him during GoNoodle time, how much it makes her laugh to watch him preening his curly, jet-black pompadour that hangs over his eyebrows. Hisret is a good little boy, a good little boy from Kurdistan.
“When did you come to the States?” Mrs. Romo asks.
“One year ago, last October,” Hisret’s aunt replies, tilting her chestnut ponytail and amber eyes down to meet his upturned gaze.
As Hisret’s language teacher he is the one I must keep watch over, more than the other 10-year-olds spasming into the Dab. Yet after two dozen parent-teacher conferences I saw enough bright eyes and half-smiles to know that his feeling is universal. All of us kids want to make people happy. All of us want to be liked, to be good.
***
I am a good little girl. I have already won “Student of the Month” once this year in my class, when my teacher found out that the Ambler Gazette printed a story I’d written in rhyming couplets for a contest they were holding. I am 11 years old, in the sixth grade, one year ahead of Hisret, one year older.
For Kindergarten through 3rd grade, I went to Mattison Avenue School in Ambler. At Mattison Avenue, Mr. Ryles the janitor let me push the big push broom across the gym floor after school. At Mattison Avenue, we could take turns staying in the classroom with Robert O. to eat lunch because he had leg braces. I loved it but it is the only school in town and it only goes up to the 3rd grade. So we had to take the bus to Blue Bell to go to 4th and 5th grade at Shady Grove School, which was cool because it had murals of dinosaurs all over the walls. The classes were about half kids from Ambler, half kids from Blue Bell.
Now in middle school there are lots of kids from Blue Bell and only a few from Ambler. In my class, the ones from Ambler are Rachel Deininger, Marissa DiCiccio, Adam Barron, and me. Everyone else is from Blue Bell. Most of my friends from Blue Bell have swimming pools in their backyards, but I don’t know anyone from Ambler who does.
***
With each rhythmic shake of the Picnic Special, the city melts away into a verdant landscape of leafy trees and farmland. The oily black vessel, coughing with soot, slices north through the Wissahickon Valley, devouring fire and spitting out sparks like a hungry giant in a fairytale.
A thousand children from the parish have piled aboard, and it took far longer than planned to pull out of Philadelphia. The balmy July air effervesces with laughter and anticipation among the summer suits and traveling dresses. We can make up for lost time, the conductor tells himself.
When he spots the southbound freighter coming around the bend, it is already too late. The steel bodies gut each other open with the screech of a thousand knife blades. The black behemoth lunges upward, then crashes to the ground with a finite bellow, lying crumpled on its side like a dropped rosary. Steam hisses angrily out of the veins of machinery. The children can barely register what has happened when suddenly an earth-shaking explosion rings out from the front of the locomotive and flames start pouring into the upturned passenger cars.
By the time the townspeople have rushed to the scene, 59 people are dead, 35 of them children. If the day had been as simple as a Sunday picnic, we would not remember even what little of it we do. Charred wreckage becomes memory. Our origin is fire.
A frail Quaker woman named Mary Ambler grabs limp and maimed bodies out of the flames. She drags them to her house, converting her living room into a makeshift hospital, limbs draping over the furniture.
Thirteen years later, shortly after her death in 1868, the train depot near where the crash took place is renamed in her honor. The town that sprouts up around the station also adopts her surname. Disaster becomes inscribed into the notion of a place, no matter how many times we try to start over.
***
My students have every minute of their days planned for them. Every moment fits into an externally imposed structure and follows a routine. From 9:45-10:20 is Reading, 10:20-11:00 is Writing, 11:00-11:45 is Reading Groups, 11:45-12:10 is Lunch and 12:10-12:25 is Recess.
Today we are given the morning to ourselves, after parent-teacher conferences ran late last night. I toss my notebook onto the floor—maybe I’ll check my email or take a nap. I wish I could be in school forever. I wish school had prepared me for a world outside of structure. I wish school had prepared me for how easy it is to languish without accountability, how easy it is to stop writing. All of these kids have their supports embedded into the community where they spend all their time. If they need speech pathology, there’s a speech pathologist at the school. If they need a therapist, they can talk to the school psychologist. Little do they know that soon enough, all of these built-in services will disappear and they will go reeling into outer space, derailed.
***
My mom takes me and my brothers to McDonald’s a lot. McDonald’s is on the other side of the train tracks, close to where Jessica Baxter used to live before she moved, close to the post office and the big brick building that says “SONS OF ITALY” on it. This McDonald’s is the only fast food place in Ambler, and we like it because they do a 49-cent “Sundae on Sunday” special. We have a whole dresser drawer full of Happy Meal toys. Also they have an old playground with a huge metal burger that you can climb into that rattles with a hollow thunder when you stomp your feet. But if we want to go to other fast food, which we do a lot when we are with our mom, we go to the Taco Bell or the Boston Market in Fort Washington.
One time I saw Adam Barron at the Boston Market in Fort Washington. I pretended not to see him, but I know he saw me. I didn’t say anything to my family, but inside my heart was pounding. It feels really weird that they don’t know anything about that.
They don’t know that it’s been going on all year, that most recently in class we had to do a poetry project and he made his poem about my legs and as he wrote it, he spoke each word aloud, so loud I could hear it from my seat across the room. I tried to just focus on my own poem but I couldn’t stop listening to his poem about my legs. He was grinning and some kids were laughing and no one told him to stop, not even the teacher, so he just kept going.
***
In 1881, the days of miracle tonics and robber barons, two men in top hats step off the train. Dr. Mattison, a tinkering pharmacist-turned-chemist with an imposing beard and limitless ambition, gestures to his business partner, Mr. Keasbey. Imagine the potential: The railroad could bring in raw materials for processing, then transport the products manufactured in our plant out for distribution. Keasbey, a wealthy industrialist and mostly silent backer, buys the land around the station, and the factory goes up right next to the tracks.
Mattison spearheads the operation, facilitating the passage of hundreds of immigrant laborers from Southern Italy to transform Ambler from a dying mill village to a bustling factory town. They build 400 new homes using the traditional stone masonry techniques of their homeland. Each home testifies to the company ranking of its dweller, an architectural caste system: elaborate Victorians for the executives, quaint twins for the foremen, humble rowhouses for the low-level workers, most of them the same stonemasons who built the houses.
Since Mattison lists himself as the sole proprietor of all the new residences—and also happens to own Ambler’s gas, water, and electric companies, as well as the town bank—most of the workers’ paychecks end up back in his pocket. Meanwhile, Mattison has a towering castle built for himself, looming behind a stone wall with ornate iron gates on his 400-acre estate called “Lindenwold,” replete with a lake, Pleasure Gardens, and more than a hundred employees on staff.
Soon enough Keasbey and Mattison Co.’s product is everywhere: in textiles, insulation, roofing shingles, paper, pipe linings, curtains. Its properties are logic-defying, even magical: indestructible, impossible to burn. “The BEST in asBESTos,” they declare, and Ambler finds it place on the map as the asbestos capital of the world.
***
The McDonald’s is destroyed now. On Google Maps it looks flattened and warped, the red roof collapsed into the ground as if it had turned to plasma. Grassy mounds of buried asbestos are now directly visible behind the empty lot. I screenshot the image: an overgrown EPA Superfund site opening to the heavens like a remnant of an ancient civilization, just beyond the painted Drive-Thru arrows on the pavement pointing to nowhere.
The screenshot sits on the desktop of my work computer for months. Hisret does not know it is there when I open up my laptop to check how much group time we have left.
***
Hisret’s shock of thick, curly black hair reminds me of Oscar, makes me remember the time he took me to his local dive bar in Istanbul. He introduced me to his friend the Kurdish bartender, who he had spent night after night communicating with exclusively through Google Translate, who showed me a video of a Kurdish-language Delta-style blues band with a sparkling fervor. I wanted to buy him a harmonica before I left, but I got shy about it—what if that’s a stupid gift for someone whose exile I was just a tourist in?
I wonder if that bartender is still there. I wonder if he knows that Oscar died. I wonder how he feels about the schisms and skirmishes of a home so far away from the corner dive. I’m sorry, Hisret. But I am so glad to know you. And Oscar—why did you die so unceremoniously?
***
Now you have to dig, I hear a voice say. Dig below the mounds, upend the surface of the earth, what seems to be the issue—keep going. What you uncover can kill you, but it’s more dangerous to ignore it. I don’t want to make you unhappy. I want to please you. I want to be Student of the Month. You seeing me is the only way I can escape the wreckage. Or—
***
We have just finished the book I Hate English! about a girl who thinks in Chinese and feels alone at school. “I hate my alarm clock,” I say, taking a moment to explain what an alarm clock is.
“I hate my hair because it’s long,” Thi says, grimacing and grabbing her ponytail.
“I hate myself,” Hisret blurts, bright-eyed.
“Don’t say that!” I scold. Hisret laughs. “It’s not funny.”
Your country is not a country. Your language is destabilized. Your self is torn open, emptied like an abandoned factory.
***
Sometimes I avoid this because I’m afraid to feel how deeply I am convinced that I don’t deserve it.
That was not always there. The poem is not about your legs. The poem does not violate you. The poem is where you problem-solve. The poem is higher-order. The poem is about late capitalism and migration and compassion and my hand in yours and a life preserver and blue, blue water and the ability to interpret the present even as it is unfolding.
I will help you. With me you will not be alone. What does “lonely” mean? Lonely means the teacher sending you out of the room.
***
The rain in Ambler falls on the just and unjust alike, and Mattison’s wealth does not spare him from tragedy. In 1887, his only daughter, Esther, dies suddenly at the age of four. In her memory, he builds the regal, gothic Trinity Memorial Episcopal Church just down the pike from Lindenwold, gleaming as grand as an old-world cathedral.
Mattison alchemizes his grief into a surge of productivity. Keasbey and Mattison Co. thrives into a new century, producing asbestos-lined helmet straps for World War I soldiers and brake linings for increasingly popular automobiles.
Yet the gears screech to an abrupt halt when Keasbey sues Mattison for funneling company funds into his side endeavors to enrich himself. Shortly after Mattison buys out Keasbey’s stake in the business for $4 million, the stock market plummets, and the company is swallowed by the bank.
Deposed as president, Mattison must abandon his beloved Lindenwold Castle and move into one of the executive mansions just outside the gates. In 1936 he sells the estate to the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth, who turn it into St. Mary’s Villa for Orphaned Children. Mattison dies of a heart attack six months later.
Ambler too falls into decline. Many husbands and fathers and sons are coughing up blood and dying young. The factory shutters, yet the dust continues to silently suffuse the air for decades.
One evening, the neighbors on Trinity Avenue are startled by a deafening crack. A strange orange light floods in through the windows. My father rushes to the street corner as my mother, eight months pregnant with me, peers down the block from the front porch.
Trinity Memorial Church is engulfed in flames. “It was like staring into the gates of hell,” one neighbor describes the scene to a reporter from the Ambler Gazette. By morning there is nothing left. Memories too can burn.
***
Our child would be Hisret’s age, had we not known we were doomed. Our child would look like Hisret, with your dark curls. Our child would have a dead father.
How were you so sure we were star-crossed? You were always so sure.
When I went to Istanbul and told you I’d just met someone, you said “I’m losing you.” So sure again.
You had a girlfriend anyway. One day we all rode the bus together: us to get coffee, her to go scrap a broken computer for parts. When she got off at her stop, you told me she had broken the computer herself by throwing it across the room at you in a screaming rage.
“Get out,” I said, but you lived in her room with no money, no legal status, with only one towel in the apartment that everybody used, and I had to pay for your coffee.
So the cycle of brokenness and chaos continued, and I loved you, but I could afford to leave all that. I paid 50 euros and changed my ticket to go home early.
The night before I left, we kissed. We didn’t know it would be the last time. I went back to the man I’d met. Two years later I moved back to the United States, and two days after that you died.
I wish I could tell you about Hisret, and that I became a teacher, and that I stopped writing.
***
Today in small group it is just me and Hisret.
“At school in Kurdistan they hit us with rulers,” he says, palms open and flat towards the sky. “At school in Kurdistan kids couldn’t talk, like kids had to be silent, but we still talked.”
“I was good at math there,” he says, and I’m not sure if I believe him but he shows me how to write numbers in Kurdish. Zero is just a dot.
He also tried to write his name, but he couldn’t remember. “R” came out as “r,” in English, and he started to giggle when he noticed it. One language is replaced with another. We slowly replace one language with another until we forget.
***
I am at my friend Ashley’s house in Blue Bell with a bunch of girls from school swimming in her swimming pool.
This is a Goodbye Party. We are both moving. Ashley is moving to Florida, and my dad is going to take me and my brothers out to California. It also happens to be my birthday today, but this is not a birthday party.
When it is time to go home, everybody at the party starts hugging each other and crying in their towels. Except me. I don’t really understand why everyone is crying. I do not feel like crying, so I just hug and say goodbye, but I do not feel sad.
***
Three months after our first meeting, Hisret’s amber-eyed aunt is back for another parent-teacher conference. This time around, Mrs. Romo is no longer amused by the way Hisret shakes his wild mane. Hisret has not been doing well. He is struggling in math, falling behind in writing, and Mrs. Romo often spots him sitting at his desk doing nothing.
This time around, Hisret does not smile. Tears swell into his big, glassy eyes.
“His hair seems to be a distraction for him,” Mrs. Romo says.
“Do you think we should cut it?” the aunt asks.
“I think that would help,” Mrs. Romo suggests.
The next day Hisret walks into the classroom with his head shorn. His face looks changed; his eyes are beady and distant. He sits down quietly at his desk and fixes his gaze to the front of the class, just like us kids are supposed to.
