Splinters

Carly Sorenson

CREATIVE NONFICTION

I CAN’T FIND my umbrella, so I put my purse in a plastic grocery bag and run in my raincoat to catch the train. The rain soaks my pants and shoes. Water sloshes around the train as it tunnels under the East River, and my phone rattles with a weather alert. I wonder idly if we will drown.

When I get to work, my manager tells me my friend was laid off. Payroll must contract with revenue. I excuse myself to buy a coffee and instead cry for a few minutes in a random doorway.

Tonight I’ll sit on the floor and call my newly unemployed friend while I polish my boots. I’d like to leave this job and do something else. I think I can do better. 

Personal Statement, p. 1:

My work as a writing instructor at [redacted] taught me that my writing benefits as much from flexibility and exploration as it does from structure. My young students respond best to a combination of structure and play—focused writing time, constructive criticism, and joyful, noisy games that teach hard skills while unlocking creativity. My role as an instructor parallels the role of a tango leader in that I am in control of the workshop but adaptable to the needs of my students, and always thinking two steps ahead. Each class is a dialogue between students and teacher, much like a dance is a dialogue between leader and follower.

My job, like most things worth doing, is stressful and poorly paid and may not exist much longer.

Reminder: It is no moral failing of mine that I found a roach in my bedroom this morning. I never eat in my bedroom and I take out the trash every day. Okay, sometimes I do eat in my bedroom, on the floor, over a towel. Whatever. I am clean and godless. I live in a holey building. It is old and full of holes and that’s how the roaches get in.

Over the weekend, I make rice and hard-boiled eggs. I shred and pickle an old carrot I find at the back of my crisper, and I apply for jobs. I prepare to apply for the Fulbright program too. I write about what I would do with the grant money if I had it and how I am a great scholar even though I’ve been out of school for years and don’t intend to return. I read and write enough as it is, without spending all that money on postgraduate degrees. What I need is a way to support myself while I read and write. I applied for the same grant last year, but my Fulbright advisor thinks I’ll have better luck this time pitching a creative nonfiction project instead of a tango ethnography. If I get the money, I will use it to dance across the black-and-white checkered floors of my Buenos Aires fantasies. 

I’m not sure this is a good time for me to be seeing new people, but I take a date to the museum anyway and we coo over the Elementary Triptych of Spain. Then we eat dinner together. The live salsa band at the restaurant makes it hard to talk, so they ask me to dance.

I demur. “No conozco el tipo de salsa que conoces.” We discussed regional varieties of salsa at the museum. I learned New York-style salsa here, and they learned the Cuban style in Costa Rica.

With a smile, they say,“Yo te guío.”

Personal Statement, p. 1:

I was born and raised in Queens, New York, in a neighborhood with a large Spanish-speaking population. As a result, I attended a local public school with a dual language program in which half the students spoke English and half spoke Spanish. Lessons were taught in both languages and equal importance was placed on both. This school not only taught me another language, but also a different perspective. I learned that my experience as a white, English-speaking American was not universal. I learned to be curious about other cultures, and Latin American cultures in particular. These years were formative for me, and inspired my project’s focus on challenging binaries—teacher-student, male-female, leader-follower, English-Spanish—without homogenizing, without losing useful structures, tensions, and distinctions.

Admittedly, all the other English-speaking kids in the program dropped out because learning a new language is difficult. But my mom never let me quit anything, so here I am, speaking Spanish with a Latin American accent of blurry classroom origin. 

Before I got my current job, I worked three days a week in accounting. I was a cost-saving measure, an office temp with no training in the field. I kept learning, so for two years they kept extending my contract. The work was so boring and lonely that I felt my eyeballs would fall out and roll across my keyboard. As long as I moved enough numbers from one spreadsheet to another, no one bothered me. I used my degree in creative writing mostly to write smut, which I sent to strangers I was pursuing online.

D. was one of those strangers, and now we are in love. He is going through a breakup so he spends all day on his bike and meets me on my lunch break. He thanks me for asking how I can support him during this difficult time. He says people don’t always think to ask. Sometimes he seems invincible to me, too, scolding producers and building bikes and locking me in a jiu jitsu leg bind while I giggle and shriek. Invincible and self-sufficient. I’ve had to squint to see that he’s not. I’d like to dance with him. I’d like for him to stumble and step on my toes. Maybe we’ll take a bachata class someday, when it’s not so urgent that I learn tango, when I am not trying to prove my commitment and competence to the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. Bachata is easy and fun. It is a good dance for people who don’t dance, whereas tango is tense and demanding. 

Statement of Grant Purpose, p. 2:

When I dance, my consciousness sinks from my mind into my body and I surrender to a shared embodied experience. As an artist-scholar who lives primarily inside my own mind, this other way of being is cathartic and connecting. I want to sink more fully into this experience, into connection, and to approach the dance as my fullest self.

“Please, no cutting the line of dance,” says the instructor to my dance partner.

The old man frowns and allows the slower couple to pass us again. His breath is sour. “I thought cutting was allowed.”

“Sure,” says the instructor. “At a milonga, if the couple ahead of you is very slow, you can cut. But this is not a milonga. This is a beginner class.”

“He’s too slow,” hisses my dance partner, glowering over my shoulder at the offending couple. “The man should move faster than that.” He raises his voice again to address the instructor. “At a milonga, it is the man’s job to set the pace, right? He has to steer the woman around tables and other couples and make sure—”

“You mean the leader, right?” asks the instructor. “Not the man.”

“What?” He looks bewildered. “No, I mean the man.”

“A woman can lead,” says the instructor. She holds out a hand to me. “May I?”

I eagerly release my dance partner, step out of line, and take her hand. She presses her other hand between my shoulder blades.

“Look,” she says, easing me into the fluid criss-cross of a backwards ocho. “I am a woman, and I am leading.”

Summary of Proposal, p. 1:

In tango’s infancy, it was customary for a man to follow before he learned to lead, as following well would help him to lead well. My tango education will pursue this tradition, although my gender turns the tradition on its head. If, as Judith Butler argues, the “effect of gender” can be understood as “the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self,” then my gestures and movements as a tango leader will constitute a break with the illusion of traditional womanhood (1990). This is what makes queer tango radical, and what I aim to explore in my writing and embodied experience.

It was my sibling who first told me about queer tango. I was frustrated by the language my bachata teacher used to address the class—gentlemen instead of leaders and ladies instead of followers, as if every one of his students actually fit those categories. My sibling told me that within the subculture of queer or open role tango, men may follow, women may lead, and anyone can ask anyone to dance. 

That was over a year ago. Now they are telling me about their new job over cups of red wine. They tell me how they show up each day to a new school with a backpack full of leaflets and sometimes worms. They try to teach the staff and students how to compost. They talk to education workers who, like me, are overworked and underpaid, and sometimes they don’t want another task, no matter how important it is to the future of the planet. My sibling wants to fix the world but feels they’ve got only duct tape to work with. They tell me that even if I don’t get the grant, I should go to Buenos Aires and write about the queer tango scene. 

I could do that, but then I’d have to get another job once I got there. I want this money so I can spend a year learning and writing and dancing. Also, I want confirmation that I have a good idea and the skills to pull it off. It’s not enough that my sibling says so, in spite of my mistrust of academia, of my country and its empire. 

Statement of Grant Purpose, p. 1:

In the classic science fiction novel A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, a character describes free will and fate in this way: “Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.”

I sent my application materials to a committee of faculty from my old college, and today they will present their feedback. The meeting has to be during their work hours, which are my work hours too. So I scheduled the meeting to coincide with my thirty-minute lunch break. 

I enter the video call’s waiting room at noon and chew my cuticles as the minutes of my lunch break tick by. They let me into the video call twenty minutes later. They needed some time to catch up, and I need my absence from the office to go unnoticed for another thirty minutes.

The professor of anthropology wants me to speak directly to the libidinal themes implicit in my writing. He can tell that my project is about sex, in the sense that sex is about connection and feeling good and, often, power. Dance is about those same things. I’m not surprised—gay people always figure it out. Straight people don’t, or else they are too shy to mention it. My Fulbright adviser doesn’t think I should mention it either. She disagrees with the anthropologist, and I think she’s right. The State Department is not going to fund my study of tango as a site of queer, culturally specific, consensual power exchange. The study abroad coordinator giddily suggests I find a way to subvert the form of a grant application. She likes what I wrote about subverting hierarchies, in dance but also in education and beyond. She likes a few of the verbs I’ve chosen too—splinter and bend and beautifully break. My Fulbright advisor agrees.

What would a splintered grant application even look like? Would it work as a grant application?  I make lists on the subway and I talk to D. about what words like subvert and disrupt mean to academics. I can think of nothing more subversive in this context than critique, so I add a few lines pointing to the disastrous history of U.S. foreign policy in Argentina. 

My advisor asks if I want the money or not. She doesn’t say that exactly, but that is what she means. In the back of my mind, boygenius plays the first murky chords of “Bite the Hand that Feeds You.” The State Department might fund my project as a filmy, feel-good gesture toward representation—“queer tango”—but not as a meaningful attempt to grapple with power, how it has been abused or how it might be shared, given and enjoyed. I want the money, so I cut those lines. If I get it, I’ll write what I want, but until then I can be coy.

Statement of Grant Purpose, p. 1:

A sonnet is supposed to consist of three rhyming quatrains and a couplet. However, poets have been bending those rules as far back as Shakespeare. In that sense, I think that tango is like a sonnet as well. Here is another comparison, this one borrowed from a dancer I met at a party: each step in tango is just a word. In order to make meaning, the leader must string those words together. The follower must know the words and how to respond. With so many steps and such strictly defined roles, the tango framework—like that of the sonnet—has the potential to beautifully splinter and snap.

I like sonnets and tango because I find structure comforting. Without a framework of lines and rhymes to start from, I am unlikely to write a poem at all. I struggle to reconcile my love of organized systems with my aversion to hierarchy. Can there ever be one without the other? They seem so entwined. 

D. likes sonnets too, and limericks, and tanaga, a traditional poetic form from the country of his birth. D. dislikes free verse poetry—too undisciplined. I feel the same way when I try bouncing around to techno music. What do I do with my hands? 

Give me a system of codes, forms, and signifiers over a vacuum any day. I will learn and bend them, bridge them, reappropriate them for my own aims. Yes, fuck the system, but not because it’s a system. Fuck the system because its purpose is profit. My purpose is pleasure.

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CARLY SORENSON (she/her) is a writer, artist, educator, and unionist born and raised in Queens, New York. Her writing has been published by Gandy Dancer and Montez Press Radio. Her textile art has been displayed by AHU and the RIVAA Gallery.

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